Morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia

This study examines morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. While the poor phonological awareness of dyslexic children has been related to their difficulty in handling the alphabetical principle, less is known about their morphological awareness, which also plays an important part in reading development. The aim of this study was to analyze in more detail the implications of the phonological impairments of dyslexics in dealing with larger units of language such as morphemes. First, the performance of dyslexic children in a series of morphological tasks was compared with the performance of children matched on reading-level and chronological age. In all the tasks, the dyslexic group performed below the chronological age control group, suggesting that morphological awareness cannot be developed entirely independently of reading experience and/or phonological skills. Comparisons with the reading-age control group indicated that, while the dyslexic children were poorer in the morphemic segmentation tasks, they performed normally for their reading level in the sentence completion tasks. Furthermore, they produced more derived words in the production task. This suggests that phonological impairments prevent the explicit segmentation of affixes while allowing the development of productive morphological knowledge. A second study compared dyslexic subgroups defined by their degree of phonological impairment. Our results suggest that dyslexics develop a certain type of morphological knowledge, which they use as a compensatory reading strategy.     

Emerging phonological awareness differentiates children with and without familial risk for dyslexia after controlling for general language skills

Emerging phonological awareness was compared in two groups of 3.5-year-old children belonging to the Jyv?skyl? Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD): children with familial risk of dyslexia (at-risk group n = 98) and children without such risk (control group n = 91). Four computer animated tasks were used: Word-level and Syllable-level Segment Identification, Synthesis, and Continuation of Phonological Units. The control group children manifested higher mastery than children in the at-risk group in phonological awareness, and the proportion of children with a low phonological awareness mean score was 2.5 times higher in the at-risk group than in the control group. In both groups, phonological awareness at 3.5 years was predicted by early language skills assessed between 14 and 26 months of age, and it was also associated with concurrent language. The difference between the at-risk and control group at 3.5-year in phonological awareness remained significant, even when the effect of other language skills such as productive and receptive vocabulary, and mastery of inflections, measured both at earlier ages and concurrently were controlled for. Our findings indicate that familial risk for dyslexia is reliably reflected in emerging phonological awareness already at this early age and it can be assessed independently of other language skills.     

The nature of phonological awareness throughout the elementary grades: An item response theory perspective

In the present study, the nature of Dutch children's phonological awareness was examined throughout the elementary school grades. Phonological awareness was assessed using five different sets of items that measured rhyming, phoneme identification, phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme deletion. A sample of 1405 children from kindergarten through fourth grade participated. Results of modified parallel analysis and analyses within the context of item response theory (IRT) showed phonological awareness to be unidimensional across different tasks and grades. Despite the evidence for a single underlying ability, the cognitive task requirements for the various tasks were found to differ. In addition to some overlap between the item sets, those for rhyming, phoneme identification, and phoneme blending were easier than those for phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. The results lend support to the assumption that phonological awareness is a continuum of availability for phonological representations which can range from partial availability (i.e., access) to full availability (i.e., access).     

Basic auditory processing and developmental dyslexia in Chinese

The present study explores the relationship between basic auditory processing of sound rise time, frequency, duration and intensity, phonological skills (onset-rime and tone awareness, sound blending, RAN, and phonological memory) and reading disability in Chinese. A series of psychometric, literacy, phonological, auditory, and character processing tasks were given to 73 native speakers of Mandarin with an average age of 9.7 years. Twenty-six children had developmental dyslexia, 29 were chronological age-matched controls (CA controls) and 18 were reading-matched controls (RL controls). Chinese children with dyslexia were significantly poorer than CA controls in almost all phonological tasks, in semantic radical search, and in phonological recoding proficiency. Chinese children with dyslexia also showed significant impairments in most of the basic auditory processing tasks. Regression analyses demonstrated that different auditory measures of rise time discrimination were the strongest predictors of individual differences in Chinese character reading (1 Rise task) and phonological recoding (2 Rise task) respectively, with frequency discrimination also important for nonsense syllable decoding. Our results support the hypothesis that accurate perception of the amplitude envelope of speech is critical for phonological development and consequently reading acquisition across languages.     

Phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual English and Greek five‐year‐olds

This study examined and compared levels of phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual English and Greek five‐year‐olds. Sixty‐eight children from Britain and Cyprus, matched on the basis of age, gender, non‐verbal and verbal IQ, were assigned to four groups: two bilingual (English‐Greek, Greek‐English) and two monolingual (English, Greek). Performance of the four groups on a set of six phonological tasks was compared. Bilingual children were given both English and Greek versions of the tasks; monolingual children were given the phonological tasks in their mother tongue only. Given the results of previous research, it was predicted that bilingual children would show higher levels of phonological awareness than monolingual. The children tested in Britain were already being taught to read in school, whereas those tested in Cyprus were not. On the basis of previous research, it was further predicted that there would also be effects of learning to read in an alphabetic language, such that the bilingual children tested in Britain would show higher levels of phonological awareness at the level of the phoneme than their counterparts tested in Cyprus. Results showed that the bilingual English‐Greek children significantly outperformed the monolingual English children, but this pattern was not replicated in the bilingual Greek‐English/monolingual Greek comparisons. This difference is discussed in terms of the bilingual enhancement effect, which, according to the present data, seems to occur only when bilingual children are exposed to a second language that is phonologically simpler than their first language. Results also showed that English‐Greek bilingual children performed significantly better than Greek‐English bilinguals, especially on tasks requiring phoneme awareness. This accords well with suggestions that learning to read in an alphabetic language promotes this level of phonological awareness.     

Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.     

A reading-level match study of phonemic processes underlying reading disabilities in a transparent orthography

The current study examined the relationship in Spanish (i.e., a transparent orthography) between different levels of phonological awareness and reading disabilities. In addition, the strategies used by the children when they resolved phoneme segmentation and reversal tasks were analyzed. A sample of 133 subjects were selected and organized in three different groups: (1) A group of 45 reading-disabled children, (2) A comparison group of 44 normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled, and (3) A reading level match group of 44 younger normal readers at the same reading level as the reading disabled. Three phonological awareness tasks were used to measure levels of intrasyllabic and phonemic awareness. The reading disabled group was equivalent to the younger reading level-matched control group in the odd-word-out task. However, there were differences in the phonemic tasks (e.g., phoneme segmentation and reversal) because the reading disabled group performed more poorly than the younger children. Overall, the children matched in age with the reading disabled group were superior in all phonological awareness tasks. There were differences between the groups when the strategies used by the children were analyzed.     

Language and literacy in nonvocal children with cerebral palsy

Metalinguistic and literacy abilities were studied in twenty-seven nonvocal cerebral palsied school children. The participants of the study were presented four tests of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, sound identification, phoneme synthesis and word length analysis. Their verbal comprehension was measured using a semantic and a syntactic task. Two tests of nonverbal memory: the visual sequential task from ITPA and Corsi blocks and the Digit Span task from WISC, were also included. These measures were related to their reading and spelling ability. The nonvocal children performed on a lower level on the reading and spelling tasks than did the children of two comparison groups, one matched for mental age and one for mental and chronological age. There were no differences in phonological awareness or in verbal memory. The disabled children performed worse on the verbal comprehension task than the children in the comparison groups. Although the reading and spelling results were low in the nonvocal group there were children showing some literacy skills. A within-group analysis performed in the nonvocal group showed that the reading children performed better on all memory tests, and on the sound identification and the word length analysis tasks than the nonreading ones. They also showed better results on verbal comprehension, the semantic task and used more symbols in their communication. Synthetic speech was more often used in reading and spelling education in the reading subgroup than in the nonreading. Metalinguistic abilities and possibility of acoustic rehearsal are discussed as important factors in reading and spelling acquisition in the nonvocal population.     

Levels of phonological awareness in preliterate and literate Spanish-speaking children

Evidence of phonological awareness levels usually comes from English-speaking children. The evidence in Spanish is scarce. The present study examined the phonological awareness of syllables, onsets–rimes, and phonemes, extending the Treiman and Zukowski (1991) results to preliterate and literate Spanish-speaking children. The sample comprised preschoolers, kindergarteners and first-graders. Children found syllables easier than onset–rime units, and onset–rime units easier than phoneme units (Experiments 1 and 2). Preliterate children found ending units easier than beginning units. However, literate children were best at initial linguistic units, particularly initial syllables. Results on the phonological awareness task and on the masked priming lexical decision task support that the phonological awareness development is sensitive to the orthographic units used by children from the time they begin to read (Experiment 3). For all children, initial continuant consonants were easier than stop consonants.     

Components of phonological awareness

The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies. Large sample sizes allowed for sensitive differentiation of constructs. In the first study, 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, syllable counting, initial-phoneme matching, initial-phoneme deletion, phoneme blending, and phoneme counting. Three basic components were extracted in a principal component analysis: a phoneme factor, a syllable factor and a rhyme factor. Cross-tabulations indicated considerable dissociation between performance on phoneme, syllable, and rhyme tasks. The structural relationships were replicated on a much larger sample (n=1509) in the second study. Subjects in this study were one year older and were attending grade 1 thus providing an opportunity to test their reading achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the phonemic factor was by far the most potent predictor. However, the rhyming factor made an independent (although small) contribution to explaining the reading variance. Among the phonemic tasks, phoneme identification proved to be the most powerful predictor.     

Comparing two forms of dynamic assessment and traditional assessment of preschool phonological awareness

The goal of the current study was to compare two forms of dynamic assessment and standard assessment of preschool children's phonological awareness. The first form of dynamic assessment was a form of scaffolding in which item formats were modified in response to an error so as to make the task easier or more explicit. The second form of dynamic assessment was direct instruction of the phonological awareness tasks. The results indicate that preschool children's phonological awareness can be assessed using standard assessment procedures, provided the items require processing units larger than the individual phoneme. No advantage was found in reliability or validity for either dynamic assessment condition relative to the standard assessment condition. Dynamic assessment does not appear to improve reliability or validity of phonological awareness assessments when preschool children are given tasks that they can perform using standard administration procedures.     

Contributions of phonological processing skills to reading skills in Arabic speaking children

This cross-sectional study investigated contributions of phonological awareness (Elision and blending), rapid naming (object, color, letter, and digit), and phonological memory (nonword repetition and Digit Span) to basic decoding and fluency skills in Arabic. Participants were 237 Arabic speaking children from Grades K-3. Dependent measures included word decoding, oral passage reading fluency, nonword reading fluency, and retell fluency. Within-grade analyses indicated that phonological awareness accounted for more variance than rapid naming regardless of the nature of the outcome measure and grade. Rapid naming’s capacity to predict variance, while less than that of phonological awareness, tended to rise steadily and was highest in Grade 3. Phonological memory, as measured by this study’s tasks, showed almost no relationship to reading performance. The findings are discussed with respect to changing the requirements of Arabic reading in Grades K-3 and suggestions are made for future research.     

Phonological awareness, reading skills, and vocabulary knowledge in children who use cochlear implants

In hearing children, reading skills have been found to be closely related to phonological awareness. We used several standardized tests to investigate the reading and phonological awareness skills of 27 deaf school-age children who were experienced cochlear implant users. Approximately two-thirds of the children performed at or above the level of their hearing peers on the phonological awareness and reading tasks. Reading scores were found to be strongly correlated with measures of phonological awareness. These correlations remained the same when we statistically controlled for potentially confounding demographic variables such as age at testing and speech perception skills. However, these correlations decreased even after we statistically controlled for vocabulary size. This finding suggests that lexicon size is a mediating factor in the relationship between the children's phonological awareness and reading skills, a finding that has also been reported for typically developing hearing children.     

Clinical appraisal of spelling ability and its relationship to phonemic awareness (blending,segmenting, elision,and reversal), phonological memory,and reading in reading disabled,ADHD, and normal children

Seventy-eight 8-to-12-year-old children (34 ReadingDisabled; 31 Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disordered; and 13diagnosed normal controls) were given a battery oftests including cognitive, linguistic, academic,phonemic awareness, and memory tests. As part of theacademic battery an 8-point spelling rating scale wasdeveloped (Rating Scale) that resulted in threedifferent scores which reliably discriminated amongthe three groups. Relationships between phonemicawareness, phonological memory, reading and spellingwere explored. Zero-order and second-ordercorrelations were completed with indications thatphonemic awareness tasks (elision, blending, reversal,and segmenting) and phonological memory (WISC-IIIDigit Span) are significantly correlated with readingdecoding and spelling measures with slightly highercorrelations with the Rating Scale. Regressionanalyses resulted in a large proportion of thevariance on reading and spelling tasks accounted forby phonemic awareness (particularly elision andreversal) and phonological memory. The ReadingDisabled group was found to produce more errors thatwere phonetically inaccurate than the other twogroups. The demand of spelling ten ``error' wordsbeyond the RD students' achievement level appeared toelicit greater weaknesses in their phonologicalrecoding abilities than in those of the ADHD ornormally achieving students.     

Disabled Readers' Performance on Tasks of Phonological Processing,Rapid Naming,and Letter Knowledge Before and After Kindergarten

The importance of early identification of children at risk for reading failure is clearly established in the literature. The purpose of this longitudinal retrospective study was to further define the relationship between the development of prereading skills and later reading outcome in two groups of children; a group of reading‐disabled children and a group of their normally reading peers. Children's alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming skills were explored at the beginning of kindergarten and again prior to first grade as a function of later reading outcomes. Results indicate that differences found between the groups in all measures at prekindergarten age diminish by prefirst grade with the exception of phonological awareness abilities. Findings have direct implications for screening children at risk for reading difficulties and the time‐sensitive nature of these tasks during the preliteracy period.     

Literacy skills in children with cochlear implants: the importance of early oral language and joint storybook reading

The goal of this study was to longitudinally examine relationships between early factors (child and mother) that may influence children's phonological awareness and reading skills 3 years later in a group of young children with cochlear implants (N = 16). Mothers and children were videotaped during two storybook interactions, and children's oral language skills were assessed using the "Reynell Developmental Language Scales, third edition." Three years later, phonological awareness, reading skills, and language skills were assessed using the "Phonological Awareness Test," the "Woodcock-Johnson-III Diagnostic Reading Battery," and the "Oral Written Language Scales." Variables included in the data analyses were child (age, age at implant, and language skills) and mother factors (facilitative language techniques) and children's phonological awareness and reading standard scores. Results indicate that children's early expressive oral language skills and mothers' use of a higher level facilitative language technique (open-ended question) during storybook reading, although related, each contributed uniquely to children's literacy skills. Individual analyses revealed that the children with expressive standard scores below 70 at Time 1 also performed below average (<85) on phonological awareness and total reading tasks 3 years later. Guidelines for professionals are provided to support literacy skills in young children with cochlear implants.     

Reading and reading-related skills in children using cochlear implants: prospects for the influence of cued speech

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory were assessed respectively through a phonemic similarity judgment task and through a word span task measuring phonological similarity effects. To assess the use of sublexical and lexical reading procedures, children read pseudowords and irregular words aloud. Results showed that cued speech improved performance on both the phonemic awareness and the reading tasks but not on the phonological short-term memory task. In phonemic awareness and reading, CS+ children obtained accuracy and rapidity scores similar to CA controls, whereas CS- children obtained lower scores than hearing controls. Nevertheless, in phonological short-term memory task, the phonological similarity effect of both CI groups was similar. Overall, these results support the use of cued speech to improve phonemic awareness and reading skills in CI children.     

Phonological awareness tasks as predictors of decoding ability: beyond segmentation

The performance of 38 male third- and fourth-grade reading disabled/poor decoders and above-average readers/good decoders was compared on a series of six measures of phonological awareness, including tasks that required the ability to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes. Performance on these tasks was also correlated with phonetic decoding of pseudowords. Significant but varying intercorrelations were obtained among tasks in both groups. For the poor decoders, deletion was the most highly correlated with the other tasks. However, all good decoders performed at ceiling level on this task. For the poor decoders, deletion was significantly correlated with phonetic decoding (r = .74 and r = .78 for timed and untimed decoding measures, respectively). While all good decoders had good phonological awareness, not all those with good phonological awareness were good decoders. The results suggest that tasks that require blending and manipulation of phonemes, in addition to segmentation, may predict decoding ability best.     

Literacy skills in Maltese–English bilingual children

This research considers aspects of literacy in Maltese–English bilingual children. The study examined the reading and phonological awareness skills in English and Maltese of children whose home language is Maltese and second language English. A sample of 50 typically developing Maltese pupils aged 8 years 0 months to 10 years 5 months was selected. Since commencing school at the age of 5 years, the children have been learning to read in Maltese and also in English. For the purpose of this study, Maltese reading and reading‐related tests were constructed to parallel the UK and US standardised assessments. The novel tests and the standardised tests were administered to all the children. Results showed that Maltese children read better in their first language (Maltese) than in English, the language of instruction. Findings also showed that phonological awareness measures correlated across first and second languages. The results are discussed in terms of L1 and L2 transfer, whereby the transparency of Maltese orthography and English phonological processing skills facilitate performance on phonological tasks in both Maltese and English.     

Cat in the hat or cat in the cap? An investigation of the developmental trajectories of phonological awareness for Korean children

This study investigated trajectories of Korean children's growth in the awareness of four phonological units –syllable, body, rime and phoneme– over time, by following a sample of 215 children over a period of 15 months, beginning at their first year of preschool and collecting four waves of data. Much of the existing research suggests that children who speak European languages tend to find subsyllabic phonological units, onset and rime, salient. In contrast, the results revealed that Korean children tended to find body and coda more accessible, and that the growth trajectories for body and rime awareness differed. Korean children had a higher awareness of the body unit than the rime unit at the beginning of the study, and their body awareness grew at a much faster rate than did their rime awareness. These findings support the emerging evidence that young Korean children find body–coda more accessible than onset–rime.