The purpose of this study was to examine the role of music perception in predicting phonological awareness in five- and six-year-old children. This study was based on the hypothesis that music perception and phonological awareness appear to have parallel auditory perceptual mechanisms. Previous research investigating the relationship between these constructs—music perception and phonological awareness—has been promising, but inconclusive. Phonological awareness is an important component of early literacy which many children struggle to acquire. If the constructs are shown to be related, music-based interventions may then be developed to promote phonological awareness, thus enhancing early literacy. Music perception, phonological awareness, and visual-spatial skills of 119 five- and six-year-old children were tested. The researcher administered the Children’s Music Aptitude Test (Stevens, 1987) in order to assess perception of pitch, rhythm, and melody. Subsequently, the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) was administered in order to measure phonological awareness skills, including blending, elision, and sound matching. The Visual Spatial Relations subtest of the Woodcock Johnson III (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) was later used to assess visual spatial skills. Structural equation modeling (SEM) allowed the researcher to model relationships between the latent variables to investigate the contribution of music perception, visual-spatial skills, and age to phonological awareness. Results supported the hypothesis that music perception, visual spatial skills, and age predict phonological awareness. Additionally, music perception made a statistically significant contribution to phonological awareness, when controlling for visual spatial skills and age. Specifically, music perception predicted a larger amount of standardized unit change in phonological awareness than did the other predictors in the theory. Thus, music perception appears to have a stronger relationship with phonological awareness than age or visual spatial skills. Further, results showed that a model without music perception as a predictor of phonological awareness was not supported. These findings confirm that music perception plays a unique role in predicting phonological awareness, above and beyond the contribution made by visual spatial skills and age. This study’s results could be used in support of the development of music-based interventions for promoting phonological awareness in five- and six-year-old children.

The development of reading competency is one of the most significant pedagogical achievements during the first few years of schooling. Although most children learn to read successfully when exposed to reading instruction, up to 18% of children experience significant reading difficulty (Shaywitz, 1998). As a group, young children with speech impairment are at risk of reading impairment, with approximately 50% of these children demonstrating poor acquisition of early reading skills (Nathan, Stackhouse, Goulandris, & Snowling, 2004; Larivee & Catts, 1999). A number of variables contribute to reading outcomes for children with speech impairment including co-occurring language impairment, the nature and severity of their speech impairment as well as social and cultural influences. An area of research that has received increasing attention is understanding how access to the underlying sound structure or phonological representations of spoken words stored in long-term memory account for reading difficulties observed in children (Elbro, 1996; Fowler, 1991). Researchers have hypothesised that children with speech impairment may be at increased risk of reading disability due to deficits at the level of phonological representations (Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995). Phonological representation deficits can manifest in poor performance on tasks that require children to think about the sound structure of words. Knowledge about the phonological components of words is commonly referred to as phonological awareness. Identifying and manipulating phonemes within words are examples of phonological awareness skills. Some children with speech impairment perform poorly on phonological awareness measures compared to children without speech difficulties (Bird et al., 1995; Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Rvachew, Ohberg, Grawburg, & Heyding, 2003). As performance on phonological awareness tasks is a strong predictor of early reading ability (Hogan, Catts, & Little, 2005), there is an important need to determine if children with speech impairment who demonstrate poor phonological awareness, have deficits at the level of phonological representations. This thesis reports a series of studies that investigated the relationship between phonological representations, phonological awareness, and word decoding ability in children with moderate to severe speech impairment. A child with complex communication needs (CCN) who used Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) was also examined to determine how the absence of effective articulation skills influences the development of phonological representations. The study employed a longitudinal design to compare the performance of nine children (aged 3:09-5:03 at initial assessment) with moderate to severe speech impairment and 17 children with typical speech development on novel assessment measures designed to determine characteristics of children's phonological representations. The tasks required children to judge the accuracy of spoken multisyllable words and newly learned nonwords. The relationships between performance on these tasks and measures of speech, phonological awareness and early print decoding were also examined. Four assessment trials were implemented at six-monthly intervals over an 18-month period. The first assessment trial was administered approximately 6 to12 months before children commenced school. The fourth trial was administered after children had completed 6 to 12 months of formal education. The child with CCN completed three assessment trials over a period of 16 months. Data analyses revealed that the children with speech impairment had significantly greater difficulty (p<0.01) judging mispronounced multisyllable words compared to their peers with typical speech development. As a group, children with speech impairment also demonstrated inferior performance on the judgment of mispronounced forms of newly learned nonwords (p<0.05). No group differences were observed on the judgment of correctly pronounced real and nonword stimuli. Significant group differences on speech production and phoneme segmentation tasks were identified at each assessment trial. Moderate to high correlations (i.e., r = 0.40 to 0.70) were also observed between performance on the phonological representation tasks and performance on phonological awareness and speech production measures at each trial across the study. Although no significant group differences were observed on the nonword decoding task, 4 of the 9 children with speech impairment could not decode any letters in nonwords (compared to only 1 child without speech impairment) at the final assessment trial when children were 6-years-old. Two children with speech impairment showed superior nonword decoding ability at trial 3 and 4. The within-group variability observed on the nonword decoding task highlighted the heterogeneity of children with speech impairment. The performances of four children with speech impairment with differing types of speech error patterns were analysed to investigate the role of phonological representations in their speech and phonological awareness development. The child with delayed speech development and excellent phonological awareness at trial 1, demonstrated superior phonological awareness and word decoding skills at age 6 years, although his performance on phonological representation tasks was inconsistent across trials. In contrast, a child with delayed development and poor early phonological awareness demonstrated weak performance on phonological representation, phonological awareness, and decoding at each successive assessment trial. The child with a high percentage of inconsistent speech error patterns generally demonstrated poor performance on phonological representation, phonological awareness and decoding measures at each of the 4 assessment trials. The child with consistent and unusual speech error patterns showed increasingly stronger performance on the phonological representation tasks and average performance on phonological awareness but limited word decoding ability at age 6. The 11-year-old girl with CCN, whose speech attempts were limited and unintelligible, demonstrated below average performance on phonological representation tasks, suggesting that an absence of articulatory feedback may negatively influence the development of well-specified phonological representations. This thesis provides evidence for the use of receptive tasks to identify differences in the phonological representations of children with and without speech impairment. The findings also provide support for the link between the representation of phonological information in long-term memory and children's speech production accuracy, phonological awareness and print decoding ability. The variable performance of some children with speech impairment and the child with cerebral palsy demonstrate the need to consider individual characteristics to develop an understanding of how children store and access speech sound information to assist their acquisition of early reading skills.

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) often present with difficulties in learning new words compared to age-matched children with typical language development. These difficulties may affect the acquisition, storage, or retrieval of new words. Word-learning deficits impact on children’s vocabulary development and impede their language and literacy development. Findings from a wide range of studies investigating word-learning in children with SLI demonstrated that semantic and phonological knowledge are crucial to the word-learning process. However, intervention studies designed to improve the word-learning abilities in children with SLI are sparse. The experiments described in this thesis addressed this need to understand the effects of interventions on word-learning abilities. Further, the thesis describes the first investigation of word-learning abilities of New Zealand school-aged children with SLI. Specifically, the following three broad questions are asked: 1. What are the word-learning skills of New Zealand school-aged children with SLI compared to children with typical language development and which underlying language skills influence word-learning? 2. What are the immediate and longer term effects of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning and language skills in children with SLI? 3. What are the error patterns of children with SLI compared to children with typical language development when learning to produce new words and do these patterns change following phonological awareness and semantic intervention? The first experiment compared the word-learning abilities of 19 school-aged children with SLI (aged 6;2 to 8;3) to age-matched children with typical language development and revealed that children with SLI presented with significant difficulties to produce and to comprehend new words. After repeated exposure, children with SLI caught up to the performances of children with typical language development in learning to comprehend new words, but not on production of new words. Correlation analyses demonstrated that there were no correlations between the word-learning skills and other language measures for children with SLI, whereas the word-learning abilities of children with typical language development were correlated to their phonological awareness, semantic, and general language skills. In the second experiment, it was investigated whether there were also qualitative differences during word-learning between children with and without SLI additionally to the quantitative differences as revealed in the first experiment. Children’s erroneous responses during the word-learning tasks were categorised into phonological, semantic, substitution or random errors. A comparison of the children’s error patterns revealed that children with SLI presented with a different error pattern and made significantly more random errors than children with typical language development. However, after repeated exposure, children with SLI demonstrated a similar error pattern as children without SLI. Furthermore, it was examined whether a specific combination of phonological and semantic cues facilitated children’s learning of new words or whether there were word-specific features that facilitated children’s word-learning. No facilitative word-specific features could be identified. Analysis revealed that there were no significant effects of cueing on learning new words, but specific patterns could be derived for children with SLI. Children with SLI learned to comprehend more words that were presented with two semantic cues or one phonological and one semantic cue and learned to produce more words that were presented with two phonological cues. In the third experiment, the effectiveness of a combined phonological awareness and semantic intervention to advance children’s word-learning abilities was examined. Nineteen children with SLI (same participants as in experiment 1) participated in this intervention study that implemented an alternating treatment group design with random assignment of the participants. Children in group A received phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention, whereas children in group B received the same interventions in the reverse order. Children’s word-learning abilities were assessed at pre-test, prior to the intervention, at mid-test after intervention phase 1, and at post-test, immediately following the completion of the second intervention phase. Each intervention itself was effective in significantly improving children’s fast mapping skills, however, gains in children’s word-learning abilities were only found for children in group A for production of new words. Extending the findings of the intervention effectiveness of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning as reported in experiment 3, it was investigated in experiment 4, whether the implemented intervention additionally influenced the error patterns of children with SLI. The erroneous responses of children with SLI on all word-learning probes at pre-, mid-, and post-test were categorised into the same error groups as described in the second experiment (semantic, phonological, substitution, and random errors). The error analyses revealed that children’s error profiles changed during the course of intervention and treatment specific effects on children’s erroneous responses were found. Post-intervention, children who received phonological awareness followed by semantic intervention displayed the same error patterns as children with typical language development, whereas children who received the same interventions in the reverse order maintained the same error pattern as displayed at pre-test. The final experiment examined the longer-term effects of the combined phonological awareness and semantic intervention reported in experiment 3 on the language and literacy development of children with SLI. Eighteen of the 19 children with SLI, who received the intervention reported in experiment 3, were available for re-assessment 6 months after the completion of the intervention. The children (aged 7;1 to 9;2 years) were re-assessed on a range of standardised and experimental measures. Data analysis revealed that 6 months post-intervention, all children were able to maintain their gains in phonological awareness, semantic, and decoding skills as displayed immediately after the intervention. Children’s general language and reading skills significantly improved following the intervention; however, children who received phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention displayed significantly better reading outcomes than the children who received the same interventions in the reverse order. This thesis revealed that a combination of phonological awareness and semantic intervention can enhance the word-learning abilities of children with SLI. The combined intervention approach was also effective in additionally improving children’s general language skills and the reading of single non-words and real words, as well as connected text. The immediate and longer-term intervention effects provide evidence that advancing the semantic and phonological awareness skills is an effective intervention approach to support children with SLI in their word-learning and to furthermore promote their language and literacy development. However, the order of the implemented interventions played a significant role: Children in the current study profited most when they received phonological awareness intervention first, followed by semantic intervention.

abstract: A substantial amount of research demonstrates that preschoolers' phonological awareness skills are a robust predictor of children's later decoding ability. Several investigators examined performance of children with speech sound impairment (SSI), defined as inaccurate production of speech sounds in the absence of any etiology or communication impairment, on phonological awareness tasks. Investigators found that children with SSI scored below their typically developing peers (TD) on phonological awareness tasks. In contrast, others found no differences between groups. It seems likely that differences in findings regarding phonological awareness skills among children with SSI is the fact that there is considerable heterogeneity among children with SSI (i.e., speech errors can either be a phonological or articulation). Phonology is one component of a child's language system and a phonological impairment (SSI-PI) is evident when patterns of deviations of speech sounds are exhibited in a language system. Children with an articulation impairment (SSI-AI) produce speech sound errors that are affected by the movements of the articulators, not sound patterns. The purpose of the study was to examine whether or not children with SSI-PI are at greater risk for acquiring phonological awareness skills than children with SSI-AI. Furthermore, the phonological awareness skills of children with SSI-PI and SSI-AI were compared to those of their typical peers. In addition, the role of executive function as well as the influence of phonological working memory on phonological awareness task performance was examined. Findings indicate that the SSI-PI group performed more poorly on an assessment of phonological awareness skills than the SSI-AI and TD groups. The SSI-PI group performed significantly more poorly on tasks of executive function and phonological working memory than the TD group. The results of this study support the hypothesis that children with SSI-PI may be more vulnerable to difficulties in reading than children with SSI-AI and children with TD. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Speech and Hearing Science 2015

The phonological awareness development of bilingual children has been discussed from the viewpoint of whether they have an advantage compared to monolingual children. Some previous studies discovered that there were language pairs where bilingual children could have no advantage in it. However, it has not been clarified yet how bilingual children with such a language pair develop phonological awareness. The purpose of this study was to give an example of such a language pair and analyze bilingual children’s phonological awareness development in comparison with that of monolingual children.      This study examined how 3- to 7-year-old Swedish/Danish-Japanese bilingual children developed Japanese phonological awareness in comparison with the corresponding Japanese children. Forty-five children (26 bilingual children and 19 Japanese children) participated in this study. The bilingual children lived in Sweden or Denmark and had Swedish or Danish as their strong language in general but they also spoke Japanese on a daily basis. On the other hand, the Japanese children used exclusively Japanese at home as their sole first language. The children were individually tested on two types of Japanese syllables (fundamental syllables and special syllables). The fundamental syllable section had three types of tasks (segmentation task, abstraction task and identification task) and the special syllable section had one type of task (segmentation task).      The results showed no advantage for the bilingual children in Japanese phonological awareness development in comparison with the Japanese children. While the bilingual children developed Japanese phonological awareness with age and/or letter knowledge in the same way as the Japanese children, their developmental rate was generally slower than that of the Japanese children. Two factors appear to play a part in this finding: first, the fact that Swedish and Danish are phonologically different from Japanese so knowledge of these languages did not help the children to discover Japanese phonological structure. Second, the amount of exposure to Japanese for bilingual children was significantly less even though they spoke and understood the language well. Thus, this study suggests that bilingual children can have difficulty with regard to phonological awareness development in one of their languages when the other language is not conducive to the discovery of this language’s phonological structure and when exposure to this language is limited, even if they speak and understand the language well.

The development of phonological representations remains a hot topic within both the developmental and neural network literature. Historically, theoretical accounts have fallen within one of two camps: the accessibility account which proposes that phonological representations are adult-like from infancy (Rozin & Gleitman, 1977; Liberman, Shankweiler & Liberman, 1989) and the emergent account which proposes that phonological representations become gradually restructured over development (Metsala & Walley, 1998; Ventura, Kolinsky, Fernandes, Querido & Morais, 2007; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Within this thesis we tested predictions made by the accessibility account and key variants of the emergent account using data from both behavioural (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) and neural network studies (Chapter 5). The novel measures used within Chapters 2 to 4 were devised to allow us to contrast implicit measures of phonological representation (PR) which probe the segmentedness of the representations themselves, with explicit PR measures which tap into children’s conscious awareness of phonological segments. Within Chapter 2 we present evidence that while explicit awareness of phonological structure is dependent on letter-sound knowledge, implicit sensitivity to the segments within words emerges independent of literacy. Within Chapter 3 a longitudinal study investigated the segmentedness of children’s phonological representations at the rime and phoneme level. These results demonstrate that implicit sensitivity to both rime and phoneme segments is driven by vocabulary growth and is not dependent on letter-sound knowledge. The results within Chapter 3 also suggest that, while awareness of rime segments emerges naturally through oral language experience, explicit awareness of individual phonemes is related to letter-sound knowledge. In Chapter 4 we explored the idea of global versus phonemic representation using a mispronunciation reconstruction task. We found that sensitivity to both global and phonemic similarity increased over time, but with global sensitivity reaching adult levels early on in development. In Chapter 5 a neural network was trained on the mappings between real acoustic input and articulatory output data allowing us to simulate the development of phonological representations computationally. The simulation data provide further evidence of a developmental increase in sensitivity to both global and phonemic similarity within a preliterate model. Taken together, the results provide strong evidence that as children’s vocabularies grow they become increasingly sensitive to both the global properties and segmental structure of words, independent of literacy experience. Children’s explicit awareness of phonemes, on the other hand, seems to emerge as a consequence of learning the correspondence between letters and sounds. Within the context of the wider literature, the current results are most consistent with the PRIMIR framework which predicts early detailed phonetic representations alongside gradually emerging phonemic categories (Werker & Curtin, 2005). This thesis underlines the importance of using implicit measures when trying to probe the representations themselves rather than children’s conscious awareness of them. The thesis also represents an important step towards modelling the emergence of segmental representation computationally using real speech data.

Syftet med följande studie är att utifrån en sociokulturell teori bidra med ny kunskap om hur pedagoger i förskoleklass uppfattar språklek och dess betydelse för läs- och skrivinlärningen samt att identifiera pedagogernas medvetenhet för språklekens betydelse i ett främjande och förebyggande perspektiv inom det specialpedagogiska området. Tidigare forskning bekräftar användandet av språklek och att det med stor fördel kan användas i ett förebyggande syfte för läs- och skrivinlärningen.    Studiens empiriska material är insamlat genom ostrukturerade, semistrukturerade gruppintervjuer med inspiration från fokusgruppmetoden. Som metodisk ansats ses det empiriska materialet utifrån en kvalitativ innehållsanalys för att nå olika perspektiv på innehållet.  Resultatet visar att pedagogerna har en relevant utbildning för sitt kunskapsuppdrag och för språklek. Vidare visar resultatet att pedagogernas uppfattningar förstärker sambandet mellan tidiga insatser där språkleken har en tydlig plats och där språkleken kan ses som ett främjande arbetssätt i förskoleklass.  I diskussionen betonas framförallt de möjligheter som språkleken ger och hur det kan påverka skolor på organisationsnivå där beslut fattas om extra anpassningar och särskilt stöd.

Background Early literacy skills have a crucial influence on the reading abilities and overall academic success of a child during the school years. The development of phonological awareness skills starts in the pre-school years. While phonological awareness predicts later reading success, working memory is also vital in higher cognitive skills such as reading. Phoneme-grapheme association supports and improves the lexical representation of words in the memory. The phoneme-grapheme association rules in transparent orthographies are in general more predictable and more words can be accurately read at an early stage. Therefore, reading accuracy and fluency seem to develop more straightforwardly since the phoneme-grapheme association is less complicated. As yet, the researcher has come across no studies which explored the role of phonological awareness and working memory in Afrikaans with its transparent orthography. Purpose To explore and describe the role of working memory in the acquisition of phonological awareness skills and ultimately reading in Afrikaans, a language with a transparent orthography. Method A cross-sectional descriptive design with correlational components was used to obtain data from the participants, aged 7 years to 8 years 11 months. Thirty-five participants from five private schools with Afrikaans as language of learning and teaching (LoLT) were assessed. Results The participants employed phonetic decoding more than eidetic decoding. The word reading skills of the participants developed rapidly and exceeded regular expectations. An overall high reading rate was displayed by the participants, likely due to the transparent orthography of Afrikaans. A higher score for the reading comprehension test was obtained by participants who read the comprehension test fluently. Text reading fluency made a more significant contribution to the performance of the participants on the reading comprehension test than word reading fluency. The number memory reversed subtest was more challenging than number memory forward. Shorter words were recalled more easily than longer words. It was less challenging for the participants to recall an eight- to ten-word sentence than to recall a list of words. Visual spatial memory had no significant relationship to the decoding or reading comprehension skills of the participants. The rhyming production subtest was more challenging than the rhyming discrimination subtest. The impact of syllable awareness skills on the word decoding skills of the participants was not significant. The segmenting and blending scores exceeded the expected performance of the participants. The correlation coefficient between reading comprehension and WM was not statistically significant. The relationship between WM and reading skills seems to be the same in both opaque and transparent orthographies. The correlations of PA and PhA skills with the word reading skills of the participants were moderate in strength. A fairly strong correlation between reading comprehension and PA as well as PhA skills was, however, observed. Conclusion The fairly strong statistically significant correlation between word reading skills and WM supports reading development in the early phases. The reasoning behind this deduction is that children who cannot hold and manipulate information in memory will find phoneme-grapheme association difficult. Keywords: Afrikaans, phonological awareness, reading, transparent orthographies, working memory. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / MA (Speech-Language Pathology) / Unrestricted

The purpose of this study was to identify relationships that exist between reading ability in 3rd grade and phonological awareness in kindergarten. A second purpose was to identify specific prereading skills that best predict later reading success. This study used a quantitative research design to answer the research questions posed. The population for this research was 244 fourth grade students enrolled in 3 primary schools in a school system in Southwest Virginia. The data used for this research study were obtained from each student's score on the kindergarten Phonological Awareness and Literacy Screening and the 3rd grade Virginia Standards of Learning examination in reading. Four predictor variables (rhyme awareness, letter recognition, sound-letter relationships, and concept of word) were evaluated to determine their level of predictability for later reading success. Independent samples t-tests were conducted to determine whether a significant difference in the mean score of the PALS and SOL examination in reading existed between male and female students. Pearson correlation coefficients were computed to determine whether a statistically significant relationship existed between the PALS and the SOL examination in reading. Subsequent Pearson correlation coefficients were computed to determine if a significant relationship existed between the PALS and the SOL examination in reading for female and male students. Female students were found to have a higher mean score than male students on the kindergarten PALS. Female and male students tended to score about same on the 3rd grade SOL examination in reading. PALS score and SOL score were found to be significantly related suggesting that students with high phonological awareness scores in kindergarten tended to also have high scores on the 3rd grade Virginia SOL examination in reading. A Pearson correlation coefficient also indicated that female students with high kindergarten phonological awareness scores tended to have high scores on the 3rd grade Virginia SOL examination in reading. Rhyme awareness was identified as the best early predictor of later reading ability.

Educators need measurement tools to determine phonological awareness in young children. This study investigated the appropriateness of rhyme cloze tasks, referred to as Finish-a-Rhyme-Story items, which were designed to measure preschool and kindergarten children's early rhyme development. The rhyme cloze tasks required children to verbally complete a sentence by filling in a final rhyming word that matched a rhyme pattern highlighted in a short story that was read aloud to them. The task required rhyme awareness as well as comprehension of the language in the story. Twenty-four items were individually administered to preschool (n = 207) and kindergarten (n = 382) children to determine item performance and discriminative power. Rasch analysis indicated that the difficulty level of the items was well matched for the sample indicating that the items were developmentally appropriate for preschool and kindergarten children. Several analyses of variance (ANOVA) compared the performance of preschool and kindergarten children as well as the performance of monolingual English speaking (ENG) children and English Language Learners (ELL) to determine if there were group differences on the rhyme cloze measure. Results also indicated that the items have the ability to discriminate between children with high and low level rhyming ability based on the Rasch model; kindergarten children were more aware of the rhyme component than preschool children and ENG children were more aware than ELL children.