Session Information
31 SES 07 B, Assessing Receptive Language Skills
Paper Session
Contribution
Phonological representations are mental categories of the sounds in a language. It is important to understand the nature and development of phonological representations as they are linked to children’s explicit knowledge of phonological elements – known as phonological awareness, which in turn has been linked to later reading success (e.g. Lonigan, Burgess & Anthony, 2000). Given the importance of raising literacy levels (ELINET, 2012), an understanding of the processes leading up to the mastery of reading and how these break down in children with reading difficulties remains a priority (Hulme & Snowling, 2009). The extent to which the link between children’s phonological knowledge and later reading success may be mediated by knowledge of letters has also been debated (Castles & Coltheart, 2004). Any comprehensive model of reading acquisition therefore needs to include a detailed account of how phonological representations develop and how they interact with children’s explicit phonological awareness and their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. Yet there is still little agreement as to the structure of children’s phonological representations and the way that they evolve over time.
There are currently four key competing accounts of phonological development: the accessibility account plus three variants of the emergent account.
The accessibility account
Some researchers have argued that children’s phonological representations are stored with the same level of phonological detail as adults, but children can only consciously access the phonological structure of words when they have learnt about the relationship between letters and sounds (e.g. Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989; Rozin & Gleitman, 1977).
The emergent account
Others have proposed that words are not initially stored in terms of phonemes and that adult-like phonological representations only emerge as children’s vocabularies become increasingly dense. The three variants of the emergent account are summarised as follows:
Variant 1: The lexical restructuring model, LRM (Metsala & Walley, 1998) suggests that phonemes emerge within children’s representations only after a gradual restructuring process driven by vocabulary growth.
Variant 2: Psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) also proposes that lexical restructuring takes place, but that phonemes only emerge within children’s representations following literacy instruction.
Variant 3: This is an extension of the lexical restructuring model, which suggests that phonemes do emerge naturally within children’s representations, but that children only develop a conscious awareness of phonemes once they learn about letters (Ventura, Kolinsky, Fernandes, Querido & Morais, 2007).
Each of these theories makes different predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the development of children’s phonological representations. The study of children’s phonological representations is complicated by the fact that the tasks often used to measure them tend to require metacognitive awareness of sound structure. Measurements of children’s conscious ability to perform segmental analysis on word forms (usually referred to as phonological awareness tasks) can be contrasted with implicit measures of segmental sensitivity (such as similarity judgements) which do not require children to have any conscious knowledge of the sound segments within words. This paper reports on the first study to directly contrast these two types of task within a longitudinal design, allowing the trajectory of children’s implicit and explicit knowledge of the phonological structure of words to be plotted. The results have both theoretical and educational implications.
Method
The current UK study plots children’s phonological development across four time points as they move through the first two years of school (aged three to five years). 24 children took part in a range of activities, which were designed to measure their implicit sensitivity to the sound structure of words as well as their conscious knowledge of phonological segments. Measures of vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge were also taken. The measures of segmental sensitivity were designed using a novel approach, allowing implicit knowledge of phonological information to be probed without requiring any conscious awareness of phonological structure (author removed for anonymous review). The novel tasks involved children making similarity judgements about phonological stimuli. For example, in the mispronunciation reconstruction task children were asked which word they thought a puppet was trying to say when he incorrectly pronounced a word (e.g. the puppet says the pseudoword ‘kaif’ and the child chooses between pictures of a cage, kiss, cap and horse). For each task, the choices were manipulated in terms of the number of shared phonemes between the words represented by the pictures and the mispronounced word that the child hears. By analysing the children’s responses to these tasks, we were able to probe their sensitivity to phonemes at an age when many of them would not yet have the metacognitive awareness required to access more traditional phonological awareness tasks (such as phoneme deletion). The predictions made by the different theoretical accounts of phonological development were tested using factor analysis (to allow composite scores for segmental sensitivity, explicit segmental analysis and vocabulary to be calculated) followed by generalised estimating equations analysis (GEE). This procedure allowed us to investigate the relative power of vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge in predicting measures of segmental sensitivity and conscious segmental analysis. This longitudinal study provides an important extension to earlier cross-sectional work (author removed for anonymous review), allowing a more comprehensive test of current theoretical accounts than has been previously possible.
Expected Outcomes
The results support the view that while phonemes may emerge within children’s representations through oral language experience alone, letter-sound knowledge is needed for children to gain conscious awareness of phonemes (Ventura et al., 2007). These findings have important implications for early education and for the identification of children with phonological difficulties. Traditional measures used for identifying phonological difficulties in children tend to require conscious phonological awareness, limiting the age at which they can be used for early identification. Measures of segmental sensitivity (such as those developed here) which do not require any conscious phonological awareness or any knowledge of letters have the potential to be used with younger children as they enter school. The findings also have implications for the way that phonics is taught in schools. While current government guidance in the UK suggests that educators should only introduce children to letter-sound correspondences once they have developed phoneme awareness (e.g. by orally segmenting and blending the sounds in words) (Department for Education and Schools, 2007), others have argued that early knowledge of letters might actually help anchor children’s awareness of phonemes. Although further work in this area is needed, this study supports the latter view that it might be fruitful to introduce letters alongside phonemes, rather than waiting for segmenting and blending to be developed first. While this study explored the phonological development of English language users, the findings may also be relevant to other alphabetic languages. It is hoped that this study will motivate cross-linguistic work, investigating the emergence of phonological categories in other languages and the subsequent implications for early education and assessment.
References
Castles, A., & Coltheart, M. (2004). Is there a causal link from phonological awareness to success in learning to read? Cognition, 91, 77-111. Department for Education and Schools (2007). Letters and Sounds: Principles and Practice of high quality phonics. London: DfES. ELINET (2015). Literacy in Europe: Facts and Figures. Retrieved from European Literacy Policy Network website: http://www.eli-net.eu/fileadmin/ELINET/Redaktion/Factsheet-Literacy_in_Europe-A4.pdf Hulme, C., & Snowling, M. (2009). Developmental cognitive disorders. Oxford, England: Blackwell/Wiley. Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, A. M. (1989). The alphabetic principle and learning to read. In D. P. Shankweiler & I. Y. Liberman (Eds.), Phonology and reading disability: Solving the reading puzzle (pp. 1–33). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lonigan, C. J., Burgess, S. R., & Anthony, J. L. (2000). Development of emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool children: evidence from a latent-variable longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 36, 596-613. Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In L. C. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89–120). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Rozin, P., & Gleitman, L. R. (1977). The structure and acquisition of reading II: the reading process and the acquisition of the alphabetic principle. In A. Reber & D. Scarborough (Eds.), Toward a psychology of reading (pp. 55-141). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Ventura, P., Kolinsky, R., Fernandes, S., Querido, L., & Morais, J. (2007). Lexical restructuring in the absence of literacy. Cognition, 105, 334–361. Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 3–29.
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