Phonological awareness as a predictor of recoding skills and syntactic awareness as a predictor of comprehension skills

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the relations between two metalinguistic abilities (phonological awareness and syntactic awareness) and two components of reading (recoding abilities and comprehension). In order to study these connections, a four‐year follow‐up study comprising 23 children was set up. These children had been tested repetitively during their first years of learning to read. Results were analysed with fixed‐order regression in which the dependent variable was either recoding abilities or comprehension performances; the first steps were extraneous variables (intelligence and vocabulary levels) and the final step was that of metalinguistic measures. Stepwise regressions were performed including all the measures (metalinguistic performances and extraneous variables). Results indicated that children's phonological awareness predicts later recoding abilities, while syntactic awareness predicts later reading comprehension after effects of extraneous variables have been ruled out.

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: Variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies

“…For example, kindergarteners show better syllable than phoneme awareness in French, Greek, Italian and Turkish, (e.g., Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988;Demont & Gombert, 1996;Durgunoglu & Öney, 1999;Harris & Giannouli, 1999), leading to claims that a large-to-small sequence is universal in European languages (Anthony & Francis, 2005;Goswami, 2002).…”

Distinguishing cause from effect – many deficits associated with developmental dyslexia may be a consequence of reduced and suboptimal reading experience

“…Such pre-literate development of phonological awareness is influenced by the properties of the particular language that is acquired (e.g. the salience of syllables and complexity of onsets; Caravolas & Bruck, 1993;Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988;Demont & Gombert, 1996;Durgunoğlu & Öney, 1999).…”

Capacités métalinguistiques d’élèves immigrants nouvellement arrivés en situation de grand retard scolaire

“…En particulier, les capacités métapho-nologiques permettraient aux apprenants de prendre conscience que les mots sont constitués d'unités sublexicales (syllabes, attaques-rimes et phonèmes), ce qui soutiendrait l'apprentissage des correspondances graphophonétiques lors de l'apprentissage de la reconnaissance de mots et de l'écriture (Blackmore et Pratt, 1997 ;Campbell et Sais, 1995 ;Demont et Gombert, 1996 ;Griffi th, 1991 ;Morais, Alegria et Content, 1987 ;Schneider et Näslund, 1993).…”

“…Pour réaliser cette tâche, le sujet doit faire appel, d'une part, à ses connaissances des règles grammaticales (Willows et Ryan, 1986) pour localiser l'erreur et, d'autre part, à ses habiletés de manipulation langagières pour être capable de reproduire cette erreur dans une autre phrase. Les recherches, quoique plus rares, tendent à montrer l'existence d'un lien entre ces capacités et, d'une part, la reconnaissance de mots et le décodage (Blackmore et Pratt, 1997 ;Bowey, 1986 ;Deutsch et Bentin, 1996) et, d'autre part, la compréhension de texte (Cupples et Holmes, 1992 ;Demont et Gombert, 1996 ;Melançon et Ziarko, 1999 ;Tunmer, Nesdale et Wright, 1987).…”