Exploring Phonological Awareness Skills in Children With Intellectual Disability

Abstract

The phonological awareness skills of 7- to 8-year-old children with intellectual disability (ID) were compared to those of 4- to 5-year-old typically developing children who were matched for early reading skills, vocabulary, and gender. Globally, children with ID displayed a marked weakness in phonological awareness. Syllable blending, syllable segmentation, and first phoneme detection appeared to be preserved. In contrast, children with ID showed a marked weakness in rhyme detection and a slight weakness in phoneme blending. Two school years later, these deficits no longer remained. Marked weaknesses appeared in phoneme segmentation and first/last phoneme detection. The findings suggest that children with ID display an atypical pattern in phonological awareness that changes with age. The implications for practice and research are discussed.

Phonological processing in students with developmental dyslexia, ADHD and intellectual disability

“…In ADHD, the lack of attention prevents important information for development of metalinguistic abilities to be retained 6 . Lastly, in intellectual disability, phonological awareness is an ability significantly affected, especially in rhyme detection and phonemic manipulation, due to failures in short-term phonological memory 31 .…”

“…Differences were observed in the phonological working memory and the phonological awareness tests between the three groups. Hence, it is noted that the phonological processing may differ in the neurodevelopmental disorders with distinct etiologies 7,11,19,20 . This may be due to the different cognitive profiles of the conditions, reinforcing that they refer to different disorders 5,6,11,14 .…”

Rapid automatized naming skills of children with intellectual disability

“…PA and letter-sound knowledge were found to be significant predictors of word identification and reading comprehension in different profiles of children with ID ( Kennedy and Flynn, 2002 ; Laing et al., 2001 ; Laws and Gunn, 2002 ; Levy et al., 2003 ; Menghini et al., 2004 ; Sermier Dessemontet and de Chambrier, 2015 ; Snowling et al., 2002 ). On the other hand, several studies indicate that PA is an area of weakness in children with ID of different etiologies ( Adlof et al., 2015 ; Laing et al., 2001 ; Lemons and Fuchs, 2010 ; Menghini et al., 2004 ; Sermier Dessemontet et al., 2017 ). PA of children with ID is also marked by an atypical pattern of development.…”

“…PA of children with ID is also marked by an atypical pattern of development. Indeed, it has repeatedly been found that these children especially struggle in rhyme awareness while achieving some phonemic tasks better (e.g., first phoneme detection) in contrast to their TD peers ( Sermier Dessemontet et al., 2017 ; Snowling et al., 2002 ; Steele et al., 2013 ).…”

“…In addition to the reliability problem resulting from the single RAN task used in Van Tilborg et al’s study (2014) , this did indeed not allow to study the pattern of RAN skills in children with ID relative to TD children. Since a deviant developmental trajectory has been found for PA in children with ID ( Sermier Dessemontet et al, 2017 ), and since data highlighted differences only in some specific RAN tasks in adolescents with ID ( Ypsilanti et al, 2006 ), the RAN skills of young children with ID should be investigated on several types of items in order to test whether their RAN pattern is similar to that of TD children.…”