Difficulties in Phonological Awareness in Children and Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

Abstract

Phonological awareness in children with DLD can be affected in pre-school ages as well as in school ages. Through this quasi-experimental study, formed by a sample of 24 subjects, 12 of with belongs to the experimental group or DLD and 12 belongs to the comparative group or Typical Development (TD). It is intended to know if the phonological awareness in children with SLI is affected and if the results obtained by this group are lower than the comparative group. For this, the evaluation of phonological awareness has been carried out through the PECO test, in order to affirm or deny the hypothesis that children with DLD present specific difficulties in phonological awareness. The results obtained shows that after evaluating both groups, the average performance in the different tasks of the experimental group or DLD is lower than that obtained by the comparative group or with TD; considering a significantly lower result in tasks of identification of phonemes, syllable addiction and phoneme addiction. Therefore, the results of this study reaffirm what has been corroborated by previous studies, that children with DLD have difficulties in phonological awareness and hence the need to implement intervention programs on this to avoid difficulties in other areas such as reading and writing.