Role of phonological awareness in
speech change is not understood. Speech
and language therapy often necessitate tasks that require an awareness of
phonemes. Preschool children, largely preliterate, often have little PA and are
therefore, are unable to segment or manipulate phonemes.
This study investigates the
possibility of teaching PA skills to preliterate children with speech
disorder. Forty-two children (randomized
controlled design) with speech disorders ages 4-4.5 years were placed in a PA or
a language stimulation intervention. Assessments measured alliteration awareness,
phoneme isolation, word segmentation and phoneme addition or deletion (pre and
posttests).
Results: more children improved in
the PA group than the language stimulation group on three of four measures. On the
two most advanced tasks, segmentation and manipulation, only a few children
showed improvement. Phoneme isolation was significant for a majority of the
children in the phonological awareness group.
Conclusions: Phoneme isolation is
the most easily learned skill and appears relevant to speech and language
therapy. Phoneme addition and deletion
and word segmentation were attainable only by a few older and more
cognitively developed children. Isolation of initial consonants can be
triggered at 4-4.5 years though meaningful activities, but phoneme manipulation
tasks were beyond the cognitive ability of most pre-literate children.
As a group, children with speech
disorders perform worse than their peers on PA tasks. Uncertainty remains re: its role in
speech therapy and also its relationship to lexical phonological representations.
Wood and Terrell (1998) found evidence for developing PA in preliterate
children without intervention. 25% of participants (ages 3yr 10m - 4yr 11 m)
could perform complex PA tasks including deletion. Hulme (2005) found that
children (mean age 4 y 11 m) could segment initial and final phonemes from
syllables despite no knowledge of letter-sound correspondence, but the ability
was more noted in older children,; however, some typically developing children
demonstrate PA before the age of 5 without literacy experiences.
Warrick et al, (1993) found that some
children with speech and language disorders could develop PA before the age of
5. Laing and Espeland (2005) found evidence that instruction improved initial
phoneme matching among 4 yr olds and Gillon (2005) provided instruction for
children with speech disorders aged 3-5, noting improvement in phoneme matching
beyond the level of typically developing peers in a control group. Treated children
could not segment; however, they did well with phoneme isolation of the first
sound in words.
Program: children in both groups
had 20 min x 30 sessions, 2-3 times weekly with a researcher, resulting in approximately
10 weeks of intervention, carried out at home or school per parent choice.
Children in the PA group began with syllable and rhyme awareness (clapping,
blending, segmenting, completing, judging, matching) moving on to PA
(consonants and picture links, initial sounds, final sounds, vowel sounds with
picture links, identifying initial and final clusters). The language stimulation program focused on
listening comprehension, print awareness, expressing feelings, developing
vocabulary and concept knowledge like days of week, seasons, transportation,
etc.
Significance of outcomes based on
comparing pre and posttests for improvement in alliteration awareness, isolation
of phoneme, and segmentation tasks as well as improvement above chance for
phoneme add/del, since participants were all at chance levels before the
intervention.
Gillon (2005) found that children
with speech disorders receiving intervention later developed phoneme and letter
awareness at the same rate as typically developing children.
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