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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Articulation disorders in children;

Abstract

Phonological awareness skills are demonstrated in daily aspects of life, as young children reflect upon and manipulate sounds and words of their language through early literacy experiences. These social interactions contribute to the organization of emerging reading skills. Deficits in explicit knowledge of the phonological structure of a language could present difficulties in phonological awareness and production (Kamhi & Catts, 1986). Recent researchers have proposed that children's performance on metaphonological tasks can affect performance on reading tasks (Stackhouse, 1997). However, there is a lack of literature investigating the interrelationship between phonological production skills and phonological awareness in children with phonological disorders. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between poor performance on phonological processing tasks and specific phoneme production errors. The current investigator hypothesized that when speech sounds in error were utilized in tasks assessing phonological processing, children would perform differently than if only their correct speech sounds were included. Subjects included 12 children with phonological impairments, ranging in age from 4: 11 to 6:5. Each subject was assessed with initial consonant matching and oddity tasks as well as an additional phonological processing task that consisted of repetition of multisyllabic nonsense words. Two versions of each task were constructed, one with speech sounds in error and one with only correctly produced speech sounds. Analyses were conducted using paired t-tests to examine differences in the subjects' performance on the two versions of each task. Results indicated that when the phonological processing tasks included the children's speech sound errors, performance decreased. A significant difference between means was obtained for both the initial consonant matching and oddity tasks, and the repetition of multisylla~ic nonsense words. Although there were significantly more errors on tasks with errored speech sounds, the subjects' performance on tasks that only included correctly produced speech sounds was not error-free, particularly on the repetition of multisyllabic nonsense words. These results suggested that children with phonological impairments have greater difficulty when phonological processing tasks include their speech sound errors. However, further research is suggested with children without phonological impairments in view of the finding that the subjects' performance was not error-free on correctly produced speech sounds. In addition, the influence of developmentally difficult sounds included in phonological processing tasks is a factor to be considered in future research, since the subjects' error sounds often were late developing phonemes.

Year of Submission

1999

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Communicative Disorders

First Advisor

Lauren K. Nelson

Second Advisor

Clifford L. Highnam

Third Advisor

Deborah L. Tidwell

Comments

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Date Original

1999

Object Description

1 PDF file (43 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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