The Effects of Literacy on the Recognition of Dichotic Words

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Abstract
The hypothesis that awareness of phonemic segments influences the way in which speech is perceived was examined. Illiterate adults, who generally lack awareness of segments, were compared with literates, who are aware of the segmental structure of speech, on the recognition of words presented dichotically. A group of people who learned to read and write but who do it only occasionally was also tested. The results indicated much better performance in literates than in illiterates or semiliterates. In addition, literates made proportionally more single-segment errors, especially those limited to the first consonant, and fewer global errors, i.e. on all the segments of a syllable, than illiterates. On the other hand, phonetic feature blendings were as frequent in illiterates as in literates. It is suggested that awareness of segments allows attention to be focused on the phonemic constituents of speech and thus contributes to better recognition in difficult listening conditions. However, awareness of segments does not influence the preattentive extraction of phonetic information.

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