Laura Elliott Adams, M.S., CCC-SLP


When I started as an SLP back in the 90s, the pendulum had swung to the opposite side of the reading education spectrum…again. The sight word “Look-Say” of my parents’ Dick and Jane era was coming back as a component of “Whole Language,” and the phonics learning of my 70s early education was going out of fashion. Teachers started to shy away from my childhood favorites, Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose, because they weren’t narrative-based and didn’t address “literature” (define literature…) or “authentic texts” (whatever that meant…). This is what I remember. I’m not going to discuss the history of reading education approaches or the best way to teach reading. I am not a reading specialist.


I am a language specialist and can speak volumes about phonological development and why those rhyming books were so important.

Have you ever wondered why you can’t spell a cluck, a pop, or the ever-elusive literary raspberry? Look at all the letters birders compile to describe the multitude of sounds our avian friends make: dzweep, tchrk, prrrow. Can you actually “read” what those birds say and reproduce their calls based on these letters? Comics show us “Pow!” and “Splat!” but are they really spelling those sounds? No. Because those sounds themselves do not have meaning in our language. Languages have onomatopoeia, words that are spelled the way they sound, but onomatopoeia is a way we try to represent sounds that are not in our languages. I remember being surprised (and probably over-corrective!) when my step-father from Croatia told me that roosters say kukuriku instead of cock-a-doodle-doo or when my mother sang a song in French to me with the bells ringing a nasalized din, din, don instead of ding dang dong. Do bells in the United States sound different in France? Even back then, I was learning how to separate our language meaning sounds from other sounds.


We start to develop our ability to hear sounds in utero. We start to distinguish speech sounds from environmental sounds in our first weeks. At four to twelve months, we start to distinguish speech sounds in our own language and our babbling starts to drop out other sounds outside of the language we hear the most. A speech sound, or phoneme from the Greek word “phon” meaning “sound,” is the smallest unit of sound that has meaning in a language. Children from early on separate environmental sounds from phonemes. This skill of isolating and assigning meaning to the language sounds we hear is critical to language development…. long before we tackle the ability to represent those sounds in symbolic letters.


It’s not as simple as figuring out which sounds are in our language and which ones are not. We go through a progression of solidifying our knowledge of the phonemes in our language. English has 44 phonemes and some dialects vary on this as well (here in California caught/cot sounds the same whereas my East Coast friends would beg to differ). We play around with minimal pairs which are words that differ by a single phoneme: cat/sat; cat/cap; sat/sit. We learn this through the auditory skill of rhyming: poems, songs, and wordplay. We learn the boundaries of these phonemes- where they start and end. Considering that running speech mashes the sounds all together at a lightning-quick speed of 140 words per minute, it’s quite remarkable that we learn words at all! Rhyming and other sound play is a critical skill that helps us with our auditory development.


Phonological development is encouraged by playing with language: just what we hear, not what we can see or spell. In the preschool years, we learn all that we can about rhyming. In the preschool to kindergarten years, we learn about syllables. Let’s clap for all the syllables we hear in Caterpillar! By age 6, we’ve learned about onsets and rimes. What rhymes with /at/ and begins with /s/? (And when I say /s/, I mean the phoneme “sssssss” like a “snake sound” not the name of the letter “S” which actually has two phonemes in English “eh-s” and three phonemes in Spanish “eh-s-ay.” If taught with a phonological approach, a kindergartener can tell you that!) We have an awareness of beginning/middle/ending phonemes and can blend sounds knowing that /h/-/a/-/t/ is “hat” by age 6. That’s so much learning in kindergarten and the beginning of first grade that is separate from reading/writing skills! In first and second grade, yes, we are ramping up our reading skills, but we still learn to segment phonemes “How many sounds do you hear in ‘spring?’” (Bonus if you figured out that it’s 5) and manipulate phonemes “change the /s/ in ‘sat’ to /h/ and what word do you have?” (Hint: Cat in the …..)


English only has 26 Latin alphabet letters to represent those 44 phonemes. Even though our spelling system is only semi-phonemic, children still need these phonological skills to help figure out the basics of reading and spelling. I have worked with countless children who fall apart when their sight word skills cannot carry them into the multisyllabic words that invariably explode into the third grade curriculums (For fun, can you segment all the sounds you hear in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?). Rhyming, segmenting, and phoneme manipulation are critical skills in learning how to say, read and spell the words we encounter.


So please, don’t give up on Dr. Seuss and all the fun wordplay we do in those early years. Preschoolers and kindergarteners and even first and second graders (and beyond… I’m talking to all you Wordlers out there): we all need these songs and poems and goofy word games.


Hey!
I say go and play.
I may rhyme away the day, you say?
Okay!
Yay!