Using children's humor to clarify the relationship between linguistic awareness and early reading ability

Abstract

This study uses linguistic humor to show that an awareness of only those linguistic units transcribed by the orthography bears a special relation to early reading success. The subjects were 48 second-grade children tested on ten "phoneme/morpheme" riddles which manipulate phonemes and bound morphemes and ten "control" riddles which depend on awareness of other aspects of linguistic structure and "common sense". Each child also received the Word Identification and Word Attack subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Reading ability was significantly related to correct resolution of the phoneme/morpheme riddles but not to correct resolution of the control riddles. PPVT scores were significantly related to performance on both types of riddles but not to reading ability. Thus, while IQ is related to the resolution of riddles in general, reading ability has a special relation to riddles which manipulate phonemes and morphemes, consistent with the morphophonological nature of English orthography.