Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Perception in 4-Year-Old Children With Delayed Expressive Phonology Skills

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the phonological awareness abilities of 2 groups of 4-year-old children: one with normally developing speech and language skills and the other with moderately or severely delayed expressive phonological skills but age-appropriate receptive vocabulary skills. Each group received tests of articulation, receptive vocabulary, phonemic perception, early literacy, and phonological awareness skills. The groups were matched for receptive language skills, age, socioeconomic status, and emergent literacy knowledge. The children with expressive phonological delays demonstrated significantly poorer phonemic perception and phonological awareness skills than their normally developing peers. The results suggest that preschool children with delayed expressive phonological abilities should be screened for their phonological awareness skills even when their language skills are otherwise normally developing.

Phonological Awareness and Working Memory in Arabic-Speaking Egyptian Preschool Children at Risk for Dyslexia

“…Phonological processing, in particular impairments related to phonological awareness (PA), is considered one of the core deficits characterizing dyslexia (Carroll & Snowling, 2004;Joanisse, Manis, Keating, & Seidenberg, 2000). PA refers to the explicit knowledge of the units that make up spoken words including syllables, onset and rime units and individual phonemes (Rvachew, Ohberg, Grawburg, & Heyding, 2003) and has been defined as the awareness of and access to the sound structure of one's oral language (Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). PA involves the awareness of the most basic speech units of a language, phonemes, as well as the larger units, such as rimes and syllables (Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995;Rvachew et al, 2003;Stackhouse, Wells, Pascoe, & Rees, 2002).…”

The Effectiveness of Explicit Individualized Phonemic Awareness Instruction By a Speech-Language Pathologist to Preschool Children With Phonological Speech Disorders

“…In other words, the timing of remediation of the phonological speech sound disorder determined whether it would affect the development of the child's phonological awareness and reading development. Rvachew et al (2003) examined two groups of preschool children (4 years old)…”

“…Previous research has demonstrated that children with speech-language impairments are at an increased risk for the development of phonological awareness and reading disabilities (Larivee & Catts, 1999;Raitano et al, 2005;Rvachew et al, 2003).…”

“…Recent research has demonstrated that a child with moderate to severe phonological speech sound disorders will be at risk for reading disabilities independent of the child's language skills. The presence of a language disorder is additive in nature, with even greater potential effects on reading development (Raitano et al, 2004;Rvachew et al, 2003). Children with phonological speech sound impairments are at increased risk for the development of phonological awareness skills due to the presence of under-specified phonological representations that affect the development of speech, reading and spelling skills (Elbro et al, 1998;Gillon, 2000;Larivee & Catts, 1999).…”

“…According to Catts et al (2001), children with a history of speech-language impairment are 4-5 times more likely to have reading problems than children from the general population. These children have poorer performance on word-level reading tasks (Rvachew, Ohberg, Grawburg & Heyding, 2003), and the severity of the speech sound inaccuracies play a role in predicting reading skills.…”