ABSTRACT
Auditory perception of speech has become an important topic in the psychology of reading, in part because reading and speech comprehension access a common store of words. Several decades of research has established phonemic analysis training as one of the most promising techniques in the improvement of reading skills. Researchers across disciplines have demonstrated the role of prosodic structure in spoken word recognition and the importance of speech acquisition to reading. Both auditory perception of phoneme units and the comprehension of continuous speech are so directly related to instruction at the beginning stages of reading that knowledge of the mechanisms involved is basic to a psychology of reading. The acquisition of language requires accurate reception at the wavelength frequencies that convey speech and at levels of loudness used in conversation. Roman Jakobson and his colleagues are generally credited with the conceptualization of spoken language as a sequence of phonemes, each distinguishable from all other phonemes.
