Brigid McNeill

Effectiveness of an Integrated Phonological Awareness Approach for Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS).

This study investigated the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness approach for children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Change in speech, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, word decoding, and spelling skills were examined. A controlled multiple single-subject design was employed. Twelve children aged 4—7 years with CAS participated in two 6-week intervention blocks (2 sessions per week), separated by a 6-week withdrawal block. Nine children with CAS made significant gains in their production of target speech sounds and these demonstrated transfer of skills to connected speech for at least one speech target. Eight children showed significant gains in at least one target phoneme awareness skill, and these children demonstrated transfer of skills to novel phoneme awareness tasks. As a group the children with CAS demonstrated improvement in phonological awareness, letter knowledge, word decoding, and spelling ability. An integrated phonological awareness programme was an effective method of simultaneously improving speech, phoneme awareness, word decoding, and spelling ability for some children with CAS.

Phonological awareness and early reading development in childhood apraxia of speech (CAS)

BACKGROUND Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is associated with phonological awareness, reading, and spelling deficits. Comparing literacy skills in CAS with other developmental speech disorders is critical for understanding the complexity of the disorder. AIMS This study compared the phonological awareness and reading development of children with CAS and children with inconsistent speech disorder (ISD). METHOD & PROCEDURES Participants included twelve children with CAS aged 4-7 years. Their performance was compared with twelve children with ISD (and normal speech motor planning) and twelve children with typical development on tasks measuring phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, real and non-word decoding, and access to underlying phonological representations of words. There was no significant difference in the age, gender, socio-economic status, and receptive vocabulary of the groups. The two groups with speech disorder were matched for severity and inconsistency of their speech impairment. OUTCOMES & RESULTS The results indicated that the CAS group had inferior phonological awareness than the ISD and typical development groups. The CAS group had a greater proportion of participants performing below their expected age level than the comparison groups on phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge and decoding tasks. There was no difference in the performance of the CAS and ISD groups on the phonological representation task. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Children with CAS are particularly susceptible to phonological awareness and reading delay. Intervention for children with CAS must facilitate skills underlying reading development in addition to resolving speech deficits in order to improve the spoke and written language outcomes of this population.

The knowledge and perceptions of prospective teachers and speech language therapists in collaborative language and literacy instruction

Successful collaboration among speech and language therapists (SLTs) and teachers fosters the creation of communication friendly classrooms that maximize children’s spoken and written language learning. However, these groups of professionals may have insufficient opportunity in their professional study to develop the shared knowledge, perceptions and attitudes required for effective collaboration. This study examined the knowledge and perceptions of student teachers and student SLTs in the areas of language concepts, junior school literacy curriculum, service delivery and professional collaboration. An online survey was completed by 58 student primary school teachers and 37 student SLTs in their final year of professional study. The results indicated that these groups possessed limited understanding of each other’s expertise in literacy curriculum and spoken language concepts. Both groups demonstrated minimal knowledge of spoken–written language relationships and how SLTs can assist to develop children’s orthographic knowledge. Participants demonstrated acceptance of indirect methods of classroom-based service delivery (e.g. SLT acting as a consultant) but were less accepting of direct methods of classroom-based service delivery (e.g. shared teaching). Both groups also reported minimal experience with SLT–teacher collaboration during their pre-service education. The data suggest pre-service inter-professional education (IPE) with a focus on children’s early literacy learning is warranted to prepare prospective SLTs and teachers for collaborative instruction that enhances children’s communication.

Developmental complexity of the stimuli included in mispronunciation detection tasks

BACKGROUND Phonological representations are important for speech and literacy development. Mispronunciation detection tasks have been proposed as an appropriate measure of phonological representations for children with speech disorder. There has been limited analysis, however, of the developmental complexity of task stimuli. Further, the tasks have not been used widely with typical populations. AIMS The study aimed to examine the developmental progression of childrens performance on a mispronunciation detection task, to evaluate the complexity of the tasks stimuli, and to analyse the association between task performance and other skills important for literacy success. METHODS & PROCEDURES A cross-sectional design was used to compare the mispronunciation detection performance of monolingual children within mainstream classrooms aged 4;0-4;5 (n = 26), 4;6-5;0 (n = 49), and 5;1-5;6 (n = 64). Comparison of the complexity of vowel mismatches, single consonant mismatches, consonant deletion mismatches, and consonant transposition mismatches was conducted. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Children in the youngest age group were outperformed by the older age groups in the phonological representation task. Fine-grained mismatches were more difficult to detect than coarse-grained mismatches. There was a trend for vowel substitutions to be the most difficult mismatch to detect. Performance in the mispronunciation detection task was moderately correlated with the childrens receptive vocabulary, speech, phonological awareness, and letter knowledge skills. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Mismatch type must be taken into account when designing mispronunciation detection tasks. Access to segmental phonological representations is related to speech, language, and letter knowledge in children from mainstream classrooms.

A Comparison of the Metalinguistic Performance and Spelling Development of Children With Inconsistent Speech Sound Disorder and Their Age-Matched and Reading-Matched Peers

Purpose This study explored the specific nature of a spelling impairment in children with speech sound disorder (SSD) in relation to metalinguistic predictors of spelling development. Method The metalinguistic (phoneme, morphological, and orthographic awareness) and spelling development of 28 children ages 6-8 years with a history of inconsistent SSD were compared to those of their age-matched (n = 28) and reading-matched (n = 28) peers. Analysis of the literacy outcomes of children within the cohort with persistent (n = 18) versus resolved (n = 10) SSD was also conducted. Results The age-matched peers outperformed the SSD group on all measures. Children with SSD performed comparably to their reading-matched peers on metalinguistic measures but exhibited lower spelling scores. Children with persistent SSD generally had less favorable outcomes than children with resolved SSD; however, even children with resolved SSD performed poorly on normative spelling measures. Conclusion Children with SSD have a specific difficulty with spelling that is not commensurate with their metalinguistic and reading ability. Although low metalinguistic awareness appears to inhibit these childrens spelling development, other factors should be considered, such as nonverbal rehearsal during spelling attempts and motoric ability. Integration of speech-production and spelling-intervention goals is important to enhance literacy outcomes for this group.

A simple model of Persian reading

This study investigated potential cognitive-linguistic predictors of reading comprehension levels of monolingual Persian-speaking children. Investigations into the Persian orthography are important since features of the orthography, such as the need to use text context to support decoding early in reading acquisition, may lead to skills developing differently from those predicted by current models of reading derived from English. Children (N = 199) in Iranian primary schools, Grades 2 to 5 (aged between 89 and 136 months), were given measures of text reading involving (1) cloze completion and (2) passages followed by comprehension questions. Performance on these measures was analysed in relation to childrens language competence, phonological ability, orthographic processing and speed of processing. Analyses indicated that Persian reading comprehension levels were predicted by measures of language-related skills and decoding ability, with the latter being predicted by phonological and orthographic processing skills. The findings were consistent with the simple view of reading being applicable to Persian despite its varying transparency between letters and sounds, though modified to take account of specific associations between orthographic knowledge and reading comprehension. A working model of Persian reading comprehension is discussed based on these findings.

Meta-linguistic predictors of word-level literacy skills in monolingual and language minority learners

Abstract Cross-linguistic transfer can influence the literacy strategies employed by children from multi-linguistic backgrounds when attempting to read or spell in their second language. The simultaneous influence of the three known meta-linguistic predictors of word-level literacy development, however, has not previously been explored in this group. This study examined the contribution of meta-linguistic skills (orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, phonological awareness) to predicting performance in English spelling and word recognition performance across children from monolingual (n = 64) and language minority (LM) backgrounds (n = 34) aged 5–8 years. Despite the groups performing equivalently on receptive vocabulary, literacy, and meta-linguistic measures, there were differences in the unique contributors to spelling performance. For the monolingual cohort, phonological awareness and orthographic awareness explained the unique and significant variance to spelling and reading, respectively. For the LM cohort, morphological awareness explained unique and significant variance to reading and spelling alone. The results suggest that cross-linguistic transfer of literacy strategy occurs regardless of the level of literacy and language proficiency that children possess in their second language. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Patterns of early primary school-based literacy interventions among Pacific children from a nationwide health screening programme of 4 year olds

Literacy success is critical to unlocking a child’s potential and enhancing their future wellbeing. Thus, the early identification and redressing of literacy needs is vital. Pacific children have, on average, the lowest literacy achievement levels in New Zealand. However, this population is very diverse. This study sought to determine whether the current national health screening programme of pre-school children could be used as an early detection tool of Pacific children with the greatest literacy needs. Time-to-event analyses of literacy intervention data for Pacific children born in years 2005–2011 were employed. A multivariable Cox proportional hazard model was fitted, and predictive assessment made using training and test datasets. Overall, 59,760 Pacific children were included, with 6,861 (11.5%) receiving at least one literacy intervention. Tongan (hazard ratio [HR]: 1.33; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.23, 1.45) and Cook Island Māori (HR: 1.33; 95% CI: 1.21, 1.47) children were more likely to receive an intervention than Samoan children; whereas those children with both Pacific and non-Pacific ethnic identifications were less likely. However, the multivariable model lacked reasonable predictive power (Harrell’s c-statistic: 0.592; 95% CI: 0.583, 0.602). Regardless, important Pacific sub-populations emerged who would benefit from targeted literacy intervention or policy implementation.

Language, communication, and literacy skills of adolescents with behavioral difficulties in mainstream education

Abstract Research has increasingly reported the presence of speech, language, and communication difficulties in young people who have a propensity to offend. Young offenders comprise a population with severe behavioral difficulties; however, less attention has been paid to students at risk of school exclusion and possible subsequent offending in the school to prison pipeline progression. This study focuses on individuals with relatively mild behavioral difficulties in a preventative step to identify potential communication challenges earlier in the offending trajectory. A between-group design was employed to ascertain the language, literacy, and communication abilities of 26 high school students aged between 13; 6 (years; months) and 14; 7. Students identified with challenging classroom behavior (n = 11) were compared to students with no history of behavioral difficulties (n = 15). Assessment of non-verbal intelligence, receptive language, literacy, and metalinguistic ability was undertaken. Students with challenging classroom behavior performed more poorly on measures of receptive language and non-verbal intelligence. Significant associations between the severity of an individuals behavior and two measures of receptive language, metalinguistic abilities, and non-verbal intelligence were also detected. The results provide further information regarding the relationship between behavior, and language, literacy, and communication difficulties. The findings suggest that raising the language profiles of those who may be at risk of future offending may contribute to enhanced academic, social, and vocational opportunities for this group.