Results showed a double dissociation between preliterate children and fluent readers.
This will be established by comparing segmentation behavior between 4- and 5-year-old preliterate children and literate adults in two experiments.
In the first experiment we examine and compare the general syllabification behavior of two participant groups: 4- to 5-year-old preliterate children3 and adults.
Testing kindergartners (preliterate) and first graders (newly literate), we looked for the differential effects of literacy, facility, and language experience.
The clearest result of this experiment is the high degree of similarity found between the segmentation responses of our participant groups, preliterate children and adults.
In the first phase (the preliterate or precommunicative phase), the child is aware of the purpose of written language, but does not yet grasp the alphabetic principle.
Preliterate children who could recite the alphabet, recognize printed letters, and print their names, were unable to solve two tasks concerning the symbolic function of those letters.
In preliterate societies, these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance.
