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The first part of this report consists of a theoretical survey of the metalinguistic domain, the main focus being upon metaphonological abilities. Metaphonological tasks are analyzed in terms of cognitive demands and degree of automaticity. The importance of metaphonological abilities for reading, spelling, and dyslexia is discussed on the basis of this theoretical analysis. It is assumed that metaphonological abilities are a prerequisite for learning to read and spell.In the second part results from three empirical studies are reported. In the first one 46 dyslexies and their matched control group were studied during their first three years at school. The development of metaphonological skills (segmentation, sound blending, sound position analysis, and segment deletion), language skills, cognitive abilities, reading, and spelling skills was studied on several occasions. The main purpose of this longitudinal study was to gain a better understanding of the causal relationship between metaphonological abilities and reading and spelling. Several causal structural equation models were tested by the LISREL method. The results supported the hypothesis that metaphonological abilities have a causal influence on reading and spelling while no support was found for a reverse causal influence.The purpose of Study II was to investigate the development of metaphonological skills. Two randomly selected classes were given four different metaphonological tests (segmentation, sound blending, sound position analysis and segment deletion) in grade 1 and grade 2. The results showed that metaphonological abilities undergo a substantial increase during the first years at school. The performance on metaphonological tasks was also very sensitive to small variations in task demands.In Study III the effects of metaphonological training on segmentation, blending and spelling were experimentally investigated in grade 1. There was a significant effect of training in the segmentaion and blending tasks. However, the effect of metaphonological training on spelling was significant only for the children with the lowest segmentation and blending pretest performance.The main conclusions to be drawn from the three studies were that metaphonological abilities are of critical importance for learning to read and spell. Furthermore, metaphonological abilities develop during a rather long period and some children might profit from carefully designed metaphonological training tasks in order to prevent reading and spelling disorders. / digitalisering@umu

Phonemic awareness is the ability to attend to the formal, phonetic or phonemic, aspects of spoken language. Skill in analysis of speech sounds and synthesis of phonetic segments into real words has often been found to correlate with success in reading acquisition. The nature of this relationship was investigated by postulating a causal model for the effect of phonemic awareness in kindergarten on reading and spelling skill in the first school years. The quantitative implications of this model were estimated with path-analysis in a kindergarten - grade 3 passive observational study. In order to experimentally test the effect of phonemic awareness a 8 week training program in kindergarten was evaluated using a quasi- experimental design in field settings. The effects of this program were evaluated in kindergarten, in grade 1 and in grade 2. Methodological problems in evaluation research were discussed. The results from the quasi- experimental study was further elucidated applying structural equation modeling with latent variables (LISREL). Clear effects of the training program were found on phonemic awareness tasks in grade 1 and on spelling in grade 2. More subtle effects were found on reading and spelling of simple words in grade 1. No effect was found on rapid silent word decoding. The LISREL analysis was interpreted in favour of a model with phonemic awareness effecting phonological processing which in turn is essential for the early reading development. The results were interpreted as supporting an interactive-compensatory limited capacity model of reading. Phonemic awareness helps the child to understand the alphabetical principle and ensures the development of an effective system for representing written language. Trained children find it easier to learn spelling-sound relations. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Univ., härtill 5 uppsatser.</p> / digitalisering@umu