Phonology Processing and Reading Ability in Elementary School-aged children with Cleft Palate

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Objectives: This study aimed to examine the phonological processing and reading abilities of elementary school-aged children with and without cleft palate (CP).Methods: The participants were 10 children with CP and 12 typically developing children in the first to the second grades of elementary school. All children with CP in the study were identified with speech and language development problems during preschool age and were recommended speech and language therapy. The performances of phonological processing were measured in terms of phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme awareness), phonological memory (nonword repetition, digit span and backward digit span), and rapid automatized naming. The reading abilities were also measured in terms of decoding, reading fluency and reading comprehension. The correlations among vocabulary, articulation, and phonological processing and reading ability were examined.Results: Children with CP showed significantly lower performances in phonological awareness of syllable level and nonword repetition than typically developing children. Also, significant group differences were seen in all decoding and reading comprehension tasks except reading fluency. The results showed that nonword repetition performances of children with CP were highly correlated with receptive vocabulary and percentage of consonants correct.Conclusion: This study confirmed that school-aged children with CP who showed speech sound disorders in preschool age are likely to have difficulties in phonological processing and reading. Therefore, this study suggested that comprehensive evaluation of phonological processing skills should be performed more actively in preschool children with CP who show speech sound disorders, and intervention should continue to improve reading skills for school age.