Acceso usuarios
The effects of adding the haptic modality to train reading (aiming at developing phonemic awareness, letter identity and grapheme-phoneme knowledge) was investigated in children (in the last year of nursery school). Two types of training, which differed in the perceptual modality involved, were compared. The « HVAM » (Haptic- Visual- Auditory- Metaphonological) involved the visual and auditory modalities. The two types of training develop phonological awareness (in particular phonemic), letter identity and grapheme-phoneme knowledge. However, letter identity work is based on visual-haptic and haptic exploration (the shape of the letters were traced with the finger) in the HVAM training and on the visual exploration only in the VAPA training. Performance was assessed before and after training by means of pseudo-word reading, letter recognition and meta-linguistic tasks (rime and phoneme recognition) . The results show improved performances in pseudo-word reading for both training conditions but the HVAM training was more effective than the VAM training. The results suggest that when the haptic modality is added to the training, reading acquisition is improved. The interpretation of these results is based on the functional specific characteristics of the perceptual modalities involved.
