Abstract
Children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment have marked deficits in phonological processing, putting them at an increased risk for reading deficits. The current study sought to examine the influence of word-level phonological and lexical characteristics on phonological awareness. Children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment were tested using a phoneme deletion task in which stimuli differed orthogonally by sound similarity and neighborhood density. Phonological and lexical factors influenced performance differently across groups. Children with dyslexia appeared to have a more immature and aberrant pattern of phonological and lexical influence (e.g., favoring sparse and similar features). Children with SLI performed less well than children who were typically developing, but followed a similar pattern of performance (e.g., favoring dense and dissimilar features). Collectively, our results point to both quantitative and qualitative differences in lexical organization and phonological representations in children with SLI and in children with dyslexia.
Highlights
Phonological awareness skills have a causal influence on reading achievement (Foy and Mann, 2001; Catts et al, 2002; Hogan et al, 2005; Nancollis et al, 2005)
Informed by well-known theories of phonological processing and reading development, the current study examined the influence of phonological and lexical features of words on a phoneme deletion task in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia compared to their typical peers
Behavioral profile of each experimental group In the current study, we evaluated 64 children who were generally matched on age and gender on a variety of speech, language, and intelligence measures
Summary
Phonological awareness skills have a causal influence on reading achievement (Foy and Mann, 2001; Catts et al, 2002; Hogan et al, 2005; Nancollis et al, 2005). A recent study found that similar sounds were more difficult to discriminate in sparse words compared to dense words (Hogan et al, in press) Their results point to the importance of considering both phonological and lexical influences on phoneme awareness tasks. Informed by well-known theories of phonological processing and reading development, the current study examined the influence of phonological and lexical features of words on a phoneme deletion task in children with SLI and dyslexia compared to their typical peers. We hypothesized that there would, be differences across the groups such that children with SLI would show a similar pattern of lexical and phonological influences on phoneme deletion to their typically developing peers; due to their smaller lexicons, they would have weaker phoneme awareness than their peers. We hypothesized, would show an aberrant pattern of phonological and lexical influences compared to their typically developing peers, which would signify underspecified, weak phonological and lexical representations
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