Individual Differences in Phonological Awareness and Their Role in Learning to Read

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Individual Differences in Reading

Abstract

Phonological awareness is one of the most important predictors of reading ability. The purpose of this poster is to define phonological awareness, to discuss its acquisition in typically developing children, and to introduce predictors of individual differences in phonological awareness development and its relations to reading ability.
Phonological awareness is defined as the awareness of and access to the sound structure of spoken language. Wagner and Torgesen (1987) conceptualized phonological awareness as one of three key reading-related phonological processes, and its dimensionality has been investigated extensively. It has been reported as having a two-factor structure, with either separable rhyming and phoneme factors or with separable phonological analysis and phonological synthesis factors. It has also been identified as having a unidimensional factor structure. Overall, it has been characterized as a single-factor construct, with method variance due to task differences as a likely explanation for findings of multidimensional structures.
Phonological awareness develops early on, as infants are able to engage in prelinguistic forms of communication and understand word boundaries within speech. Children develop phonological awareness by the time they are three to four years old, and at the start of formal schooling, most children understand rhyme and can segment words into the onset and rime. Towards the end of kindergarten, typically developing children are able to isolate the beginning sounds of words and to blend sounds together (e.g., isolating the /k/ in cat and blending the sounds /b/ and /oi/ to get boy). Further, the progression of this knowledge is stable and predictable; that is, children are less able to detect or manipulate phonemes before understanding rime and onset, and children are less able to detect onset and rime before understanding syllables.
There exist numerous important predictors of individual differences in phonological awareness. For instance, children whose babbling is more advanced achieve greater phonological awareness proficiency by age 3. Also, oral language exposure, especially to languages with transparent orthographies, has a significant impact on early phonological awareness acquisition. Finally, short term or working memory capacity and the saliency of phonological representations are early indicators of phonological awareness.
Three alternative hypotheses explain the relations between phonological awareness and reading. First, phonological awareness may play a causal role in learning to read. Similarities and differences between spoken words and their written counterparts can be detected more easily when phonological awareness is properly developed. Further, phonological awareness difficulties are highly correlated with reading disability. Secondly, learning to read may facilitate development of phonological awareness, especially in alphabetic writing systems. Phonemic awareness (i.e., letter sound knowledge) does not develop until children are taught to read and write; illiterate adults perform worse on phonological awareness tasks than formerly illiterate adults who were later taught to read. Lastly, bidirectional relations may exist between phonological awareness and reading. This is supported by longitudinal studies designed to test for bidirectional causal influences and from evidence of the previous two hypotheses.

Authors

• Jamie M Quinn, Florida State University

• Mercedes Spencer, Florida State University

• Rick Wagner, Florida State University