Is the deficit in phonological awareness better explained in terms of task differences or effects of syllable structure?

Abstract

The primary purpose of the study reported here was to explore the effects of the complexity of syllable structure and the effects of task differences in the explanation of deficit in phonological awareness (PA). A sample of 97 subjects was selected and organized into three different groups: 29 readingdisabled (RD) children, 41 normal readers matched in age with the former, and 27 younger normal readers at the same reading level as those with reading disabilities. We administered PA tasks which included items with different complexity of syllable structure. The results showed that the complexity of syllable structure had no particularly marked effect on the dyslexic children. Rather, the isolation task revealed the phonological deficit across all syllable structures.

Phonological processing and emergent literacy in Spanish-speaking preschool children

“…More importantly, relative to all of the PPAs and general cognitive ability, PA was the best predictor of these children's ability to distinguish alphabetic text from nonalphabetic characters. Such findings are consistent with research that has shown phonological awareness in Spanish-speaking individuals is related to their literacy skills (Adrian et al, 1995;Carrillo, 1994;Cisero & Royer, 1995;de Manrique & Signorini, 1998;Jimenez, 1997;Jimenez et al, 2005;Jimenez & Valle, 2000). However, these findings uniquely highlight how early phonological awareness may play a role in the literacy development of Spanish-speaking children.…”

“…Exceptions include the one study of Dutch children (de Jong & van der Leij, 1999) and the one study of Latvian children (Sprugevica & Hoien, 2004) discussed above. This is a nontrivial shortcoming given that PPAs have been demonstrated to play important roles in the development of literacy in many languages including Spanish (Adrian, Alegria, & Morais, 1995;Carrillo, 1994;Cisero & Royer, 1995;de Manrique & Signorini, 1998;Jimenez, 1997;Jimenez et al, 2005;Jimenez & Valle, 2000), French (Alegria, Pignot, & Morais, 1982;Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999;Gombert, 1994), Portuguese (Bertelson, de Gelder, Tfouni, & Morais, 1989;Cardoso-Martins, 1991), German (Naslund, 1990), Italian (Cossu et al, 1988), Hebrew (Bentin, Hammer, & Cahan, 1991), Danish (Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988), and Swedish (Lunderberg, Olofsson, & Wall, 1980) to name only a few. In short, systematic and comprehensive investigation of the nature of PPAs with young children who speak and read different languages is essential before the various PPAs can be incorporated into a theory of literacy development that spans all alphabetic languages.…”

Are phonological processes the same or different in low literacy adults and children with or without reading disabilities?

“…For another study, Jiménez et al (2005) investigated the effects of the complexity of syllable structure (i.e., CV vs. CCV) and the effects of task differences in the explanation of deficit in PA in Spanish dyslexic children. They found that the access to phonological units of speech was not mediated by the complexity of syllable structure of the items.…”

Evaluación de la conciencia fonológica en niños y adultos iletrados: ¿es más relevante la tarea o la estructura silábica?

“…En la presente investigación, cuando analizamos el rendimiento de niños y adultos en resolver las tareas de CF hemos comprobado que las diferencias observadas no están mediatizadas por la influencia del tipo de estructura silábica. Este hallazgo es coherente con los resultados obtenidos en investigaciones previas con niños disléxicos donde se demuestra que el déficit en CF no se explica por la influencia de esta variable lingüística (Jiménez et al, 2005). También, Jiménez y Venegas (2004) examinando la relación entre CF y habilidad lectora en adultos iletrados encontraron que solamente el 40,5% de los adultos que eran capaces de identificar letras eran capaces de manipular las unidades principio y rima en sílabas CV, y el 51,5% de los adultos que podían reconocer palabras podían realizar también ese tipo de operaciones mentales.…”