Phonological awareness, and working memory, as a component of phonological awareness, have been found to be highly correlated, not only with the acquisition of reading skills, but also with each other. Existing data does not address this aspect of emergent literacy in South African children, for whom bilingualism may impact on their levels of phonological awareness, and possibly working memory. This research study was designed and conducted in an attempt to identify the relationship between these two skills in a sample of seventy-nine South African Grade 1 children (mean age 86 months). The sample consisted of two language groups, namely first-language English (EL1), an opaque orthography (n=42) and second-language English with first-language one of the nine official African languages of South Africa (EL2), a transparent orthography (n=37). The primary aim was to examine the relationship between phonological awareness (comprising a sound categorisation task, a phoneme deletion task, and a syllable splitting task) and working memory (comprising a verbal short-term memory task, a visuo-spatial short-term memory task, a verbal working memory task and a visuo-spatial working memory task). A measure of non-verbal intelligence was included as a control. Separate analyses were run for the two language groups in order to draw a comparison between their performance on the tasks. Results generally supported existing literature that showed that the relationship between working memory and phonological awareness appears to be dependent on the depth of analysis of phonological awareness, which determines the level of demand made on working memory, yet the relationship differed between the language groups, indicating that the EL2 children draw more on general or apparently unrelated skills to conduct working memory and phonological awareness tasks. A secondary aim of this study was to explore the predictive power of firstly, the four memory skills on phonological awareness; secondly, the sound categorisation skills on phoneme deletion and finally, non-verbal intelligence on working memory. Results again differed between the language groups, suggesting that a broader range of working memory skills predict performance on phonological awareness tasks in the EL2 group than in the EL1 group. The implications of these results are discussed in detail.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-119).

Children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) are likely to experience severe and persistent spoken and written language disorder. There is a scarcity of intervention research, however, investigating techniques to improve the speech and literacy outcomes of this population. The series of 5 experiments reported in this thesis investigated phonological awareness and early reading development in children with CAS and trialled a new intervention designed to advance the spoken and written language development of those affected. In the first experiment (presented in Chapter 2), a comparison of 12 children with CAS, 12 children with inconsistent speech disorder (ISD), and 12 children with typical speech-language development (TD) revealed that children with CAS may be particularly susceptible to phonological awareness and reading deficits. There was no difference in the articulatory consistency and speech severity of the CAS and ISD groups, and no difference in the receptive vocabulary of the CAS, ISD, and TD groups. The children with CAS exhibited poorer phonological awareness scores than the comparison groups and had a greater percentage of participants performing below the expected range for their age on letter knowledge, real word decoding, and phonological awareness normative measures. The children with CAS and ISD performed inferiorly than the children with TD on a receptive phonological representation task. The results showed that the children with CAS had a representational component to their disorder that needed to be addressed in intervention. In the second experiment (presented in Chapter 3), a follow-up pilot study was conducted to examine the long-term effects of a previously conducted intensive integrated phonological awareness programme (7 hours of intervention over 3 weeks) on 2 children with CAS. The children aged 7;3 and 8;3 at follow-up assessment had previously responded positively to the intervention. Results showed that the children were able to maintain their high accuracy in targeted speech repeated measures over the follow-up period. One child was also able to maintain her high accuracy in phonological awareness repeated measures. The children performed superiorly on a standardised phonological awareness measure at follow-up than at pre-intervention. Non-word reading ability showed a sharp increase during the intervention period, while minimal gains were made in this measure over the follow-up period. The findings suggested that an integrated intervention was a potential therapeutic approach for children with CAS. In the third experiment (presented in Chapter 4), the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness programme was evaluated for the 12 children (identified in the first experiment) aged 4 to 7 years with CAS. A controlled multiple single-subject design with repeated measures was employed to analyse change in trained and untrained speech and phoneme segmentation targets. A comparative group design was used to evaluate the phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development of the children with CAS compared to their peers with TD over the intervention. The children participated in two 6- week intervention blocks (2-sessions per week) separated by a 6-week withdrawal block. Seven children with CAS made significant gains in their production of trained and untrained speech words with 7 of these children demonstrating transfer of skills to connected speech for at least one target. Ten children showed significant gains in phoneme awareness, and 8 of these children demonstrated transfer of skills to novel phoneme awareness tasks. As a group, the children with CAS demonstrated accelerated development over the intervention period in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, word decoding, and spelling ability compared to their peers with typical development. In the fourth experiment (presented in Chapter 5), the speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of children with CAS and TD were re-evaluated 6- months following completion of the intervention programme. A measure of reading accuracy and reading comprehension in a text reading task was administered to the children with CAS. There was no difference in the performance of the children with CAS in post-intervention and follow-up assessments. The children with CAS and children with TD presented with similar relative change in phonological awareness, reading, and decoding measures over the follow-up period. The connected reading performance of children with CAS mirrored their phonological awareness and decoding skills. The findings demonstrated that children with CAS were able to maintain gains achieved during the intervention but may need further support to promote sustained development in written language. In the fifth experiment (presented in Chapter 6), the long-term effects of the integrated phonological awareness programme for identical twin boys who participated in the research intervention at pre-school were examined. The study examined Theo and Jamie's spoken language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development during their first year of schooling. The results pointed to the benefit of providing phonological awareness within a preventative framework for children with CAS. Theo and Jamie experienced continued growth in speech and phonological awareness skills. They exhibited age-appropriate reading and spelling development during their first year of formal literacy instruction. It was concluded from this series of experiments that children with CAS are particularly vulnerable to phonological awareness and early reading difficulty, and that an integrated phonological awareness intervention is an effective means of developing speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills in most children with CAS. The intervention appears to target processes underlying spoken and written language development in this population. The results are discussed within a phonological representation deficit hypothesis of CAS and clinical implications of the findings are highlighted.

Children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) are likely to experience severe and persistent spoken and written language disorder. There is a scarcity of intervention research, however, investigating techniques to improve the speech and literacy outcomes of this population. The series of 5 experiments reported in this thesis investigated phonological awareness and early reading development in children with CAS and trialled a new intervention designed to advance the spoken and written language development of those affected. In the first experiment (presented in Chapter 2), a comparison of 12 children with CAS, 12 children with inconsistent speech disorder (ISD), and 12 children with typical speech-language development (TD) revealed that children with CAS may be particularly susceptible to phonological awareness and reading deficits. There was no difference in the articulatory consistency and speech severity of the CAS and ISD groups, and no difference in the receptive vocabulary of the CAS, ISD, and TD groups. The children with CAS exhibited poorer phonological awareness scores than the comparison groups and had a greater percentage of participants performing below the expected range for their age on letter knowledge, real word decoding, and phonological awareness normative measures. The children with CAS and ISD performed inferiorly than the children with TD on a receptive phonological representation task. The results showed that the children with CAS had a representational component to their disorder that needed to be addressed in intervention. In the second experiment (presented in Chapter 3), a follow-up pilot study was conducted to examine the long-term effects of a previously conducted intensive integrated phonological awareness programme (7 hours of intervention over 3 weeks) on 2 children with CAS. The children aged 7;3 and 8;3 at follow-up assessment had previously responded positively to the intervention. Results showed that the children were able to maintain their high accuracy in targeted speech repeated measures over the follow-up period. One child was also able to maintain her high accuracy in phonological awareness repeated measures. The children performed superiorly on a standardised phonological awareness measure at follow-up than at pre-intervention. Non-word reading ability showed a sharp increase during the intervention period, while minimal gains were made in this measure over the follow-up period. The findings suggested that an integrated intervention was a potential therapeutic approach for children with CAS. In the third experiment (presented in Chapter 4), the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness programme was evaluated for the 12 children (identified in the first experiment) aged 4 to 7 years with CAS. A controlled multiple single-subject design with repeated measures was employed to analyse change in trained and untrained speech and phoneme segmentation targets. A comparative group design was used to evaluate the phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development of the children with CAS compared to their peers with TD over the intervention. The children participated in two 6- week intervention blocks (2-sessions per week) separated by a 6-week withdrawal block. Seven children with CAS made significant gains in their production of trained and untrained speech words with 7 of these children demonstrating transfer of skills to connected speech for at least one target. Ten children showed significant gains in phoneme awareness, and 8 of these children demonstrated transfer of skills to novel phoneme awareness tasks. As a group, the children with CAS demonstrated accelerated development over the intervention period in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, word decoding, and spelling ability compared to their peers with typical development. In the fourth experiment (presented in Chapter 5), the speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of children with CAS and TD were re-evaluated 6- months following completion of the intervention programme. A measure of reading accuracy and reading comprehension in a text reading task was administered to the children with CAS. There was no difference in the performance of the children with CAS in post-intervention and follow-up assessments. The children with CAS and children with TD presented with similar relative change in phonological awareness, reading, and decoding measures over the follow-up period. The connected reading performance of children with CAS mirrored their phonological awareness and decoding skills. The findings demonstrated that children with CAS were able to maintain gains achieved during the intervention but may need further support to promote sustained development in written language. In the fifth experiment (presented in Chapter 6), the long-term effects of the integrated phonological awareness programme for identical twin boys who participated in the research intervention at pre-school were examined. The study examined Theo and Jamie's spoken language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development during their first year of schooling. The results pointed to the benefit of providing phonological awareness within a preventative framework for children with CAS. Theo and Jamie experienced continued growth in speech and phonological awareness skills. They exhibited age-appropriate reading and spelling development during their first year of formal literacy instruction. It was concluded from this series of experiments that children with CAS are particularly vulnerable to phonological awareness and early reading difficulty, and that an integrated phonological awareness intervention is an effective means of developing speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills in most children with CAS. The intervention appears to target processes underlying spoken and written language development in this population. The results are discussed within a phonological representation deficit hypothesis of CAS and clinical implications of the findings are highlighted.

This paper is an attempt to investigate the significance of the phonological component for the successful reading process at the elementary stage of learning a foreign language. Phonological awareness, the ability to segment language into smaller components and consciously manipulate them, together with the phonemic awareness, i.e. the ability to discriminate the individual phonemes within words, have been extensively studied since the 1980’s. Their causal role in reading acquisition is considered to be the single most powerful advance in the science and pedagogy of reading this century. However, this phonological component of reading skills formation has not yet been extensively examined in Lithuanian schools, while a number of scholars have proved the inter-relationship of the above mentioned skills by different experiments, conducted in foreign countries. The paper comprises three parts. In the first part Reading as a Cognitive Process the views about the cognitive process of reading of such scholars as G. V. Rogova, J. Harmer, F. Davies and many others are discussed. The second part of the paper, The Taxonomy of Phonological Awareness, deals with the phonological as well as phonemic awareness and their role in reading acquisition. The scholars K. Hempenstall, P.E. Bryant, R. Sensenbaugh, and some others are analysed here. In The Experimental Part of the paper, the hypothesis, that the presence of phonological awareness stimulates reading skills and vice versa, the... [to full text]

Phonological awareness is an important component of early literacy and many children struggle to master its key elements, such as the ability to hear syllables and rhymes within the speech stream. The hypothesis explored within this study is that since music and language have parallel auditory perceptual mechanisms then training in rhythmic activities, such as music, could lead to increased understanding of the rhythmic nature required to decode early language and literacy skills. Previous research investigating the relationship between the constructs of music perception and phonological awareness has been promising, but generally inconclusive. Within the study I examine whether there is a link between the temporal processing required to process rhythmic entrainment in both phonological awareness skills and music. The data are interpreted with respect to a theoretical framework linking music and language based on temporal sampling. The ‘temporal sampling theory’ (Goswami, 2011) suggests that the decoding of both language and music is linked to the perception of accent and beat, and that the ability to hear the onset of these accents is critical within a stream of auditory events. To this end rhythmic entrainment tasks were presented in a range of musical activities including drumming along to music and singing nursery songs and rhymes. The musical and rhythmic activities were given in several different forms, to see which would be most effective in showing the children’s ability to synchronise to a beat. These were all presented at four pulse rates (400 ms, 500 ms, 666 ms, 1000 ms). Data were collected over a period of 2 years commencing in November 2009. In Study1 93 4 and 5-year-old children were tested and in Study 2 data were collected from a further 99. In addition to psychometric tests for IQ, Word Recall, teachers from the schools provided information from the children’s Foundation Stage profiles. Phonological awareness skills (syllable and rhyme) were also measured, as was reading development. Overall, children showed greater temporal accuracy (rhythmic entrainment) in keeping time with a musical piece than in keeping time with a metronome. Entrainment accuracy was greatest at the 500 ms rate, the only rate for which entrainment was as accurate with music and metronome. Individual differences in rhythmic entrainment whilst drumming were not linked to I.Q. Children were more temporally accurate when singing than in the rhythmic entrainment tasks and temporal accuracy at pulse rates of 500 ms (2 Hz) and 666 ms (1.5 Hz) showed some significant links to rhyme awareness and to reading. Temporal accuracy in singing a rhyming word on time was also greatest at 500 ms, although simply singing along to music did not show a preferred rate. Unexpectedly, temporal accuracy in singing was linked to I.Q., and was not linked independently to syllable and rhyme awareness. However, temporal accuracy in singing at the 500 ms rate was linked to reading. In Sample 2 of the PhD I report on the results of a seven-week three group matched intervention study of 99 children. The intervention was designed to investigate whether a short intervention of either music or ‘rhythmic speech’ based around the preferred rate of 500ms would lead to improved phonological awareness skills. Group 1 was given a programme of music games and songs, and group 2 was given a matched programme of games and ‘rhythmic speech’, without musical accompaniment or singing, to promote syllable and rhyme awareness. A third group, who received no additional training acted as a control. The results show that an intervention based on rhythmic structure in either a rhythmic speech form or in musical form can be successful in improving children’s phonological awareness skills. The rhythmic speech programme proved to be a more successful vehicle than the music intervention in improving the phonological skills of this group of 90 children. Both interventions were successful in improving both rhyme and syllable awareness, but the greatest improvements came in the syllable tests. There was further evidence that an intervention in either rhythmic speech or music would impact on the children’s future reading skills. Both interventions produced significantly higher correlations with a Word Reading test than the control group. There was no evidence to suggest that a musical intervention based on tapping along to a beat was of more benefit than one based on rhythmic speech. Overall the evidence gathered from the data in this study does suggest that there are direct links between rhythmic awareness, as measured by tapping to an isochronous beat, and the children’s capacity to decode phonological information. The favoured rate at which the brain processes information in both domains, thus linking them together, is at a pulse rate with an Inter Onset Interval set to 500ms. This study’s results could be used to support the development of rhythmic based interventions, in both a rhythmic speech and musical form in support of early literacy skills in 4 and 5 –year –old children.

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