Ninety-five kindergarten and 89 second-grade children were given a battery of tasks to examine the latent structure of phonological processing. Tasks commonly used to measure phonological awareness, phonological code retrieval, and phonological coding in working memory were administered, along with control tasks and measures of general cognitive ability. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to evaluate how well each of 17 alternative models of phonological processing "fit" the data collected at both the kindergarten and second grade-levels. In addition, the relationship between phonological processing and cognitive ability was examined by obtaining correlations between each identified latent phonological processing factor and the cognitive ability factor. For the kindergarten children, one factor accounted for individual differences in performance on tasks purported to measure phonological coding in working memory and on tasks purported to measure analysis skill. Separate, correlated factors accounted for performance on measures of synthesis, serial naming, and isolated naming. Identical results were observed at the second-grade level, with the exception that individual performance differences on working memory and analysis tasks were accounted for by separate (although highly correlated) factors, rather than by a single latent ability. At both grade levels, the correlations obtained between the latent phonological processing factors and the cognitive ability factor indicated a stronger relationship between phonological processing and cognitive ability than was expected on the basis of previous research. The results suggest that the latent structure of phonological processing is relatively cohesive and stable during the early years of reading instruction. The slightly different pattern of results observed with the second-grade sample, however, / suggests that the present study cannot rule out the possibility that the latent structure of phonological processing changes following the mastery of initial reading skills. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-11, Section: A, page: 3822. / Major Professor: Richard K. Wagner. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76546 |
| Contributors | Simmons, Karen Dorothy., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 91 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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