Measures Of Phonological Awareness Research Articles

Longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling across languages varying in orthographic consistency

We examined the longitudinal predictors of nonword decoding, reading fluency, and spelling in three languages that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, Greek, and English. Eighty-two English-speaking, 70 Greek, and 88 Finnish children were followed from the age of 5.5 years old until Grade 2. Prior to any reading instruction, they were administered measures of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming speed. In Grade 2, they were administered measures of nonword decoding, text-reading fluency, and spelling. The results showed that the model for nonword decoding in Greek was similar to that of Finnish (both have consistent grapheme-to-phoneme mappings) while the model for spelling in Greek was similar to that of English (both have some inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme mappings). In addition, the models for nonword decoding and spelling in Finnish were similar, because Finnish is consistent in both directions. Letter knowledge dominated the prediction in each language. The predictable role of orthographic consistency on literacy acquisition is discussed.

Expanding the Simple View of Reading in Accounting for Reading Skills in Community College Students

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that listening comprehension and decoding, properly measured, can account for all of the variance in reading comprehension. We assessed the simple view in community college students. In addition to listening comprehension and decoding, we included measures of oral vocabulary, nonverbal reasoning, phonological awareness, reading fluency, and verbal working memory. In combination, the measures yielded an R2 of.48, but only listening comprehension and reading fluency made independent contributions to reading comprehension. Predictors that best distinguished less skilled from average readers were phonological awareness and verbal working memory. These findings suggest a need to expand the simple view in accounting for individual differences among adult readers.

Simplifying Reading: Applying the Simplicity Principle to Reading

Debates concerning the types of representations that aid reading acquisition have often been influenced by the relationship between measures of early phonological awareness (the ability to process speech sounds) and later reading ability. Here, a complementary approach is explored, analyzing how the functional utility of different representational units, such as whole words, bodies (letters representing the vowel and final consonants of a syllable), and graphemes (letters representing a phoneme) may change as the number of words that can be read gradually increases. Utility is measured by applying a Simplicity Principle to the problem of mapping from print to sound; that is, assuming that the "best" representational units for reading are those which allow the mapping from print to sounds to be encoded as efficiently as possible. Results indicate that when only a small number of words are read whole-word representations are most useful, whereas when many words can be read graphemic representations have the highest utility.

The fragile nature of phonological awareness in children with specific language impairment: Evidence from literacy development

Previous studies have suggested that children with specific language impairment (SLI) risk encountering subsequent literacy difficulties, due to difficulties in phonological awareness (PA). This longitudinal study provides evidence in support of this view based on a group of 20 French-speaking children with SLI examined at the start of learning to read. It also investigates the specific difficulties in reading decoding, reading comprehension and spelling. The sample was tested on standardized measures of phonological awareness, nonverbal skills, morphosyntax, reading, and spelling. The assessment was performed twice separated by an interval of 30 months. At Time 2, the results indicated normal scores on phonological awareness. Despite this, the sample scored poorly on literacy tasks, and the majority exhibited particularly striking deficits on spelling. We argue that there is a reciprocal influence between the early PA deficit and the subsequent literacy development in children with SLI. The sample of the study presented normal PA skills after 2 or 3 years of schooling. Nonetheless, most of the participants experienced difficulties on the literacy tasks, thus proving that the acquired PA skills were fragile and not sufficiently developed to cope with tasks more complicated than typical PA tasks.

The relationship between phonological processing skills and word and nonword identification performance in children with mild intellectual disabilities

Word and nonword identification skills were examined in a sample of 80 elementary school age students with mild intellectual disabilities and mixed etiologies who were described as struggling to learn to read by their teachers. Performance on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, measures of phonological awareness, and measures of word and nonword identification were included for analyses. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that, after controlling for chronological age and vocabulary knowledge, phonological processing accounted for a large and significant amount of unique variance of both word and nonword identification. In addition, the pattern of results found in this study is similar to that obtained with typically developing learners. As with typically developing children, measures of phonological awareness were significantly correlated with measures of both reading achievement and vocabulary knowledge.

Cognitive Characteristics of Treatment-Resistant Children With Reading Disabilities: A Retrospective Study

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to compare the cognitive performance of 11-to 14-year-old children with reading disabilities as a function of high (>85 reading standard score) and low (<85 reading standard score) response to intervention. Students were divided into high responders, low responders, and nonresponders after 3 years of instruction and compared on phonological, rapid naming, temporal, and executive processing measures. Although children designated as responders were statistically comparable with nonresponders at Year 1, significant differences in favor of high responders emerged on measures of phonological awareness, rapid naming, and temporal processing when compared with the other groups. All groups yielded below normal performance on measures of phonological awareness, planning, and verbal working memory. Overall the findings suggest that low responders and nonresponders suffer multiple deficits beyond the phonological system.

A cross‐sectional study of prosodic sensitivity and reading difficulties

In this cross‐sectional study, we explore the relationship between prosodic sensitivity (suprasegmental phonology) and phonological awareness (segmental phonology) and investigate whether a group of poor readers display significant suprasegmental phonological deficits in comparison to chronological age‐matched controls and younger, reading age‐matched controls. Phonological awareness assessments were administered along with a battery of prosodic sensitivity assessments drawn from recent literature. The results showed that poor readers were outperformed by their chronological age‐matched counterparts on all measures of prosodic sensitivity. A significant main effect of group was found on the revised stress mispronunciations task and the stress assignment task from the prosodic assessment battery, the former of which remained even after controlling for individual differences in receptive vocabulary and measures of phonological awareness. Significant relationships were also found between measures of prosodic sensitivity and phonological awareness (especially phoneme awareness). These findings emphasise the importance of both segmental and suprasegmental phonological skills in children's reading development.

Phonological awareness in kindergarten: a field study in Luxembourgish schools

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effectiveness of a phonological awareness training program in the specific context of the Luxembourgish educational system. The intervention was run by the kindergarten teachers in their classes with minimal external supervision. Forty-one classes of the area around Luxembourg City participated in the study. One hundred and fifty children from 20 kindergarten classes were part of the training group and 157 children from 21 classes formed the control group. At the end of kindergarten, clear training effects were observed for all phonological awareness tasks, except for the highly demanding phoneme deletion task. After 6 months of reading and writing instruction in first grade, no training effects were found in a pseudoword spelling task for the entire training group. Only at-risk children, which had the lowest performance on preschool phonological awareness measures, showed significant training effects. We conclude that early phonological awareness training may be profitably incorporated in kindergarten classroom activities, particularly for at-risk pupils, even when the language characteristics and teaching methods already concur in facilitating the understanding of the alphabetic principle.

Investigating children's ability to reflect on stored phonological representations: the Silent Deletion of Phonemes Task

The development of children's speech, language, and literacy skills is considered to build on a robust and intact speech-processing system, with normally functioning skills at all levels of input and output processing, as well as storage. There are a range of tasks available that assess input and output processing skills, however there are few tasks described in the literature that require a child to reflect on and analyse the internal structure of their own phonological representations. This paper will describe the development of the Silent Deletion of Phonemes (SDOP) task. This task is designed to assess a child's ability to delete and manipulate sounds silently within their own stored representations while minimizing the impact of any output difficulties. The SDOP task was presented to 69 typically developing mainstream Year 2 children (aged 7;2-8;1 years) as part of a battery of phonological processing skills and literacy measures. Scores for the population of typically developing Year 2 children were normally distributed and above a basal level but not approaching ceiling. Performance on the SDOP was significantly correlated with other measures of phonological processing but not a measure of non-verbal ability. It was most highly correlated with the measure of phonological awareness as expected, as both tasks measure awareness of the internal structure of words. However, the SDOP provided more information about the accuracy and specificity of a child's underlying phonological representations. The SDOP explained a significant amount of concurrent variance in both reading and spelling performance beyond the variance accounted for by the predictors that have been used by researchers to date. In combination, the SDOP and rapid-naming measure accounted for 58.8% of variance in performance on the reading measure and 54.4% of variance in spelling performance. The SDOP task appears to be a valid and reliable tool to assess the internal structure of a child's stored phonological representations. Profiling phonological representations allows clinicians to explore children's speech-processing skills which may be particularly useful with children with complex literacy difficulties.

Small Wins Big

The present study examined invented spelling of pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching and learning Chinese words) in relation to subsequent Chinese reading development. Among 296 Chinese kindergartners in Beijing, independent invented pinyin spelling was found to be uniquely predictive of Chinese word reading 12 months later, even with Time 1 syllable deletion, phoneme deletion, and letter knowledge, in addition to the autoregressive effects of Time 1 Chinese word reading, statistically controlled. These results underscore the importance of children’s early pinyin representations for Chinese reading acquisition, both theoretically and practically. The findings further support the idea of a universal phonological principle and indicate that pinyin is potentially an ideal measure of phonological awareness in Chinese.

Analizando procesos cognitivos y de escritura en niños hispano-parlantes que aprenden inglés como segunda lengua y niños canadienses de habla inglesa

El objetivo principal de este estudio ha sido analizar los procesos cognitivos y de escritura de niños hispano-parlantes que aprenden el inglés como segunda lengua. Para ello se seleccionó a una muestra de niños canadienses de habla inglesa y otra de hispano-parlantes que reciben instrucción en inglés como segunda lengua en escuelas canadienses del distrito de Vancouver en la provincia canadiense de Columbia Británica (British Columbia). Se tomaron medidas de competencia lingu?ística (vocabulario y conciencia sintáctica), memoria de trabajo, conciencia fonológica y escritura de palabras y pseudopalabras en inglés para el grupo de monolingu?es, y las mismas medidas en los idiomas inglés y español para el grupo de hispano-parlantes. Nuestra predicción es que si existe un efecto de transferencia de L1 sobre L2 entonces existiría relación entre los procesos cognitivos y de escritura que se miden en ambas lenguas, y no existirían diferencias significativas en este tipo de medidas que se toman en L2 entre niños canadienses de habla inglesa e hispano-parlante. El principal hallazgo ha sido encontrar que no existen diferencias significativas entre ambos grupos en procesos fonológicos y de escritura de palabras y pseudopalabras, sin embargo, los niños canadienses de habla inglesa presentan mayor competencia lingu?ística en comparación al grupo de hispano-parlantes ya que obtienen puntuaciones superiores en medidas de vocabulario y de conciencia sintáctica.

Does the Dynamic Testing of Working Memory Predict Growth in Nonword Fluency and Vocabulary in Children With Reading Disabilities?

This three-year longitudinal study assessed whether working memory (WM performance) when tested under dynamic testing conditions is related to growth on measures of phonological awareness and vocabulary in skilled readers and subgroups of children with reading disabilities (RD) (children with RD-only, children with both reading and arithmetic deficits, and low verbal IQ readers). A battery of memory and reading measures was administered to 78 children (11.6 yrs) across three testing waves spaced one year apart. WM tasks were presented under initial, gain, and maintenance testing conditions. The important results were (1) growth curve modeling showed that WM performance administered under initial and maintenance testing conditions was a significant moderator of growth in receptive vocabulary, whereas the number of probes and WM performance under gain testing conditions were significant moderators of growth in nonword fluency and (2) WM performance was statistically comparable within subgroups of children with RD, but inferior to skilled readers across all testing conditions. The results support the notion that children’s WM performance when measured under dynamic testing conditions was related to the rate of growth on basic reading and vocabulary measures.

Language Development, Literacy Skills, and Predictive Connections to Reading in Finnish Children With and Without Familial Risk for Dyslexia

Discriminative language markers and predictive links between early language and literacy skills were investigated retrospectively in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia in which children at familial risk for dyslexia have been followed from birth. Three groups were formed on the basis of 198 children’s reading and spelling status. One group of children with reading disability (RD; n = 46) and two groups of typical readers from nondyslexic control (TRC; n = 84) and dyslexic families (TRD; n = 68) were examined from age 1.5 years to school age. The RD group was outperformed by typical readers on numerous language and literacy measures (expressive and receptive language, morphology, phonological sensitivity, RAN, and letter knowledge) from 2 years of age onward. The strongest predictive links emerged from receptive and expressive language to reading via measures of letter naming, rapid naming, morphology, and phonological awareness.

Kindergarten Predictors of Second Versus Eighth Grade Reading Comprehension Impairments

Multiple studies have shown that kindergarten measures of phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge are good predictors of reading achievement in the primary grades. However, less attention has been given to the early predictors of later reading achievement. This study used a modified best-subsets variable-selection technique to examine kindergarten predictors of early versus later reading comprehension impairments. Participants included 433 children involved in a longitudinal study of language and reading development. The kindergarten test battery assessed various language skills in addition to phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, naming speed, and nonverbal cognitive ability. Reading comprehension was assessed in second and eighth grades. Results indicated that different combinations of variables were required to optimally predict second versus eighth grade reading impairments. Although some variables effectively predicted reading impairments in both grades, their relative contributions shifted over time. These results are discussed in light of the changing nature of reading comprehension over time. Further research will help to improve the early identification of later reading disabilities.

A test of the cerebellar hypothesis of dyslexia in adequate and inadequate responders to reading intervention.

The cerebellar hypothesis of dyslexia posits that cerebellar deficits are associated with reading disabilities and may explain why some individuals with reading disabilities fail to respond to reading interventions. We tested these hypotheses in a sample of children who participated in a grade 1 reading intervention study (n = 174) and a group of typically achieving children (n = 62). At posttest, children were classified as adequately responding to the intervention (n = 82), inadequately responding with decoding and fluency deficits (n = 36), or inadequately responding with only fluency deficits (n = 56). Based on the Bead Threading and Postural Stability subtests from the Dyslexia Screening Test-Junior, we found little evidence that assessments of cerebellar functions were associated with academic performance or responder status. In addition, we did not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that cerebellar deficits are more prominent for poor readers with "specific" reading disabilities (i.e., with discrepancies relative to IQ) than for poor readers with reading scores consistent with IQ. In contrast, measures of phonological awareness, rapid naming, and vocabulary were strongly associated with responder status and academic outcomes. These results add to accumulating evidence that fails to associate cerebellar functions with reading difficulties.

Principles for School-Age Language Intervention: Insights from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Principles for School-Age Language Intervention: Insights from a Randomized Controlled Trial

The Efficacy of Supplemental Early Literacy Instruction by Community-Based Tutors for Preschoolers Enrolled in Head Start

The purpose of the current study was to test the efficacy of a supplemental phonological awareness focused intervention delivered by community-based paraeducators with preschool children (M = 4.73 years) in eight Head Start classrooms in the rural Midwest. Participating children were randomly assigned to small groups within classrooms, which were in turn were randomly assigned to receive either treatment or control (vocabulary-focused storybook reading) instruction in small groups for 20 min/day, 5 days/week, for 10 weeks (February–April). All instruction was delivered by community-based paraeducator tutors. At posttest, treatment students (n = 41) outperformed controls (n = 47) on measures of alphabetic knowledge (d = 1.22) and phonological awareness (d = .62). No significant differences between conditions were detected on print awareness or vocabulary. Overall, the results demonstrate that at-risk preschoolers benefit from community-based paraeducator implemented supplemental phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge instruction.

Second Language Learning Difficulties in Chinese Children With Dyslexia: What Are the Reading-Related Cognitive Skills That Contribute to English and Chinese Word Reading?

This study examined the relations between reading-related cognitive skills and word reading development of Chinese children with dyslexia in their Chinese language (L1) and in English (L2). A total of 84 bilingual children—28 with dyslexia, 28 chronological age (CA) controls, and 28 reading-level (RL) controls—participated and were administered measures of word reading, rapid naming, visual-orthographic skills, and phonological and morphological awareness in both L1 and L2. Children with dyslexia showed weaker performance than CA controls in both languages and had more difficulties in phonological awareness in English but not in Chinese. In addition, reading-related cognitive skills in Chinese contributed significantly to the ability to read English words, suggesting cross-linguistic transfer from L1 to L2. Results found evidence for different phonological units of awareness related to the characteristics of the different languages being learned, supporting the psycholinguistic grain size and linguistic coding differences hypotheses.

Predictors of verbal working memory in children with cerebral palsy

The goal of the present study was to examine the precursors of verbal working memory in 52 children with cerebral palsy with varying degrees of speech impairments in the first grade of special education. Following Baddeley's model of working memory, children's verbal working memory was measured by means of a forced-recognition task. As precursors of verbal working memory, measures of intelligence, speech rate, speech intelligibility, auditory perception, and phonological awareness were also administered. Correlations were computed between all measures followed by Structural Equation Modeling analyses with speech rate and speech intelligibility being identified as a single factor ‘speech’. The results revealed that verbal working memory was mostly predicted by intelligence, auditory perception and speech ability. It was also found that children with cerebral palsy with additional intellectual and speech impairments were at risk for limited verbal working memory spans.

Does task-focused versus task-avoidance behavior matter for literacy development in an orthographically consistent language?

We examined the importance of children’s classroom activity, defined as task-focused versus task-avoidance behavior, on different literacy outcomes in an orthographically consistent language. Greek children ( n = 95) were tested in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 on measures of general cognitive ability, phonological awareness, RAN, and short-term memory. The teachers of the children also assessed their task-focused behavior. Nonword decoding, reading fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension measures were administered in grades 2 and 3. The results indicated that task-focused behavior accounted for unique variance in spelling and reading comprehension, even after controlling for the effects of autoregressor, non-verbal IQ, and phonological processing.