Effects of Phonological Impairment on Word, Syllable, and Phoneme Segmentation and Reading

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to compare the phonological awareness ability of children with persistent phonological impairment to that of phonologically normal children. We also studied the impact of speech intelligibility on beginning reading skills. Eleven moderate to severely unintelligible children and 11 phonologically normal children between the ages of 6:5 (years:months) and 8:6 were administered four measures of phonological awareness and one measure of word recognition (reading) ability. Phonologically normal children scored significantly higher on three of the four phonological awareness measures. There were no significant differences for word recognition. Multiple regression analysis yielded speech intelligibility as a highly significant predictor of performance on three of the four phonological awareness tasks. We concluded that phonological awareness is closely associated with productive phonological ability independent of mental age, chronological age, and educational experience.