Phonological skills, reading and dyslexia

Background. Language disorder is the most frequent developmental disorder in childhood and it has a significant negative impact on children’s development. The goal of the present review was to systematically analyze the effectiveness of interventions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) from an evidence-based perspective. Methods. We considered systematic reviews, meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), control group cohort studies on any type of intervention aimed at improving children’s skills in the phono-articulatory, phonological, semantic-lexical, and morpho-syntactic fields in preschool and primary school children (up to eight years of age) that were diagnosed with DLD. We identified 27 full-length studies, 26 RCT and one review. Results. Early intensive intervention in three- and four-year-old children has a positive effect on phonological expressive and receptive skills and acquisitions are maintained in the medium term. Less evidence is available on the treatment of expressive vocabulary (and no evidence on receptive vocabulary). Intervention on morphological and syntactic skills has effective results on expressive (but not receptive) skills; however, a number of inconsistent results have also been reported. Only one study reports a positive effect of treatment on inferential narrative skills. Limited evidence is also available on the treatment of meta-phonological skills. More studies investigated the effectiveness of interventions on general language skills, which now appears as a promising area of investigation, even though results are not all consistent. Conclusions. The effectiveness of interventions over expressive and receptive phonological skills, morpho-syntactic skills, as well as inferential skills in narrative context underscores the importance that these trainings be implemented in children with DLD.

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Production of the English past tense by children with language comprehension impairments

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000904006555 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 117-137 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

KATE NATION ◽

MARGARET J. SNOWLING ◽

PAULA CLARKE

Keyword(s):

Language Comprehension ◽

High Frequency ◽

Matched Control ◽

Low Frequency ◽

Past Tense ◽

Phonological Skills ◽

The Poor ◽

Poor Comprehenders ◽

Irregular Form ◽

Irregular Verbs

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap verbal-semantic abilities, the two groups showed equivalent phonological skills. Poor comprehenders performed as well as control children when asked to inflect novel verbs and regular verbs. In contrast, poor comprehenders were less skilled than controls at inflecting both high frequency and low frequency irregular verbs. Although the predominant error pattern for all children was to over-regularize, this was most marked in the poor comprehenders; control children were more likely to produce errors that contained knowledge of the irregular form than poor comprehenders. In addition, the ability to inflect irregular verbs was related to individual differences in verbal-semantic skills. These findings are discussed within a framework in which verb inflection is related to underlying language skills in both the phonological and semantic domains.

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Phonological skills and ability to perceive auditorily the structure of a word at the level of a single phoneme at ages 2–6

Journal of Early Childhood Literacy ◽

10.1177/1468798413512847 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 14 (4) ◽

pp. 510-533

Author(s):

Outi Suortti ◽

Lasse Lipponen

Keyword(s):

Phonological Skills

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Individual Differences in Subphonemic Sensitivity and Phonological Skills

10.31234/osf.io/3fncy ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Monica Yin Chen Li ◽

David Braze ◽

Anuenue Kukona ◽

Clinton L. Johns ◽

Whitney Tabor ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Speech Processing ◽

Community Sample ◽

Reading Difficulty ◽

Phonological Representations ◽

Phonological Skills ◽

Wide Range ◽

Phonological Categories ◽

Phonemic Category ◽

Phonological Abilities

Many studies have established a link between phonological abilities (indexed by phonological awareness and phonological memory tasks) and typical and atypical reading development. Individuals who perform poorly on phonological assessments have been mostly assumed to have underspecified (or “fuzzy”) phonological re- presentations, with typical phonemic categories, but with greater category overlap due to imprecise encoding. An alternative posits that poor readers have overspecified phonological representations, with speech sounds perceived allophonically (phonetically distinct variants of a single phonemic category). On both accounts, mismatch between phonological categories and orthography leads to reading difficulty. Here, we consider the implications of these accounts for online speech processing. We used eye tracking and an individual differences approach to assess sensitivity to subphonemic detail in a community sample of young adults with a wide range of reading-related skills. Subphonemic sensitivity inversely correlated with meta-phonological task performance, consistent with overspecification.

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The effect of audiovisual speech training on the phonological skills of children with specific language impairment (SLI)

Child Language Teaching and Therapy ◽

10.1177/0265659018793697 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 34 (3) ◽

pp. 269-287 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jenni Heikkilä ◽

Eila Lonka ◽

Auli Meronen ◽

Sisko Tuovinen ◽

Raija Eronen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Specific Language Impairment ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Training Programme ◽

Auditory Training ◽

Audiovisual Speech ◽

Phonological Skills ◽

Specific Language ◽

Auditory Speech ◽

Spoken Words

We developed a computerized audiovisual training programme for school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI) to improve their phonological skills. The programme included various tasks requiring phonological decisions. Spoken words, pictures, letters and written syllables were used as training material. Spoken words were presented either as audiovisual speech (together with the talking face), or as auditory speech (voice alone). Two groups (10 children/group) trained for six weeks, five days per week: the audiovisual group trained with audiovisual speech, and the other group received analogically the same training but with auditory speech. Before and after training, language skills and other cognitive skills were assessed. The audiovisual group improved in a non-word-repetition test. Such improvement was not observed with auditory training. This result suggests that audiovisual speech may be helpful in the rehabilitation of children with SLI.

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