Research Questions and Theoretical Approach

Phonological awareness can be defined as the ability to identify and manipulate speech sounds. Acquisition of phonological awareness implies that a child moves from implicit to explicit control of the sound structure of language, and this explicit control, or awareness, is critical when a child learns to understand and handle the alphabetic principle in both transparent and deep orthographies.

There is no generally established consensus how to measure phonological awareness. Tests of phonological awareness vary in terms of the size of the phonological units to be manipulated, the complexity of processing, and the degree of explicit awareness required. Examples of phonological tasks include judgments of rhyme, blending of phonological elements, deletion of phonological segments, phoneme and syllable counting, and judgments of shared phonemes in sequences of words (Alloway, Gathercole, Willis & Adams, 2004).

Anthony and Lonigan (2004) observed that some definitions of phonological awareness are highly inclusive of which different types of phonological skills are indicative of phonological awareness, while others are stricter. The strictest definition only includes tasks that involve manipulation of phonemes. A less strict definition includes identification or manipulation of all sub-syllabic skills, such as onsets, rimes and phonemes. According to an even more general definition,phonological awareness is the capacityto consciously isolate word segments smaller than syllables.

An even more inclusive definition was proposed by Stanovich (1992), who argued that the notion of conscious awareness should not be a definitional requirement. He instead proposed the term “phonological sensitivity,” described in terms of a continuum from a “shallow” sensitivity of large phonological units to a “deep” sensitivity of small phonological units (Stanovich, 1992, p. 317). This definition thus includes phonological skills involving any word unit, and it implies that phonological sensitivity can be seen as a developmental continuum, ranging from abilities to detect large phonological units such as words, and syllables, to ability to manipulate smaller units such as phonemes. This developmental conceptualization of phonological sensitivity implies that children’s early developed phonological skills form the basis for more advanced phonological skills, while at the same time they reflect the same underlying ability (Anthony & Lonigan, 2004).

The different conceptualizations of phonological awareness described above agree that there are multiple phonological skills that are distinguished by linguistic complexity and type of operation performed. The basic issue of disagreement is whether the different types of phonological skills belong to the same construct or whether they represent distinct abilities. Typically, studies that investigate different aspects of phonological sensitivity do so by examining different levels of linguistic complexity. However, phonological tasks also differ in terms of the complexity of the cognitive processing required and this aspect is often not explicitly recognized.

The fact that phonological tasks involve both a facet of linguistic complexity and a facet of processing complexity suggests that both these facets need to be explicitly recognized in the construction and interpretation of phonological tasks. We therefore propose a model where two dimensions are taken into account simultaneously: the linguistic complexity level (morphemes, syllables, phonemes), and the processing complexity level (identification, segmentation/blending, manipulation). In the empirical study a test battery of phonological tasks with a complete crossing of these two dimensions (Wolff, 2013) was implemented in a longitudinal design with three waves of measurement. The aim was to investigate the dimensionality of phonological abilities among typically developing 4-year old children.

References Alloway, T. P., Gathercole, S.E., Willis, C. & Adams, A.-M. (2004) A structural analysis of working memory and related cognitive skills in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 87, 85-106. Anthony, J. L., & Lonigan, C. J. (2004). The nature of phonological awareness: Converging evidence from four studies of preschool and early grade school children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 43–55. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.96.1.43 Stanovich, K. E. (1992). Speculations on the causes and consequences of individual differences in early reading acquisition. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 307–342). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Wolff, U. (2013). MiniDUVAN. Kartläggning av fonologisk förmåga hos barn mellan 4 och 6 år. [Assessment of phonological skills in children 4 – 6 years old]. Stockholm: Hogrefe Psykologiförlaget.