The relationship between speech impairment,phonological awareness and early literacy development

Although children with speech impairment are at increased risk for impaired literacy, many learn to read and spell without difficulty. Around half the children with speech impairment have delayed acquisition, making errors typical of a normally developing younger child (e.g. reducing consonant clusters so that spoon is pronounced as ‘poon’). A smaller group make disordered speech errors that are atypical of normal development (e.g. marking all consonant clusters with /f/ so bread is pronounced as ‘fed’). Profiles of surface speech errors may provide a way of identifying underlying deficits that account for differences in literacy development. This paper investigates the relationship between type of speech impairment, phonological awareness and literacy acquisition. Thirteen children, aged 5;2–7;9, with either delayed or disordered speech and six typically developing controls were compared on tasks measuring onset-rime awareness, letter knowledge, phonological rule knowledge, real and non-word reading. Children with delayed speech development performed like typically developing controls on all phonological awareness and reading measures. Children with speech disorder, who consistently made errors atypical of normal development, had difficulties on all phonological awareness tasks with the exception of syllable awareness. They showed no measurable emergent reading ability. The results suggest the need to differentiate between speech delay and disorder when planning intervention, particularly for literacy skills.     

Verbal memory and phonological processing in dyslexia

This study examines whether two frequently reported causes of dyslexia, phonological processing problems and verbal memory impairments, represent a double‐deficit or whether they are two expressions of the same deficit. Two‐hundred‐and‐sixty‐seven Dutch children aged 10–14 with dyslexia completed a list‐learning task and several phonological tasks, together with a number of reading and spelling tests. The results indicate that phonological deficits and verbal memory impairments in dyslexia stem from the same root, which seemingly reflects an inaccurate encoding of the phonological characteristics of verbal information. This phonological encoding deficit is a negative predictor for both the reading and spelling skills of dyslexic children.     

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.     

Amplitude envelope perception, phonology and prosodic sensitivity in children with developmental dyslexia

Here we explore relations between auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, prosodic sensitivity, and phonological awareness in a sample of 56 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. We examine whether rise time sensitivity is linked to prosodic sensitivity, and whether prosodic sensitivity is linked to phonological awareness. Prosodic sensitivity was measured by two reiterant speech tasks modelled on Kitzen (2001). The children with developmental dyslexia were significantly impaired in the reiterant speech tasks and in the phonological awareness tasks (onset and rime awareness). There were significant predictive relations between basic auditory processing of amplitude envelope structure (in particular, rise time), prosodic sensitivity, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling. The auditory processing difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia appear to impair their sensitivity to phrase-level prosodic cues such as metrical structure as well as to phonology, but in this study phonological and prosodic sensitivity made largely independent contributions to reading.     

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.     

The literacy profile of Greek precocious readers: a follow‐up study

The aim of this follow‐up study was to examine the progress made by 13 Greek‐speaking precocious readers in phonological awareness, reading and spelling from the fourth to sixth grades of primary education, and to compare their progress with that of 11 nonprecocious reader classmates. It was hypothesised that because of the linguistic characteristics of Greek orthography, precocious readers would not have an advantage in phonological awareness, spelling and reading comprehension tasks, but would have an advantage in reading speed. The data analyses showed that by the end of primary education, precocious readers had significantly better performance than their nonprecocious reader classmates in phonological awareness and reading speed tasks, but there was no significant difference between the groups in spelling and reading comprehension tasks. However, phonological awareness differences between the groups did not maintain when spelling achievement was taken into account.     

The relationship between phonological codes on memory and spelling tasks for students with and without learning disabilities.

The purpose of the study was to determine the degree to which 31 (23 boys and 8 girls) 13-year-old children with learning disabilities from Grades 7, 8, and 9 were comparable to younger (9-year-old) reading- and spelling-matched controls in (a) phonological similarity effects, (b) phonetically based misspellings, and (c) relationships between memory and spelling performance. Children with reading disabilities and reading-recognition-matched controls, subgrouped by spelling ability, were compared on their memory for phonetically similar and dissimilar word lists and types of spelling errors. The results indicate that children with reading disabilities who are matched to younger children on both reading recognition and spelling ability exhibit normal phonological effects on memory and spelling measures. Within each reading group, low spellers produced more semiphonetic errors than high spellers, and high spellers produced more phonetic errors than low spellers. Significant correlations between memory and spelling error measures were more frequent for children with reading disabilities when compared to controls matched on reading and spelling ability. It was concluded that the phonological performance of reading/spelling-matched children with reading disabilities is characterized by an overreliance on phonological codes, whereas their counterparts' performance reflects independent and less generalizable use of phonological substrates across tasks.     

Predictors of English spelling in bilingual and monolingual children in Grade 1: the case of Cantonese and Tagalog

In order to examine the effect of the home language on the spelling development in English in children who are learning English as a second language (ESL learners), it is best to directly compare groups of ESL learners from various home language backgrounds. This study compared the oral language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling performance of Tagalog–English bilingual, Cantonese–English bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking children in Grade 1. The bilingual children had lower scores than the monolinguals on measures of oral proficiency, but demonstrated similar or better performance on most phonological awareness, reading, and spelling tasks after controlling for vocabulary size in English. A series of moderated regression analysis revealed that although phonological awareness was associated with English spelling performance regardless of language background, the associations between specific spelling tasks and related underlying skills seemed to differ across language groups.     

Investigating the double-deficit hypothesis of developmental dyslexia in an orthography of intermediate depth

The present study aimed to investigate the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH) in an orthography of intermediate depth. Eighty-five European Portuguese-speaking children with developmental dyslexia, aged 7 to 12, were tested on measures of phonological awareness (PA), naming speed (NS), reading, and spelling. The results indicated that PA and NS were not significantly correlated, and that NS predicts reading fluency (but not reading accuracy and spelling) beyond what is accounted for by PA. Although the majority of the children with developmental dyslexia have double deficit (62.4%), some children have a single phonological deficit (24.7%) or a single NS deficit (8.2%). Children with a double deficit were not more impaired in reading fluency, reading accuracy, and spelling than both single-deficit subtypes. In conclusion, the findings of the present study are partially consistent with the DDH and provide evidence for the multifactorial model of developmental dyslexia. Implications of the DDH for an orthography of intermediate depth are emphasized.

     

The Development of Invented Spelling

Ninety-three children were tested on a variety of reading-related skills, including Tangel and Blachman's (1992) invented spelling measure, four times over 1.5 years. Results revealed that this measure of invented spelling was 1) stable, 2) highly associated with traditional phonological awareness tasks, and 3) substantially predictive of standardized spelling and word and nonword decoding tests over time. A measure of orthographic processing, as well as phonological processing, was significantly associated with time 4 invented spelling, suggesting that both orthographic and phonological processes are involved in invented spelling. These results indicate that this measure of invented spelling may be an optimal diagnostic tool for researchers and educators interested in predicting subsequent reading ability/disability in early development. Invented spelling administered in early kindergarten may be an even better predictor of subsequent decoding skills than are traditional phonological awareness tasks, for American school children.     

Patterns of phonological and memory processing in beginning readers and spellers of Greek

This study examined the patterns of reading and spelling performance of first-grade Greek children who either were facing difficulties in literacy acquisition or were normal achievers. In addition, we studied the relationship between obtained literacy development levels and the children's phonological awareness and ability to retain phonological information in short-term memory. The participants were tested in the reading of single letters, letter clusters, words, and nonwords, as well as in word and nonword spelling. Furthermore, their phonological processing knowledge was assessed via a battery of phonological awareness tasks and short-term memory phonetic-representation tasks. The main findings of the study were as follows: (a) Accurate decoding of Greek was achieved by almost every young child (attributed mainly to the nature of the Greek writing system); (b) the time the children needed to process a written item was the crucial index of their difficulty in literacy acquisition; (c) spelling was performed by deriving the orthographic form of a word on the basis of sound-spelling correspondence knowledge; (d) although the children with difficulties in literacy development had achieved a satisfactory performance in phonological processing, their performance was nevertheless significantly lower than that of the normal achievers; and (e) phonemic awareness and speech rate tasks were among the best predictors of learning to read and spell Greek words.     

The Development of Invented Spelling

Ninety-three children were tested on a variety of reading-related skills, including Tangel and Blachman's (1992) invented spelling measure, four times over 1.5 years. Results revealed that this measure of invented spelling was 1) stable, 2) highly associated with traditional phonological awareness tasks, and 3) substantially predictive of standardized spelling and word and nonword decoding tests over time. A measure of orthographic processing, as well as phonological processing, was significantly associated with time 4 invented spelling, suggesting that both orthographic and phonological processes are involved in invented spelling. These results indicate that this measure of invented spelling may be an optimal diagnostic tool for researchers and educators interested in predicting subsequent reading ability/disability in early development. Invented spelling administered in early kindergarten may be an even better predictor of subsequent decoding skills than are traditional phonological awareness tasks, for American school children.     

The Double-Deficit Theory of Reading Disability Does Not Fit All

The double-deficit theory of reading disability (Wolf & Bowers, 1999) was examined in a sample of 56 reading-disabled and 45 normal-reading elementary school children (aged 8 to 11). As hypothesized, the two groups differed markedly on all phonological analysis tasks and on rapid continuous naming of digits and letters (the double deficits), but they differed as well on orthographic tasks, attention ratings, arithmetic achievement, and all WISC-III factors except perceptual organization. Within the reading-disabled (RD) sample, children in the double-deficit subgroup were no more impaired in reading and spelling than those with a single deficit in phonological analysis, and those with a single deficit in rapid naming were no more impaired than those with neither deficit. Multiple regression analyses suggest that a multiple causality theory of RD is more plausible than a double-deficit theory.     

Relationships among rapid digit naming, phonological processing, motor automaticity, and speech perception in poor, average, and good readers and spellers

In this article, we explore the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and other cognitive processes among below-average, average, and above-average readers and spellers. Nonsense word reading, phonological awareness, RAN, automaticity of balance, speech perception, and verbal short-term and working memory were measured. Factor analysis revealed a 3-component structure. The first component included phonological processing tasks, RAN, and motor balance. The second component included verbal short-term and working memory tasks. Speech perception loaded strongly as a third component, associated negatively with RAN. The phonological processing tests correlated most strongly with reading ability and uniquely discriminated average from below- and above-average readers in terms of word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling. On word reading, comprehension, and spelling, RAN discriminated only the below-average group from the average performers. Verbal memory, as assessed by word list recall, additionally discriminated the below-average group from the average group on spelling performance. Motor balance and speech perception did not discriminate average from above- or below-average performers. In regression analyses, phonological processing measures predicted word reading and comprehension, and both phonological processing and RAN predicted spelling.     

Poor Reading: A Deficit in Skill-Automatization or a Phonological Deficit?

This study examined whether the characteristic reading speed impairment of German dyslexic children results from a general skill-automatization deficit sensu Nicolson and Fawcett (1990) or from more specific deficits in visual naming speed and phonological skills. The hypothesized skill-automatization deficit was assessed by balancing, peg moving, and visual search. Rapid "automatized" naming tasks served as measures of impaired visual naming speed, and the phonological deficit was assessed by speech perception, phonological sensitivity, and phonological memory tasks. Dyslexic German children and age-matched control children (all boys) were tested at the end of Grade 2 and as participants of a longitudinal study also at the beginning of Grade 1. No evidence for a skill-automatization deficit was found, as the dyslexic children did not differ at all on the balancing tasks and little on the other nonverbal skill tasks. However, the dyslexic children showed impaired visual naming speed and impaired phonological memory performance that were observed not only in Grade 2 but also before learning to read. Overall, the findings support the conclusion that, even in regular orthographies, difficulties in learning to read are due to a phonological deficit and not to a general skill-automatization deficit.     

Preschool cognitive and language skills predicting Kindergarten and Grade 1 reading and spelling: a cross‐linguistic comparison

The importance of cognitive and language skills on reading and spelling development were investigated in a cross‐linguistic longitudinal study of 737 English‐speaking children (US/Australia) and 169 Scandinavian children (Norway/Sweden) from preschool to Kindergarten and Grade 1. The results revealed that phonological awareness and print knowledge were the strongest predictors of early reading and spelling across orthographies. The contribution from rapid naming to literacy development was low in Kindergarten, but similar to that of phonological awareness and print knowledge in Grade 1. The present study identified a significant difference across orthographies in the effects of print knowledge and general verbal ability on spelling in Kindergarten. However, this pattern was explained by cultural rather than orthographic differences. The results indicate that cognitive and language skills underlying early reading and spelling development are similar across alphabetic orthographies.     

The development of orthographic and phonological strategies for the decoding of words in children

This study examined the use of orthographic and phonological deletion strategies by children in the 6–16‐year age range. Children from Grades 1 to 10 (n=191) were presented either visually or orally isolated words and were asked to pronounce these words using either an orthographic (spelling) strategy following mental deletion of one letter, or a phonological (sounding) strategy following mental deletion of one sound. All children performed additional reading and spelling tasks in which they read and spelt all the words and derivatives from the deletion tasks. Analysis of variance revealed that younger readers were more accurate when using phonological strategies than when using orthographic strategies, whereas older readers showed superior orthographic and phonological processing abilities. Generally the results supported the suggestion that phonological and orthographic processing ability increase with age, and that the increase in these abilities with age is not solely dependent on reading and spelling ability.     

Developmental surface and phonological dysgraphia in German 3rd graders

The investigation of developmental reading and spelling disorders within the framework provided by cognitive neuropsychology has yielded interesting results for several alphabetic orthographies, for example English, Italian, and French. However, this approach has not attracted much attention in German speaking countries up to now. The following study, carried out with 35 German dysgraphic 3rd graders provides evidence that there is no less reason to apply this line of research to German children than to children acquiring other alphabetic orthographies. By evaluating the individual scores of the dysgraphic children on spelling nonwords and orthographically irregular or inconsistent words against the corresponding mean scores established for two non-dysgraphic control samples (grade-matched and 2nd grade), nine children could be assigned to the surface dysgraphic and 12 to the phonological dysgraphic subtype. In order to restrict the range of cognitive deficits which might have caused the spelling patterns of the two dysgraphic subgroups at more distal links of the causal chain, individual performance profiles were determined for several spelling-related phonological and visual-graphemic tasks. On average, the phonological dysgraphic children showed poorer performance in different phonological tasks than the children assigned to the surface subtype. In addition, both subgroups showed subnormal skills in visual-graphemic tasks. Dissociations between the different spelling related tasks were observed not only between but also within the subgroups. This may reflect individually varying cognitive processing deficits underlying developmental dysgraphia in German.     

Speech reading and learning to read: a comparison of 8-year-old profoundly deaf children with good and poor reading ability

Nine children with severe-profound prelingual hearing loss and single-word reading scores not more than 10 months behind chronological age (Good Readers) were matched with 9 children whose reading lag was at least 15 months (Poor Readers). Good Readers had significantly higher spelling and reading comprehension scores. They produced significantly more phonetic errors (indicating the use of phonological coding) and more often correctly represented the number of syllables in spelling than Poor Readers. They also scored more highly on orthographic awareness and were better at speech reading. Speech intelligibility was the same in the two groups. Cluster analysis revealed that only three Good Readers showed strong evidence of phonetic coding in spelling although seven had good representation of syllables; only four had high orthographic awareness scores. However, all 9 children were good speech readers, suggesting that a phonological code derived through speech reading may underpin reading success for deaf children.     

Finger-writing intervention impacts the spelling and handwriting skills of children with developmental language disorder: a multiple single-case study

Learning to use grapheme to phoneme correspondences (GPCs) provides a powerful mechanism for the foundation of reading skills in children. However, for some children, such as those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), the GPC learning process takes time, is laborious, and impacts the entire reading and spelling processes. The present study aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of a finger-writing intervention on reading, spelling and handwriting performances. A visuomotor support was designed to help them to learn more efficiently GPCs since children with DLD appear to have altered phonological representations in memory. Over a period of two months, five children with DLD from a special primary school (aged from 7.42 years to 10.17 years) received individually either a finger-writing intervention or a control intervention, both focusing on phonological awareness and the learning of specific GPCs. In the finger-writing intervention, the child had to explore with their fingers the shape of relief-graphemes and excavated-letter. In the control intervention, the same exercises were made except that the two finger-writing tasks were replaced by two visual discrimination tasks. Children were compared on several measures (reading, spelling, handwriting and phonological awareness) before and after the treatment. Results indicated that the children from the finger-writing intervention showed greater improvement than the children from the control group in learning GPCs to improve their graphemic spelling and, for two of the three children, in handwriting. These findings have a clear practical implication for teachers' instructional practices at school.