Question
Asked 1st Sep, 2014
Are minimal pairs and auditory discrimination grouped within phonological awareness?
I want to know if I can group minimal pairs and auditory discrimination in phonological awareness category or these three are totally different?
Most recent answer
My understanding of phonological awareness is the ability to correctly link phonemes to graphemes, as in reading acquisition. A child is aware, for example, that the letter x signifies the sound combination /ks/. This is why words like "xylophone" to illustrate the concept are confusing, and some modern dyslexia remediating methodologies use words like "fox" instead. Minimal pairs are sounds that are different from each other in voicing, whereas the same in placement (e.g., /b/ and /p/ are both bilabial sounds, but one of them is produced with vocal fold vibration and the other is a silent burst of air; similarly, /g/ and /k/ are both velar sounds, but one is voiced and the other is voiceless). Auditory discrimination is a very early on process. I believe babies acquire this skill by 6 months of age. If your question is whether phonological awareness may be used as an "umbrella term" for both auditory discrimination and minimal pairs, I would say probably not. To my understanding, phonological awareness is a metalinguistic skill, learned much later in development, than auditory discrimination, which is a developmental process. However, when there is a breakdown, and a child lacks the auditory discrimination skills and is unable to hear (and/or produce) sounds correctly, he/she requires remediation, where awareness of the difference between the sounds is explicitly taught via minimal pairs, often before the child is even able to read. I hope this was helpful.
All Answers (11)
Dear Pooia,
Minimal pairs is a technique to identify between phonemes/allophones etc. In other words, it is created by linguists (exactly by Roman Jacobson) in order to classify sounds. The child is not exposed to a rhetorically organized data but rather he is confronted with a whole mess in the Kantian sense. However, since we can't escape the boundaries of our sensibility (again Kant) ,it may be fair to conclude that a child who is developing the same sensibility we have as adults is likely to use the same strategy we tend to resort to in order discriminate between sounds. Now we can say that an artificial technique may be used as a strategy, among others to develop phonological awareness.
Auditory discrimination is not artificial nor is it a learned strategy. It is rather part of our sensibility. part of the tools we have as humans in order to perceive the world not at is necessarily but as it is according to our spectacles.
Phonological awareness is neither a strategy nor an intrinsic tool. It is a concept that exist by deduction. If a child has this ability to discriminate between different sounds, and the necessary strategies and tools to do so ,then his/her phonological awareness must be behind all this. But it is also perfectly logical to reach an opposite conclusion. That the child, for example, discriminate between sounds because he is programmed to. In other words , a child is innately programmed to learn his L1. This shows the conceptual nature of phonological awareness.
So the answer is yes you can group these terms but you have to point out the nuances I pointed earlier.
First, auditory discrimination is the job of the hearer. The speaker must have the productive knowledge to produce phonemic targets WITHIN ranges whose quanta are within the acoustic realm such that the hearer can perceive the correct intented phoneme of the speaker. Neither the speaker nor the hearer can afford to be "off target" with any of the major distinctive features that uniquely provide the phoneme in question. Now, this is PART of what some call "phonological awareness." Three other aspects of this "awareness" deal with phoneme - grapheme mapping as well as the segmentation of phonemic and/or graphemic strings into their constituent parts, and the appreciation of the basic syllable constituents and the templatic hierarchy of that syllable.
Be aware (no pun!) that this "awareness" is platonic in the sense that it is NOT at all "out of awares" in the explicit. No. The awareness here is in the "implicit" realm, and therefore in an important sense, the childre3n are not consciously aware of any of this, and surely cannot comment on what it us that they are "aware" of. The actual structural patterns that constitute their "phonological awareness" must be drawn out by elicitation or experimentation or by engaging them in conversation - with a recorder turned on.
I agree with most of what you said. Just one thing bothers me: "First, auditory discrimination is the job of the hearer. "I don' t think it is solely the hearer's. Actually we cannot speak if we are deaf because ,lack of auditory discrimination, we cannot correct the mistakes we are making and if we do we would sound like a person with Downs Syndrome. .
Brahim:
Good points, but I don't get the connection with what is usually discussed under the term "phonological awareness." But, nevertheless, what you say is correct. How can you stand living in the backwater and racist state like North Carolina. Maybe Charlotte is a big place and there may be enough Democrats to make it livable. But, the conservative, right wing nuts in that state sicken me. Take care
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Phonological awareness, according to its original proposal (at the time referred to as Linguistic Awareness: Mattingly, 1972) refers to an ability beyond that of perceptual discrimination of phonemes. And, according to Mattingly, this ability is the key to the ability to read, which varies among individuals. Auditory discrimination, on the other hand, is more of a lower level, automatic and likely subconscious ability that anyone who can produce and perceive speech must be endowed with. See http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0516A.pdf
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Dear YI Xu
Thanks for the nice article of Mattingly. I feel so good that finally there is someone who does not consider Chomsky as a taboo word.
I do not agree with some of his assertions but the article was written in 1972 so it is stupid to complain.
Dear Katherine,
"minimal pairs and auditory discrimination are therapy methods that you would use to remedy a child's phonology, not their phonological awareness."
When you remedy child's phonology you increase his/her phonological awareness.
"but minimal pairs and auditory discrimination would fall under phonology for me, not phonological awareness."
Minimal pairs is a technique. In other words I can even use it to teach classical rimed poetry. Auditory discrimination is a human skill that has physical presence in the brain. it can be damaged after an accident for example but can be improved upon or even reconstituted through various means.
Phonemic Awareness is the ability to understand and manipulate the smallest units of sound (phonemes). So actually you can use minimal pairs. If you are using minimal pairs to teach rhyme, to compare, discriminate, or identify if a particular phoneme is present in various positions of a word, this is phonemic awareness.
I know but do not forget that a child does not find organized minimal pairs when he first acquires his/her language. Actually he is confronted with a chaotic corpus of sounds and he may or may not use minimal pairs technique in order to identify phonemes from allophones. In other words his/her phonemic awareness can be achieved by various strategies. This does not mean that minimal pairs are not an option-it only means that it is a technique and not an obligatory strategy.
My understanding of phonological awareness is the ability to correctly link phonemes to graphemes, as in reading acquisition. A child is aware, for example, that the letter x signifies the sound combination /ks/. This is why words like "xylophone" to illustrate the concept are confusing, and some modern dyslexia remediating methodologies use words like "fox" instead. Minimal pairs are sounds that are different from each other in voicing, whereas the same in placement (e.g., /b/ and /p/ are both bilabial sounds, but one of them is produced with vocal fold vibration and the other is a silent burst of air; similarly, /g/ and /k/ are both velar sounds, but one is voiced and the other is voiceless). Auditory discrimination is a very early on process. I believe babies acquire this skill by 6 months of age. If your question is whether phonological awareness may be used as an "umbrella term" for both auditory discrimination and minimal pairs, I would say probably not. To my understanding, phonological awareness is a metalinguistic skill, learned much later in development, than auditory discrimination, which is a developmental process. However, when there is a breakdown, and a child lacks the auditory discrimination skills and is unable to hear (and/or produce) sounds correctly, he/she requires remediation, where awareness of the difference between the sounds is explicitly taught via minimal pairs, often before the child is even able to read. I hope this was helpful.
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