Phonological Awareness Performance Research Articles

Speech connectedness predicts reading performance three months in advance: a longitudinal experiment

Aiming to verify the predictive value of oral narrative structure on reading acquisition, we followed 253 children (first and second graders) during an entire school year, assessing oral narratives and reading performances in five sessions. Transcriptions of oral narratives were represented as word-recurrence graphs to measure connectedness attributes. Connectedness predicted performance in phonological awareness, reading comprehension, and word reading accuracy 3–4 months in advance.

Does Knowing the Word Matter for Preschool DLLS? Individualized Vocabulary Words on Phonological Awareness Performance

Does Knowing the Word Matter for Preschool DLLS? Individualized Vocabulary Words on Phonological Awareness Performance

An Investigation of the Differences in Phonological Awareness Performance Based on Cognitive Style

Purpose: Research in cognitive style has shown its relevance in predicting reading ability. However, its effect on phonological awareness, which plays a central role in reading acquisition, remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in phonological awareness based on cognitive style. Method: Twenty-nine monolingual English speaking African American and Caucasian 6-year-old 1st grade students from the Washington DC metropolitan area participated in the study. Participants were distributed as follows: 11 females, 18 males, 21 African Americans, and 8 Caucasians. Participants were of middle-class socioeconomic background with no evidence of cognitive, language, phonological, articulation or hearing deficits. Testing occurred over two sessions scheduled on different days. During the first session, participants were individually administered the Cognitive Style Assessment Protocol (CSAP) to measure cognitive style and assigned to either the wholistic or analytic cognitive style group. In the second session, the Phonological Awareness Assessment Protocol (PAAP) was administered to measure the main components of phonological awareness. Raw data consisted of participant scores on the CSAP and PAAP. Data were analyzed using two-tailed t-tests to determine if there were significant group differences between the analytic and wholistic groups in phonological awareness and its components. Results: Results showed that students with an analytic cognitive style performed better than those with a wholistic cognitive style on overall phonological awareness and on the following phonological awareness components: syllable segmentation, phoneme substitution, and phoneme blending. No significant group differences were found on rhyming, phoneme isolation, phoneme deletion, and phoneme segmentation tasks. Conclusion: Findings showed some differences in phonological awareness between analytic and wholistic students with analytic students performing better than wholistic students. These differences in aspects of phonological awareness seem to implicate cognitive style in reading acquisition given the central role that phonological awareness pays in reading development and suggest that wholistic students may experience reading difficulties that stem from their cognitive orientation.

Relationships Between First and Second Language Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in Chinese Children with Dyslexia

Relationships Between First and Second Language Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in Chinese Children with Dyslexia

Phonological Awareness, Rapid Naming, and Nonword Repetition Abilities in Children with Dyslexia in Grade 1 to 6

Objectives: This study examined phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and nonword repetition abilities in children with dyslexia and typically developing children in grade 1 to 6. To examine the phonological processing abilities according to reading developmental stage, participants were divided into two groups: grade 1-2 and grade 3-6. Methods: A total of 78 children with dyslexia and typically developing children in grade 1-2 and 3-6 participated. All participants had no problems in nonverbal cognition and receptive vocabulary. Children with dyslexia had to score a standard score of 85 or less, and among the typically developing children those with a standard score of 90 or higher on the word decoding test of the standardized reading test were selected. Phonological processing abilities were tested using the phonological awareness, rapid naming, and nonword repetition tasks. Results: Children with dyslexia showed lower performance in phonological awareness, RAN, and nonword repetition tasks compared to typically developing children. In addition, it was found that all phonological processing abilities improved as the grade increased. There was an interaction effect on only nonword repetition, with no difference between children with dyslexia and typically developing children in grade 3-6. Conclusion: Even in Hangul, a transparent orthography, children with dyslexia had problems in all three phonological processing abilities. The effect size was the largest on the RAN between the two reading groups, so children with dyslexia were likely to have most difficulty on RAN. Finally, vocabulary ability in children with dyslexia would influence nonword repetition abilities.

Bilingual phonological awareness as a function of language proficiency

Aims and objectives: The present study examined whether phonological awareness reflects a stable construct or whether it varies by the different languages of bilingual speakers. In particular, the study tests to what extent language proficiency determines phonological awareness above and beyond language structural characteristics. Methodology: Bilingual adult speakers were tested as they afford within-participant comparisons to address this issue. Specifically, 29 Hebrew (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were compared to 33 English (L1)-Hebrew (L2) bilinguals on a timed auditory rhyme judgment task including 270 word-pairs (90 English pairs, 90 Hebrew pairs, and 90 pseudo-Hebrew pairs). Data and analysis: Reaction times and dʹ on the rhyme judgment task were compared between the two bilingual groups to examine the role of language proficiency in predicting phonological awareness performance. Furthermore, rhyme judgments on Hebrew pairs were correlated with those on English pairs to provide within-participant index of phonological awareness stability. Findings: Rhyme judgment performance on the same set of words was affected by the strength of linguistic representations, as determined by language proficiency profile. English-Hebrew bilinguals performed better on English pairs, whereas Hebrew-English bilinguals performed better on Hebrew pairs. Moreover, within-group comparisons revealed that performance in the more proficient language was not correlated with performance in the less proficient language. Originality: By testing two groups of bilinguals who differ in their language dominance profile using the same set of materials (including both L1 and L2 pairs), the results reveal differences in phonological awareness abilities as a function of language proficiency that cannot be reduced to structural differences between the examined languages. Significance: The findings underscore the dynamic nature of phonological awareness abilities and carry implications for clinical diagnosis of bilingual populations, in that rhyme judgment performance in one language should not be taken to index expected abilities in the other language of bilingual speakers.

Relações entre idade linguística e consciência fonológica de crianças com transtorno do desenvolvimento da linguagem

ABSTRACT Purpose: to verify whether there is a relation between linguistic age and performance in phonological awareness of children presented with developmental language disorder. Methods: a retrospective study comprising 53 children with developmental language disorder aged between 4 and 7 years old. Their language disorder diagnosis followed the inclusion criteria internationally described and Brazilian standardized tests for language assessment were used. All children underwent phonological awareness and linguistic skills assessment via standardized tests and all data went through statistical analysis. For correlation analysis, the p-value was performed through the Pearson’s test. In the regression analysis the models used expressive and receptive linguistic age as independent variables and the performance in phonological awareness as a dependent variable (p=0,036* and p= 0,048*). Results: the data indicated a strong correlation between language age and phonological awareness skills in children with language developmental disorder. A strong correlation between syllabic awareness and linguistic age was found as well. In addition, phonemic awareness was correlated to their chronological age. All correlation tests were confirmed by regression analysis. Conclusion: the data indicated a strong correlation between linguistic age and phonological awareness in children with developmental language disorders. These findings raise discussion regarding phonemic skills in children under this condition and their literacy process.

Bibliometric analysis of the literature on phonological awareness in bilingual children

ABSTRACT Purpose: to characterize the profile of scientific production in the international literature on phonological awareness in bilingual children between 2011 and 2020. Methods: a bibliometric analysis was made with the search for articles in ERIC, LILACS, MEDLINE, and SciELO databases, using descriptors in English. The articles were selected based on the eligibility criteria, by reading the titles, then reading the abstracts, and lastly, reading the full-text articles. Results: a total of 1,167 articles were analyzed, 1,152 of which were excluded for not meeting the inclusion criteria. Hence, 15 articles were selected for full-text reading and bibliometric analysis. The United States was the country with most publications, followed by Brazil, Singapore, and China. The approach of the studies was predominantly quantitative, followed by qualitative; the most common type of study was cross-sectional, with samples of more than 100 participants. Conclusion: there was a greater number of publications in the last 3 years, most of them cross-sectional ones, presenting better phonological awareness performance among bilinguals, with positive results in reading.

Bibliometric analysis of the literature on phonological awareness in bilingual children

ABSTRACT Purpose: to characterize the profile of scientific production in the international literature on phonological awareness in bilingual children between 2011 and 2020. Methods: a bibliometric analysis was made with the search for articles in ERIC, LILACS, MEDLINE, and SciELO databases, using descriptors in English. The articles were selected based on the eligibility criteria, by reading the titles, then reading the abstracts, and lastly, reading the full-text articles. Results: a total of 1,167 articles were analyzed, 1,152 of which were excluded for not meeting the inclusion criteria. Hence, 15 articles were selected for full-text reading and bibliometric analysis. The United States was the country with most publications, followed by Brazil, Singapore, and China. The approach of the studies was predominantly quantitative, followed by qualitative; the most common type of study was cross-sectional, with samples of more than 100 participants. Conclusion: there was a greater number of publications in the last 3 years, most of them cross-sectional ones, presenting better phonological awareness performance among bilinguals, with positive results in reading.

Auditory Processing of Non-speech Stimuli by Children in Dual-Language Immersion Programs.

Perception of low-level auditory cues such as frequency modulation (FM) and rise time (RT) is crucial for development of phonemic representations, segmentation of word boundaries, and attunement to prosodic patterns in language. While learning an additional language, children may develop an increased sensitivity to these cues to extract relevant information from multiple types of linguistic input. Performance on these auditory processing tasks such as FM and RT by children learning another language is, however, unknown. Here we examine 92 English-speaking 7–8-year-olds in the U.S. and their performance in FM and RT perceptual tasks at the end of their second year in Cantonese or Spanish dual-language immersion compared to children in general English education programs. Results demonstrate that children in immersion programs have greater sensitivity to FM, but not RT, controlling for various factors. The immersion program students were also observed to have better phonological awareness performance. However, individual differences in FM sensitivity were not associated with phonological awareness, a pattern typically observed in monolinguals. These preliminary findings suggest a possible impact of formal language immersion on low-level auditory processing. Additional research is warranted to understand causal relationships and ultimate impact on language skills in multilinguals.

Longitudinal effects of family and school context on the development on emergent literacy skills in preschoolers

The negative influence of economic and socio-cultural disadvantages on students’ literacy performance has been widely documented. However, the ability of schooling to counterbalance the predictive effect exerted by inequality in the family context has been less investigated. This study aims to longitudinally investigate the relative weight of the child’s family context, i.e., parents’ occupation and education levels; home literacy; and the school context, in terms of didactical intervention, on emergent literacy skills. A total of 193 children in the last year of preschool participated in the longitudinal research. Each child was administered socio-economic measures (parental education [PE] and home literacy [HL] levels) and, at the beginning and end of the school year, tasks to assess his or her emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness and textual and notational skills). General linear model analyses were carried out. The results of the initial assessment showed that PE level was a powerful predictor of performance that was associated with significantly lower performance in children from disadvantaged backgrounds in all the tested skills. After a year of schooling, all participants benefitted from the teaching received, with significantly increased performance in phonological awareness, notational skills and textual competence. In addition, by comparing the scores of the three groups at the end of the school year, we verified that teaching exerted varying degrees of influence depending on the student group and tested ability.

Effects of the Computer-Based Grapho-Phonological Training Lautarium in Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Effects of the Computer-Based Grapho-Phonological Training Lautarium in Children with Developmental Dyslexia The effects of the computer-based training program Lautarium on phonological awareness and literacy skills were investigated in 41 third-grade children with developmental dyslexia who attended special dyslexia classes in a primary school in Saxony, Germany. Based on the proven efficacy of phonics-based instruction, Lautarium combines training of phoneme perception and phonological awareness with training of grapheme-phoneme-relationships and reading and spelling of transparent words. In addition, rapid access from written words to meaning is included. The children of the training group (N = 27) worked through the program during school lessons, 5 times per week for 30 minutes, for a period of 7 weeks. During the training period, the controls (N = 14) received traditional remedial reading instruction, 2-3 times per week, in small groups. Children's performance in phonological awareness, reading, and spelling was assessed at three time points (pretest, immediate posttest, and follow-up after 9 weeks). Pretest scores did not differ between groups. For spelling and subtests of phonological awareness, group comparisons of raw scores at posttest and follow-up including the respective pretest score as covariate confirmed stronger improvements in the training group when compared to the controls. Effect sizes were medium to strong. For reading, improvements did not differ between groups. In both groups, standard scores (T-scores) for reading and spelling increased significantly and substantially across the study period (from pretest to follow-up). The results confirm the efficacy of computer-based training with Lautarium in children with dyslexia, and the efficacy of school-based remedial instruction provided in the dyslexia classes.

Basic reading and reading-related language skills in adults with deficient reading comprehension who read a transparent orthography

This study set out to examine the basic reading skills (accuracy and fluency in decoding, word and text reading) and some of the reading-related language skills (phonological awareness and rapid-naming) of 54 adults with low reading comprehension, who read the transparent German orthography. Participants were born in Germany and showed a typical non-verbal processing speed. With the exception of reading accuracy, participants were expected to present deficits in all basic reading and reading-related skills. The average performance in measures of decoding and word reading fluency was extremely low. A notable proportion of the sample, however, did not present a deficit in these measures. As expected, the average rate of reading errors was generally low. Nevertheless, text reading accuracy was deficient for one quarter of the sample. Tests addressing the reading-related language skills also indicated an average low performance in phonological awareness, but not in rapid-naming. Here too, a notable variance was observed. These results suggest that deficits in the basic reading skills and in phonological awareness characterise, on average, adults with low reading comprehension. At the same time, significant deficits in reading comprehension in this population do not necessarily imply deficits in the more basic skills of reading as well. In addition, the results indicate that reading accuracy constitutes a source of difficulty for some of these adults, despite the reading of a transparent orthography. The sources for the variance in performance throughout the different reading and reading-related measures remain to be explored.

The Relation Between Vocabulary Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Children With Cochlear Implants.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relation between lexical knowledge and phonological awareness performance of children with cochlear implants. Method Thirty children with cochlear implants (aged 5-7 years), 30 children with normal hearing matched for age, and 30 children with normal hearing matched for vocabulary size participated in the study. Children completed a vocabulary knowledge measure and three phonological awareness tasks with words that had high and low neighborhood density. Results Children with cochlear implants performed more poorly than their age-matched peers and similarly to their vocabulary-matched peers on phonological awareness tasks. When performance was analyzed according to the neighborhood density of the target word, children with cochlear implants and age-matched children performed better with high-density words. Across all groups, vocabulary size correlated significantly with phonological awareness performance. Conclusion Children with cochlear implants demonstrate delays in both vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness performance, but children with cochlear implants appear to take advantage of lexical information similarly to their age-matched peers.

Precocious readers: a cognitive or a linguistic advantage?

We investigated the role of linguistic and cognitive processes in reading precocity from kindergarten to grade 2. A sample of 33 precocious readers was identified that did not differ on age, gender, and parental education to a control group of 259 typical readers. The effects of verbal ability were also controlled. All children were administered a battery of cognitive and linguistic measures in three assessment points at the midterm of each year. Individual growth modeling (IGM) was used to test the rate and shape of change of the two groups. Results showed that precocious readers exhibited superior performance in phonological awareness, naming speed, and reading fluency, across development, whereas their early advantage in letter knowledge disappeared by grade 1. A cognitive advantage specific to executive function (planning) was also observed for the precocious readers early on and was maintained through grade 2. Precocious readers outperformed the control group also on silent word reading, reading comprehension, and on the expressive (production) and the receptive (recognition) orthographic processing tasks. We concluded that both linguistic and cognitive abilities—independent of verbal ability—underlie individual differences in reading precocity.

4～6세 일반아동 및 언어발달지연 아동의 음운인식 및 음운처리 능력이 언어 능력에 미치는 영향*

Phonological awareness is a metalinguistic awareness ability of phonology and is known to predict language skills, such as reading and vocabulary skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness, phonological processing, and language skills in 4- to 6-years-old typically developing (TD) children and children with language delay (LD). A total of 32 children (TD=18, LD=15) participated in this study. They performed a phonological awareness task consisting of counting, deletion, and discrimination at syllable level. Nonword Repetition, Digit Backward, Receptive & Expressive Vocabulary Test, and Grammaticality Judgment Task were performed to analyze the correlation between phonological awareness, phonological processing, and language ability. A multiple stepwise regression analysis was performed to examine the phonological awareness subtasks that predict language ability. In the TD group, the syllable categorization task significantly predicted the receptive vocabulary and the performance of the Grammaticality Judgment Task. The LD group showed that the syllable counting task significantly predicted the receptive vocabulary, the expressive vocabulary, and the performance of the Grammaticality Judgment Task. The results showed that the phonological awareness performance was significantly different between the two groups. Further, correlation analysis and regression analysis showed different results for each group. The result of the phonological awareness performance predicted the language ability of each group significantly, suggesting the importance of the meta-linguistic awareness ability of phonology.

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and Its Relationship to Phonological Awareness and Reading: A Pilot Study in a Greek Sample of Students with Dyslexia

Introduction: Reading impairment in children with dyslexia stems from either a phonological awareness deficit or a deficit in rapid automatized naming. Both deficits constitute the double deficit hypothesis of dyslexia. The aim of the present study was to assess phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming in a group of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia and to correlate their performance in phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming with reading fluency (accuracy and comprehension) scores. Method: Participants were 23 children with a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and 27 typically-developing children with no other learning difficulties or dyslexia. All children were monolingual speakers of Greek and they were administered a naming speed test, a fluency test, a phonological awareness test and reading accuracy and comprehension tasks. Results: Students with dyslexia scored worse in most phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading fluency measures in comparison to their non-dyslexic peers. In addition, students with dyslexia needed more time to complete the rapid automatized naming tests. Positive correlations were found between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading fluency tests for both groups of students. Specifically, rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness explained 9.3% and 21.8%, respectively, of the variance in the reading fluency of students with dyslexia, while the respective contributions of rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness to the reading fluency for non-dyslexic students were 2% and 9.3%, respectively. Discussion and Conclusion: Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming can be reliable predictors of reading fluency even in orthographically consistent languages (i.e., Greek), offering support to the double deficit hypothesis. In addition, combining phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming tests seems to be a quick and reliable way to early identify children at risk of reading difficulties in the first grades of primary school.

Differences in phonological awareness performance

Abstract Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α < .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to – and importantly, also not detrimental to – phonological awareness.

Spelling errors and phonological awareness skills in children with typical and atypical phonological development.

To verify and correlate the spelling errors present in the written productions to the performance in phonological awareness skills of children in different school years, with typical and atypical phonological development. The sample consisted of 50 children divided into two groups: with typical phonological development (TPD) and with atypical phonological development (APD); students from the early years (1st to 5th grades) of schooling and ages between 6:0 and 10:0 years old. The children were submitted to speech-language and audiological evaluations. Data were tabulated and statistical analyzes were performed using the Spearman Correlation Coefficient. In relation to the number of spelling errors in writing, these were similar in the TPD and APD groups, except for the contextual-arbitrary errors that were greater for the APD. Still, it was observed that the number of written spelling errors decreased with the increase in schooling. Concerning the average performance in phonological awareness, the TPD performed better than the APD in syllabic and phonemic awareness. The children of 4th and 5th grades presented better performance in phonological awareness than those in grades 1st to 3rd. The correlation was inversely proportional between the phonological awareness performance and the number of spelling errors (those that alter the syllabic structure) for both groups, demonstrating that the more errors of this type, the lower the performance in syllabic, phonemic and total phonological awareness.

A comparative study on phonological acquisition and performance in phonological awareness by children exposed to a bilingual or monolingual family environment

ABSTRACT Objective: to verify and compare phonological acquisition and performance in phonological awareness tasks among children exposed to a bilingual (Brazilian Portuguese and German) or monolingual family environments (Brazilian Portuguese). Methods: a sample of 32 children of both sexes aged 5 years were divided into the bilingual group (13 children), who lived daily with people who spoke German and Portuguese, and the monolingual group (19 children), who lived daily with people who spoke only the Portuguese language. Phonological acquisition and phonological awareness skills were assessed using protocols standardized for Brazilian Portuguese and statistically analyzed using the Fisher exact test and Mann-Whitney test, considering p<0.05. Results: the results revealed that a greater number of subjects demonstrated atypical phonological acquisition in the bilingual group and scored worse results in the phonological awareness skills evaluation. Phonological processes were similar in both groups. None of the results obtained were statistically significant. Conclusion: deviant phonological acquisition was superior in the bilingual family environment group. Phonological processes were similar for both groups. In the phonological awareness tasks, children in the bilingual family environment group obtained better results only for the phonemic synthesis tasks. For other tasks, children in the monolingual family group achieved better results.