Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact

Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual’s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this paper is to provide new experimental evidence on this topic by exploring the phonological competence in Italian of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia. To this purpose, we developed three tasks, assessing nonword repetition, rhyme detection and spoonerisms, which we administered to 148 10-year-old children in two distinct studies. In Study 1, we found that two groups of L2 Italian typically developing bilinguals, having either Arabic or Romanian as L1, performed similarly to Italian monolinguals in all measures, pointing to absence of both bilingualism-related and L1-related effects in these tasks. In Study 2, we administered the same tasks to four groups of children: Italian monolinguals with dyslexia, Italian monolingual typically developing children, L2 Italian bilinguals with dyslexia and L2 Italian bilingual typically developing children. Results showed that children with dyslexia, both monolingual and bilingual, exhibited significantly more difficulties than typically developing children in all three tasks, whereas bilinguals, consistent with Study 1, performed similarly to their monolingual peers. In addition, no negative effects of bilingualism in dyslexia were found, indicating that being bilingual does not provide additional difficulties to children with dyslexia.

WORD-SOUND THERAPY AS AN INTERVENTION TO IMPROVE PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS: CASE STUDY ON A CHILD WITH PHONOLOGICAL DISORDER

Phonological awareness is ability to segment the syllables and phonemes heard in speech. It is also the most important behavioral index to measure the development of reading skill. Children who had problems or impairments in phonological awareness will perform high-risk for reading skill mastery which is the most important skill in early education level. The current study aims to evaluate the effect of Word-Sound Therapy in improving phonological awareness and speech production in single word segment level. The subject of the study is a child, 5 years of age, who met the diagnostic criterias for Phonological Disorder according to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). The Word-Sound Therapy is used as an intervention which include series of phonological awareness tasks and inserting the speech production training between the phonological awareness activities to improve phonemic awareness. This research is using a multiple baseline across behavior design. The qualitative data analysis was conducted using behavioral approach, Response Antecedents Consequences-Strength (RAC-S). Visual inspection was also used to observe the emergence of target behaviors. Result showed that Word-Sound Therapy is improving child’s ability in identifying similarity and analyze the last phoneme in words. Result also showed that this therapy could be used for children at minimum 5 years of age, had normal IQ, and needs a phonological awareness intervention especially focused in rhyme detection and last phoneme isolation.

Exploring Phonological Awareness Skills in Children With Intellectual Disability

The phonological awareness skills of 7- to 8-year-old children with intellectual disability (ID) were compared to those of 4- to 5-year-old typically developing children who were matched for early reading skills, vocabulary, and gender. Globally, children with ID displayed a marked weakness in phonological awareness. Syllable blending, syllable segmentation, and first phoneme detection appeared to be preserved. In contrast, children with ID showed a marked weakness in rhyme detection and a slight weakness in phoneme blending. Two school years later, these deficits no longer remained. Marked weaknesses appeared in phoneme segmentation and first/last phoneme detection. The findings suggest that children with ID display an atypical pattern in phonological awareness that changes with age. The implications for practice and research are discussed.

Measures of phonological short-term memory and their relationship to vocabulary development

ABSTRACTVocabulary scores, word span, nonword repetition, rhyme detection, and articulation rate measures were obtained for a group of 30 preschool children with a mean age of 4;11. After allowing for age and intelligence, it was found that the best predictors of vocabulary were memory span, rhyme detection, and nonword repetition, accounting for 19%. 15%, and 13% of the variance, respectively. Of these children, 28 were tested again on the same measures 13 months later. At the later stage, memory span and rhyme scores again predicted vocabulary to a significant extent, but nonword repetition score did not. Of the measures taken initially, memory span and rhyme detection significantly predicted later vocabulary scores, whereas nonword repetition just failed to reach significance. Cross-lagged correlations showed (hat memory span and rhyme detection on the first test predicted later vocabulary after partialing out initial vocabulary scores. However, initial vocabulary scores did not predict later memory span (or rhyme detection) after partialing out the initial span (or rhyming) scores. Articulation rate was not significantly related to vocabulary at either age. The results are interpreted as indicating that the phonological store of working memory (required by word span, rhyme detection, and nonword repetition, but independent of articulation rates) contributes to vocabulary development.