Poster #44 - The role of early phonological processing abilities in later development of reading comprehension

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

Background and Aims
Based on the simple view of reading, language ability is a significant element to reading comprehension. On the basis of phonological deficit hypothesis, the abilities of phonological processing could be the influential factors to oral language and reading comprehension development. This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the predictive power of different key phonological processing skills and language abilities at early stages to reading comprehension at later stage to further understand the role of early phonological processing in oral language and reading development.

Methods
The participants were forty second-graders (G2), including 20 children with language difficulties (who performed lower than the 25th percentile on the Test of Communication and Language Ability, TCLA) and 20 age-matched children with typical language development. To be included, all participants had to perform higher than 80 on nonverbal IQ (WISC-IV). All children were followed up to their 4th grade. The self-designed speech perception (tone identification) and phonological awareness (tone awareness) tasks, standardized language comprehension and reading comprehension tests were administered to individual participants every year at G2, G3, and G4.

Results
The results showed that language difficult group performed significantly poorer than typical development group on phonological processing and language ability measured at G2 and G3, including tone identification, tone awareness, and overall standard score of TCLA (all ps < .05). As a group, children with language difficulty at G2 continually showed poorer performance on the phonological processing abilities and language abilities at G2 and G3. When examining the longitudinal roles of phonological processing and language ability at G2 and G3 in later reading comprehension at G4 (as shown in Figure 1 & 2), we observed that language ability has been a significant and strong predictor to reading comprehension across G2-G4 (β=.655, p <.01) or G3-G4 (β=.778, p <.01). In addition, G2 (β=.290, p <.05) and G3 (β=.273, p <.05) phonological awareness (i.e., tone awareness) has unique contribution to G4 reading comprehension. More interestingly, a mediation relationship with language ability as a mediation variable between phonological processing ability and reading comprehension were illustrated in the longitudinal predictive models. That is, G2 speech perception significantly predicted G2 language ability (β=.483, p <.01), but not for the tone awareness (β=.185, p >.05). On the contrary, G3 phonological awareness significantly predicted G3 language ability (β=.409, p <.05), but not for the speech perception (β=.207, p > .05). The results indicated that for the different levels of phonological processing, the phonological awareness has an increasing influence on language ability with age, whereas the speech perception ability may have more contributions to early language abilities and indirect predictions to later reading development.
Conclusion
The present findings suggest that both phonological processing ability and language ability were consistently predictive of later reading comprehension. For the phonological processing abilities, in addition to the consistent contributions of phonological awareness to oral language and reading comprehension, the early speech perception ability also plays important roles in language development, and has indirect contributions to later reading comprehension development at G4.

Authors

• Huei-Mei Liu, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU)
  Presenting Author

• Yi-Chun Wu