语音意识的实质及其作用机制的实证研究

语音意识是影响儿童阅读发展的重要因素,但极少有研究探索语音意识的内在本质特征及作用机制。本研究首先从词汇阅读过程和词汇表征的理论视角分析语音意识的本质特征,从中推导得出语音意识在本质上反映了语音表征质量,具体包括特定单词语音表征和形音对应语音表征两大特征,然后运用验证性因子分析和结构方程模型加以验证。数据分析的结果表明,语音意识两大特征模型成立,并且两大特征独立作用于阅读,证实了有关语音意识本质特征的论断。     

Synergetic effects of phonological awareness,vocabulary, and word reading on bilingual children’s reading comprehension: A three-year study

Using comparable measures of first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English, this three-year longitudinal study examined the synergetic effects of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading on reading comprehension development among 227 Hong Kong Chinese-English bilinguals from Grades 2-4. Structural equation growth modeling revealed that all three factors were significantly linked to one another and to initial reading comprehension for each language. Across languages, L1 Chinese vocabulary was directly linked to initial L2 English reading comprehension, while L1 Chinese phonological awareness was indirectly linked to initial L2 English reading comprehension via L2 English vocabulary and word reading. These findings underscore the synergetic effects of early phonological and lexical skills in determining early reading comprehension ability in both L1 and L2.     

Phonological processes as predictors of specific reading skills in children at risk for reading failure

Children at risk for reading disability were evaluated as kindergartners and again as first graders to determine (1) intercorrelations among phonological processing tasks and (2) the relationship of such tasks to word identification and word attack. With IQ controlled, there were no intercorrelations among measures of phonological awareness, phonetic recoding in working memory, and phonological recoding in lexical access. Thus, these results failed to substantiate the concept of a general phonological processing ability. Partial correlations controlling for IQ revealed no relationship between reading and phonological awareness or phonetic recoding in working memory. In contrast, lexical access measures were significantly, albeit moderately, correlated with word identification but not word attack. Word attack and word identification were predicted by different combinations of variables. These results suggest that lexical access ability is an important factor in reading acquisition and that different combinations of phonological processes may be related to different aspects of reading.This research was supported by PHS grant HD 21887 to Bowman Gray School of Medicine and by PHS Grant NS 19413 to UNC-Greensboro Subcontract to Bowman Gray School of Medicine.     

Preschool phonological representations and development of reading skills

Individual differences in the quality of phonological representations of kindergarten children may be predictive of Grade 1 phonological awareness and reading development. Three longitudinal studies are presented that attempt to measure variance in the quality of the phonological structures within lexical items using three tasks: non-word repetition, cued word fluency, and a gated auditory word recognition task. Nonword repetition was a consistent predictor of later phonological awareness, even after current phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge were taken into account. The results of the three studies provide inconclusive support for the theory that individual differences in the quality of phonological representations play an important role in the development of explicit phonological awareness and reading acquisition. An important finding of the third study is that caution needs to be maintained in measuring skills in preschoolers as stability of results can be an issue when interpreting the relations between variables. However, the present studies do confirm that individual differences in vocabulary, nonword repetition, and phonological awareness are important factors in predicting the development of reading related skills.     

Sensitivity to linguistic stress,phonological awareness and early reading ability in preschoolers

Recent research has found that sensitivity to linguistic stress is related to phonological awareness and reading development. This study investigated the roles of two types of linguistic stress sensitivity (lexical and metrical stress) in the phonological awareness and reading development of young children. Forty‐five kindergarten children were tested on a battery of tasks that examined linguistic stress sensitivity and early reading ability. Results indicated that lexical stress, but not metrical stress sensitivity, is significantly related to phonological awareness and early reading ability. However, lexical stress is not able to predict unique variance in early reading ability once phonological awareness is controlled for. The relationships of both lexical and metrical stress sensitivity with phonological awareness and early reading development are discussed.     

Developmental dyslexia in an orthography of intermediate depth: the case of European Portuguese

Fifteen Portuguese children with dyslexia, aged 9–11 years, were compared with reading and chronological age controls with respect to five indicators related to the phonological deficit hypothesis: the effects of lexicality, regularity, and length, implicit and explicit phonological awareness, and rapid naming. The comparison between groups indicates that Portuguese children with dyslexia have a phonological impairment which is revealed by a developmental deficit in implicit phonological awareness and irregular word reading (where younger reading level controls performed better than dyslexics) and by a developmental delay in decoding ability and explicit phonological awareness (where dyslexics matched reading level controls). These results are discussed in relation to the idea that European Portuguese is written in an orthography of intermediate depth.     

Phonological awareness,verbal working memory and the acquisition of literacy

This paper describes a 2-year longitudinal study of 76 initially prereading children. The study examined the relationships between phonological awareness (measured by tests of onset and rime, phonemic segmentation and phoneme deletion), verbal working memory and the development of reading and spelling. Factor analyses showed that the verbal working memory tests which were administered loaded on two distinct but highly related factors, the first of which,simple repetition, involved the repetition of verbal items exactly as spoken by the experimenter, whereas the second,backwards repetition, involved repetition of items in reverse order. Factor analyses also showed that, whist the phonological awareness variables consistently loaded on the backwards repetition factor at the beginning and end of Grade 1, by Grade 2 the phonological awareness variables loaded on a separate factor which also included sentence repetition. Results of multiple regression analyses, with reading and spelling as a compound criterion variable, indicated that phonological awareness consistently predicted later reading and spelling even when both simple and backwards repetition were controlled. In contrast, verbal working memory did not consistently predict reading and spelling across testing times. Whilst there was some indication that verbal working memory, especially backwards repetition, measured during Grade 1 did predict reading and spelling in Grade 2, these effects were no longer evident when all three phonological variables were controlled. Nevertheless, with 4 individual reading and 2 individual spelling measures as the criterion variables, it was shown that phonological awareness was not quite such a consistent predictor of reading and spelling: it was most highly related to reading pseudowords and spelling real words; but it was not so highly related to spelling pseudowords, apparently because the processing demands of the task for the young children in the study were extremely high. Given the importance of verbal working memory for the completion of phonological awareness, reading and spelling tasks, in particular for spelling pseudowords, the findings are interpreted as providing some support for a theoretical position which posits that both phonological awareness and verbal working memory contribute to the early stages of literacy acquisition. Whilst the findings suggest some support for a general underlying phonological ability, there is also evidence that, as children learn to read and write, verbal working memory and phonological awareness become more differentiated.     

Phonological processing and emergent literacy in younger and older preschool children

Phonological awareness, phonological memory, and phonological access to lexical storage play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPA) in 389 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the validity of each PPA as separate from general cognitive ability and separate from each other. Multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM) with mean structure demonstrated that older preschoolers have better developed latent PPA than younger preschoolers but that the structure of PPA is equivalent. RAN was found uniquely associated with letter knowledge and text discrimination in younger preschoolers, and PA was found uniquely associated with word reading skills in older preschoolers. Finally, general cognitive ability was only indirectly associated with emergent literacy via PPA. These results highlight the importance of PPA in the early literacy development of English-speaking preschool children.     

The unique role of lexical accessibility in predicting kindergarten emergent literacy

The goal of this longitudinal study was to examine how lexical quality predicts the emergence of literacy abilities in 169 Dutch kindergarten children before formal reading instruction has started. At the beginning of the school year, a battery of precursor measures associated with lexical quality was related to the emergence of letter knowledge and word decoding. Confirmatory factor analysis evidenced five domains related to lexical quality, i.e., vocabulary, phonological coding, phonological awareness, lexical retrieval and phonological working memory. Structural equation modeling showed that the development of letter knowledge during the year could be predicted from children’s phonological awareness and lexical retrieval, and the emergence of word decoding from their phonological awareness and letter knowledge. It is concluded that it is primarily the accessibility of phonological representations in the mental lexicon that predicts the emergence of literacy in kindergarten.     

Phonological basis in reading disability: A review and analysis of the evidence

Poor readers are known to do consistently worsethan their normal reading peers on tasks ofphonological processing. They are characterizedby their difficulties in printed wordrecognition, phonological awareness andphonological decoding. An increasing body ofevidence points to deficits in speechperception as a source of subtle but ramifyingeffects in reading impaired children andadults. These deficits may be traced to poorlycoded phonological representations. Thisarticle will attempt to explain poor readers'difficulties in phonological coding by drawingon a gestural account speech development.Implications of this approach for readingintervention will be presented.     

A Comparison of Phonological Awareness,Lexical Compounding,and Homophone Training for Chinese Word Reading in Hong Kong Kindergartners

Research Findings: In this study, 88 kindergartners received special training in lexical compounding, homophone awareness, or phonological awareness or were assigned to a control condition over a period of approximately 2 months, with 20-min lessons administered twice per week. Chinese word reading improved significantly more in the lexical compounding group as compared to the other groups. Vocabulary knowledge also showed a trend toward improvement in this group (p < .08) and improved significantly in the homophone group. Although phonological awareness improved most in the phonological awareness training group, this group showed no reading or vocabulary improvements relative to the other groups. Practice or Policy: The results underscore the importance of morphological awareness training for both word reading and vocabulary knowledge in young Chinese children.     

A twin study of the etiology of high readingability

The present study examined the etiology of highreading ability in an overall sample of 350twin pairs in which at least one member of 100pairs (54 MZ, 46 DZ) had a reading compositescore one standard deviation above the sample mean. These highreaders also had significantly higher scoresthan the rest of the sample on Full Scale,Verbal and Performance IQ scores, as well as onmeasures of phoneme awareness, orthographiccoding, phonological decoding, and verbalshort-term memory. The MZ proband-wiseconcordance rate for high group membership wassignificantly higher than the DZ proband-wiseconcordance rate and further behavioralgenetic analyses corroborated that high readingability is partly due to genetic influence(h² _g = 0.55 ± 0.22). Bivariatemultiple regression analyses demonstrated thathigh phonological awareness, orthographiccoding, phonological decoding, and short-termverbal memory skills all share significantcommon genetic influence with high readingability. These results suggest that readingability and its cognitive correlates are on acontinuous distribution, with both extremes ofthe distribution being similarly heritable. They also support the hypothesis that the samecognitive processes that are associated withdyslexia are important for the development ofhigh reading ability.     

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.     

Comparing the phonological and double deficit hypotheses for developmental dyslexia

This study tested the predictions of thephonological and double deficit hypotheses byexperimentally examining speech perception,phoneme awareness, lexical retrieval (serialand discrete), articulatory speed, and verbalSTM in school age child (N = 35) and adolescent(N = 36) dyslexics, and both chronological age(CA) and reading age (RA) controls. Theresults confirmed the findings of previousstudies of a deficit in phoneme awareness indevelopmental dyslexia. At both age levels,dyslexics performed significantly more poorlythan both their CA and RA controls. Althoughdeficits in the other processes investigated,particularly in rapid serial naming, were alsoapparent, they were not as clear-cut as thedeficit in phoneme awareness. In general,definite evidence of a deficit in rapid serialnaming was limited to the more severelyimpaired dyslexics. Furthermore, although rapidserial naming contributed independent variationto various literacy skills, its contributionwas modest relative to the contribution ofphoneme awareness, regardless of whether theliteracy skill relied more or less heavily onphonological or orthographic coding skills. Further analyses suggested that variation inrapid serial skill is particularly importantfor fluent reading of text, whereas phonemeawareness is particularly important for thedevelopment of the ability to read byphonologically recoding letters or groups ofletters in words into their phonological codes.This explains the relatively strongcontribution of phoneme awareness to readingand spelling ability in general. In sum, thephonological hypothesis offers a moreparsimonious account of the present resultsthan the double deficit hypothesis.     

Effects of Visual and Phonological Distinctness on Visual–verbal Paired Associate Learning in Dutch Dyslexic and Normal Readers

In three studies, the effects of visual and phonological distinctness on the visual–verbal paired associate learning of dyslexic and normal readers at the age of 10–12 were examined. We hypothesized that both groups would be equally affected by the visual distinctness of the pictures, whereas the learning performance of the dyslexic children would be more susceptible to the phonological distinctness of the verbal stimuli (words). As expected, in Study 1 we found that the visual distinctness of pictures had a similar effect on both groups. However, the results of Studies 2 and 3 on the effect of phonological distinctness did not support the hypothesis. Both reader groups were equally affected by the phonological distinctness of the words. In addition, we found that, although not consistently, dyslexic children tended to be worse in verbal learning, which could to a large extent be explained by their problems with phonological processing.     

Effect of phonological and morphological awareness on reading comprehension in Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities

This research explored phonological and morphological awareness among Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities (RD) and its effect on reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities. Participants included 39 seventh graders with RD and two matched control groups of normal readers: 40 seventh graders matched for chronological age (CA) and 38 third graders matched for reading age (RA). We assessed phonological awareness, word reading, morphological awareness, and reading comprehension. Findings indicated that the RD group performed similarly to the RA group on phonological awareness but lower on phonological decoding. On the decontextualized morphological task, RD functioned on par with RA, whereas in a contextualized task RD performed above RA but lower than CA. In reading comprehension, RD performed as well as RA. Finally, results indicated that for normal readers contextual morphological awareness uniquely contributed to reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities, whereas no such unique contribution emerged for the RD group. The absence of an effect of morphological awareness in predicting reading comprehension was suggested to be related to a different recognition process employed by RD readers which hinder the ability of these readers to use morphosemantic structures. The lexical quality hypothesis was proposed as further support to the findings, suggesting that a low quality of lexical representation in RD students leads to ineffective reading skills and comprehension. Lexical representation is thus critical for both lexical as well as comprehension abilities.     

Do students with and without lexical retrieval weaknesses respond differently to instruction?

Deficits in phonological processing are theorized to be responsible for at least some reading disabilities. A considerable amount of research demonstrates that many students can be taught one of these phonological processes-phonemic awareness. However, not all students have responded favorably to this instruction. Research has suggested that these nonresponders may be unable to retrieve phonological codes quickly from long-term memory. The purpose of this study was to examine whether such a deficiency, which we refer to as lexical retrieval weakness, blunts the effectiveness of combined phonemic awareness and decoding training. To this end, we compared the effectiveness of phonemic awareness and decoding training for students with and without severe lexical retrieval weaknesses. All students in both groups demonstrated poor phonemic awareness. The results suggested that students with relatively strong lexical retrieval skill responded more favorably to beginning reading instruction than did students with weak lexical retrieval skill. In other words, lexical retrieval weakness may influence reading development independently of the effects of phonemic awareness. Implications for instruction are discussed.     

Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and reading in English–Arabic bilingual children

The paper reported an exploratory study that tested (a) the relationship between phonological and morphological awareness in English (L1)–Arabic (L2) bilingual children in Canada (N = 43), and (b) the relevance of these skills to word and pseudoword reading accuracy, and to complex word reading fluency. The results showed a significant correlation between phonological awareness in English and in Arabic. However, morphological awareness in the two languages was not correlated. Phonological awareness predicted reading cross-linguistically, but only Arabic morphological awareness predicted word reading in English. Moreover, while both phonological and morphological awareness in English predicted independent unique variance in English word reading, only phonological awareness in Arabic predicted Arabic word reading. Complex-word reading fluency was predicted by morphological awareness within both languages. Similarly, in both languages, phonological awareness was the single factor predicting pseudoword decoding accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of cross-linguistic differences between English and Arabic in orthographic depth and in morphological structure and transparency.     

Children’s Orthographic Knowledge and Their Word Reading Skill: Testing Bidirectional Relations

Prominent models of word reading concur that the development of efficient word reading depends on the establishment of lexical orthographic representations in memory. In turn, word reading skills are conceptualised as supporting the development of these orthographic representations. As such, models of word reading development make clear predictions of bidirectional relations between lexical orthographic knowledge and word reading skill. We test these predictions in a longitudinal study of 112 English-speaking children in Grades 2 and 3. At two time points, we assessed lexical orthographic knowledge and three aspects of word reading skill: word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, and phonological decoding. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we found that earlier word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, and phonological decoding predicted gains in lexical orthographic knowledge. Contrary to theoretical predictions, lexical orthographic knowledge did not predict gains in any of our measured word reading skills.