Phonological processing in written word learning: assessment for children who use augmentative and alternative communication

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of a series of alternative assessment tasks of phonological processing for individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The performance of a group of 32 AAC users, aged 7.5 to 17.5, was compared to that of a group of reading-level-matched younger children who had normal speech and no physical disabilities. Phonological recoding was assessed using a pseudoword speech-to-print matching task, a pseudoword spelling task, and two adapted pseudoword reading tasks. Multiple tasks, including those related to phoneme recognition, deletion, and substitution, were also used to assess phoneme awareness. A pseudoword alliteration task to assess partial accuracy in pseudoword reading was found to be appropriate for AAC users. In addition, the relationships between the participants' scores on the phonological recoding and phoneme awareness tasks and two measures of word reading were found to be at least as strong as those for the comparison group. Furthermore, in the AAC user group, scores on the pseudoword speech-to-print matching task were strongly related to word reading. On the basis of these results, we suggest that a detailed assessment of phonological processing would be useful for both understanding the literacy learning needs of students who use AAC and for designing interventions in this regard.