Abstract:

Differentiation is the child´s ability to perceive similarities or differences among audible or speech stimuli in their acoustic quality, intensity or duration. Child can distinguish two or more stimuli and learns differences among them. Word differentiation is ability to recognize sounds in words; length of words, syllables, sounds; and recognition of differences among words based on selected signs. Identification is the ability to mark (repeat) audible or speech stimuli heard by a child. Presented study deals with theoretical starting points, issues and research findings in ability to differentiate and identify heard words in Slovak preschool age children. This ability should be developed in preschool age with the aim to help children in initial learning to read and write. The research was focused on child´s ability to identify target word at the picture based on pronunciation of two audible similar words. It means that child got a pair of pictures and its task was to choose (identify) the one which was pronounced by a teacher, e.g. “had” (snake) and “hrad” (castle). Teacher said “hrad” (castle) and child had to show a picture with castle. The ability to recognize acoustically and to differentiate pairs of words was detected in following word pairs: mrak – drak (cloud – dragon), babka –bábka (grandmother – puppet), kvet – kvety (flower – flowers), nohy – rohy (feet – horns), kačka – mačka (duck – cat). The research was conducted with 866 respondents at the age of four to seven years. The results are part of a more extensive research focused on the development of a complex tool used to evaluate the level of phonemic awareness. The paper is the outcome of the VEGA project no. 1/0637/16 entitled The Development of the Diagnostic Instrument for the Assessment of the Level of Phonemic Awareness of Pre-School Age Children.

Keywords:

Word differentiation, word identification, phonemic awareness, word, phoneme, sound.