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Phonological Awareness Skills in Children with Highly Unintelligible Speech

The phonological awareness skills of children with language disorders has been well addressed throughout the literature. Research into the phonological awareness skills of children with highly unintelligible speech, however, is still in its infancy. One published study has looked at the relationship between phonological awareness skills in children with persistent phonological impairments and in children with normal phonology (Webster & Plante, 1992). Significantly higher scores were recorded on three of the four phonological awareness measures for the children with normal phonology As phonology improved, so did the children's phonological awareness skills. The purposes of the present study were to determine if there is an improvement in phonological awareness skills of children with highly unintelligible speech who receive speech sound intervention services, and to determine if there is a difference in phonological awareness skills between children who receive a phoneme-oriented treatment approach and those who receive a phonological cycling treatment approach. Children who took part in a larger study (Buckendorf, 1996) in which the effectiveness of the two treatment approaches was examined, were given the Assessment of Metaphonological Skills-Prekindergarten (Hodson, 1995) early in the course of treatment and again 2 to 3 months later. The following specific questions were addressed: 1. Is there an increase in phonological awareness skills for children who receive articulation/phonological intervention? 2. Is there a difference in the amount of improvement of phonological awareness skills for children who receive a phoneme-oriented treatment approach as compared with children who receive a phonological cycling treatment approach? To test if the subject's phonological awareness skills improved from pretest to posttest, a one tailed !-test for paired differences, and the Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks test were performed. Results on both of these analyses indicated a statistically significant improvement between pretest and posttest scores. To test if there is a difference in the improvement of phonological awareness skills between the two groups, a !-test for independent samples of group and the Mann-Whitney LI-Wilcoxon Rank Sum W-Test were performed on pretest, posttest, and pretest-to-posttest. Results on both analyses indicated no statistically significant differences between the two groups on any of these variables.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-6235
Date15 May 1996
CreatorsMohwinkel, Sheryl
PublisherPDXScholar
Source SetsPortland State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceDissertations and Theses

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