Effects of two forms of sound feedback on learning to read words

For the development of educational software for beginning readers, including the use of digitized speech, it is important among other things to know how auditory feedback has to be incorporated. Therefore an experiment was conducted in which sixty first graders were requested to read thirty relatively difficult words over three consecutive days. Under the first condition (control condition) children had to read t hirty words aloud without feedback. Under the second cOlldition, children had to perform the same task, but the word sound was provided by a computer system whenever a reading error was made or the child did not read the word at all (whole-word condition). The third condition was similar to the whole-word condition, the only difference being the fact that the word was produced phoneme by phoneme (segmented feedback coudition). At a pre and post-test, children had to read the same words while reading times and error! were recorded. The results of training over three sessions showed that, under the whole-word condition, children learned significantly more than under the segmented-feedback condition. There was no significant difference between the segmented-feedback condition and the control condition.