Levels of Phonological Awareness, Working Memory, and Lexical Knowledge in Elementary School Children

Abstract

Relationships between oral language, phonological awareness, and working memory have been empirically demonstrated, however, phonological awareness encompasses different abilities, assessed at different levels. The present study investigated the possible associations between specific phonological awareness abilities and phonological working memory in first-grade students. In the initial phase ( n = 254), the study evaluated the abilities of phonological awareness and phonological working memory and found a high positive correlation between these abilities, thus confirming the findings of previous studies. The second phase ( n = 12) evaluated the vocabulary of individuals who, in the initial phase, showed low or high working memory and phonological awareness scores. Students with low working memory and low phonological awareness capacities had low scores in expressive language abilities, suggesting that phonological working memory may have direct effects on lexical knowledge. These results contribute to the understanding of the relationships investigated in this study and have important implications for planning teaching strategies.

Avaliação das habilidades preditoras do sucesso de leitura em crianças de 1º e 2º anos do ensino fundamental

“…These results are in agreement with a study that identified a strong correlation between the performance on pseudoword reading with several phonological processing skills, with vocabulary, or with knowledge about writingthe latter being a predictive factor for pseudoword decoding 26 . Tasks under Letter identification showed strong correlations with reading and writing competencies, which confirms evidence that letter recognition is a strong predictor of both writing and reading performance 24,25 . The appropriation of the alphabetic principle involved in grapho-phonemic correspondence depends on the understanding that letters are equivalent to sound segments.…”

“…Even though the study has not delved into analyzing tasks in comparison to one another, the mean distribution reveals poor performance on the tasks under Exclusion of phonemes, both for 1 st -and 2 nd -grade students. Some authors affirm that syllable and rhyme awareness develops earlier than phonemic awareness, given the fact that longer phonological units, such as syllables and rhymes, are more perceptible and thus more easily manipulated [24][25][26] . The analyses presented in this study do not allow such considerations to be made, since performance was not statistically compared across tasks in a same group.…”

Intervención logopédica para la estimulación de las habilidades fonológicas en un caso con retraso madurativo

“…Sin embargo, teniendo en cuenta que el nivel inicial de conciencia silábica era menor que el de conciencia fonémica, se puede afirmar que la evolución a nivel de sílaba fue mayor. Esto coincide con la hipótesis de Herrera y Defior (2005) y Bandini et al (2013) de que aparecen antes las habilidades silábicas que las fonémicas, siendo el nivel silábico el más fácil y rápido de aprender por los niños.…”

“…La adquisición de los niveles de conciencia fonológica un orden decreciente, adquiriendo primero la conciencia léxica, luego silábica, después la intrasilábica y, por último, la conciencia fonémica (Herrera y Defior, 2005;Bandini, Santos y de Souza, 2013). Para un completo desarrollo de todos los niveles es necesario el aprendizaje de la lectoescritura (Alcock, Ngorosho, Deus y Jukes, 2010).…”

Adaptation into European Spanish of the Automated Working Memory Test Battery (AWMA)

“…In fact, working memory deficits are associated with disorders in reading (e.g., López-Escribano, Elosúa de Juan, Gómez-Veiga, & García-Madruga, 2013;Wang & Gathercole, 2014), mathematics (e.g., Geary, Hoard, Byrd-Craven, & DeSoto, 2004;Santos et al, 2012;Pina, Fuentes, Castillo, & Diamantopoulou, 2014), language (e.g., Archibald & Gathercole, 2006;Bandini, Santos, & Souza, 2013;Holmes et al, 2015), and attention (e.g. Martinussen & Tannock, 2006;Holmes et al, 2014).…”