Gail T. Gillon

The Efficacy of Phonological Awareness Intervention for Children With Spoken Language Impairment

PURPOSE This study investigated the efficacy of an integrated phonological awareness intervention approach for children with spoken language impairment (SLI) who demonstrated early reading delay. Ninety-one, 5- to 7-year-old New Zealand children participated in this study: 61 children with SLI and 30 children with typically developing speech and language skills. All of the children with language impairment exhibited expressive phonological difficulties and some also had delayed semantic and syntactic development. METHOD The children with SLI participated in either: (a) an integrated phonological awareness program, (b) a more traditional speech-language intervention control program that focused on improving articulation and language skills, or (c) a minimal intervention control program over a 4 1/2-month time period. RESULTS Effects of the interventions on phonological awareness ability, reading performance, and speech production were examined. The children who received phonological awareness intervention made significantly more gains in their phonological awareness ability and reading development than the children receiving the other types of speech and language intervention. Despite significant delays in phonological awareness prior to training, children who received the phonological awareness intervention reached levels of performance similar to children with typically developing speech and language skills at post-test assessment. The phonological awareness intervention also improved the childrens speech articulation. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The findings suggest that integrated phonological awareness intervention may be an efficient method to improve phonological awareness, speech production, and reading development of children with SLI. Findings are discussed with reference to a speech-literacy link model.

Follow-up study investigating the benefits of phonological awareness intervention for children with spoken language impairment

The efficacy of phonological awareness intervention for children at risk for reading disorder has received increasing attention in the literature. This paper reports the follow-up data for participants in the Gillon (2000a) intervention study. The performance of twenty, 5-7-year-old New Zealand children with spoken language impairment, who received phonological awareness intervention, was compared with the progress made by 20 children from a control group and 20 children with typical language development approximately 11 months post-intervention. The children with spoken language impairment all had expressive phonological difficulties and demonstrated delay in early reading development. Treatment effects on strengthening phoneme-grapheme connections in spelling development were also investigated. The results suggested that structured phonological awareness intervention led to sustained growth in phoneme awareness and word-recognition performance. At the follow-up assessment, the majority of the children who received intervention were reading at, or above, the level expected for their age on a measure of word recognition. The phonological awareness intervention also significantly strengthened phoneme-grapheme connections in spelling as evidenced by improved non-word spelling ability. In contrast, the control group of children with spoken language impairment who did not receive phonological awareness intervention showed remarkably little improvement in phoneme awareness over time and the majority remained poor readers. The results highlight the important role speech-language therapists can play in enhancing the early reading and spelling development of children with spoken language impairment.

The Effects of Training Phonological, Semantic, and Syntactic Processing Skills in Spoken Language on Reading Ability

The efficacy of a program designed to remediate the spoken language deficits of students with specific reading disability was evaluated. The study investigated the learning of program content and the effects of training spoken language on reading accuracy and reading comprehension ability. The program consisted of two parts: one providing explicit instruction in phonological processing skills and the other providing training in semantic-syntactic skills. Ten students, aged between 10–12 years, who had demonstrated severe difficulties on written and higher-level spoken language tasks during the 2 years before the current study, participated in the intervention program. Subjects were randomly divided into two groups. Group 1 received the phonological training program first followed by the semantic-syntactic training program, and Group 2 received the programs in the reverse order. Subjects were trained for 12 hours over a 6-week period on each of the programs in their regular school environment. Results indi...

Enhancing Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Children with Down Syndrome

This study investigated the effectiveness of a phonological awareness intervention for 4‐year‐old children with Down syndrome. Seven children with Down syndrome who attended an early intervention centre participated in the intervention. Their performance on measures of phonological awareness (initial phoneme identity), letter name and sound knowledge, and print concepts pre‐intervention and post‐intervention, was compared with that of a randomly selected group of age‐matched peers with typical development. The intervention involved print referencing techniques whereby the children’s parents were instructed to bring the children’s attention to targeted letters and sounds within words and to draw their attention to the initial phonemes in words during daily shared book reading activities. The intervention was presented for a 6‐week period. The results indicated a significant treatment effect on phonological awareness and letter knowledge for the children with Down syndrome. Additionally, above‐chance performance on the initial phoneme identity task was contingent on letter knowledge of the particular phoneme. Individual profiles of the children with Down syndrome pre‐intervention and post‐intervention are presented, and implications for the management of preschool children approaching the age of integration into mainstream primary schools are discussed.

Development of phonological representations and phonological awareness in children with speech impairment.

BACKGROUND Children with speech impairment are more likely to have difficulty learning to read compared with children with typical speech development. Researchers have hypothesized that a difficulty in accessing good-quality phonological representations of words stored in the memory may constrain these childrens performance on phonological awareness tasks and subsequent early reading acquisition. AIMS The study investigated the following research questions. (1) Do preschool children with moderate or severe speech impairment show persistent difficulty on tasks designed to tap underlying phonological representations? (2) What is the relationship between performance on phonological representation tasks and measures of speech production, phonological awareness and early print decoding? METHODS & PROCEDURES Utilizing a longitudinal design, the performance of nine children (aged 3.09-5.03 years at initial assessment) with moderate or severe speech impairment and of 17 children of the same age with typical speech development were assessed on three occasions over a 12-month period. Assessments included receptive-based tasks designed to tap underlying phonological representations, speech production and phonological awareness measures. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Children with speech impairment had greater difficulty judging correct and incorrect productions of words, and had difficulty in reflecting on the accuracy of newly learned non-words. Moderate correlations were observed between performance on phonological representation and phonological awareness tasks. CONCLUSIONS Poorly specified underlying phonological representations will result in difficulties during listening, speaking and phonological awareness tasks, as well as create additional challenges during the decoding of written words for some children.

Phonological Awareness Intervention for Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech.

Aims: To investigate the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness intervention to improve the speech production, phonological awareness and printed word decoding skills for three children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) aged 7;3, 6;3 and 6;10. The three children presented with severely delayed phonological awareness skills before intervention.Methods & Procedures: In consideration for the heterogeneity in the population with CAS, the study employed a multiple single‐subject design with repeated measures. Baseline and post‐intervention measures for speech, phonological awareness and decoding were compared. Each child received intervention for three 45‐min sessions per week for 3 weeks (approximately 7 h of individual treatment). Sessions focused on developing phoneme awareness, linking graphemes to phonemes and providing opportunities for targeted speech production practice. Phonological awareness activities were linked with each childs speech production goals.Outcomes & Results: Two p...

Spoken language samples of New Zealand children in conversation and narration

A New Zealand (NZ) database has been created comprising conversational and narrative spoken language samples from 268 children aged between 4;5 and 7;6 years. This paper addresses several questions related to the development and validation of the database and provides a comparison of this NZ database with an American database of language samples. Analyses of the spoken language samples contained in the database revealed a clear developmental trend of increasing syntactic complexity, semantic diversity and verbal productivity with increasing age of the participants. In addition, elicitation context for the language samples had a significant impact on language production measures obtained. The narrative language sampling contexts elicited more syntactically complex language samples. To ascertain if the New Zealand database is useful in identifying children with language impairment, oral narrative transcripts from 21 children with identified reading comprehension difficulties and mild spoken language impairment were compared to the database. The results indicated that the database was sensitive to language impairment. These children showed a much higher incidence of errors at word-level and generally produced shorter sentences compared to the language samples in the database. Comparisons between the NZ and American databases of language samples revealed that six-year-old NZ children showed stronger expressive language skills than the American children.

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.

Oral narrative intervention for children with mixed reading disability

Ten children (aged between 7;11 and 9;2) with mixed reading disability participated in an oral narrative intervention programme that focused on enhancing childrens story structure knowledge. The participants had all demonstrated persistent reading and oral narrative comprehension and production difficulties in a two-year longitudinal study prior to the intervention. A non-equivalent pretest—posttest control group design was used in which one group of five children was randomly selected to receive the intervention immediately and the other group of five children received the intervention delayed. A speech language therapist implemented the intervention in small group sessions twice weekly until 12 hours of intervention were completed. The results indicated significant treatment effects for oral narrative comprehension performance. Despite this improvement in childrens ability to answer comprehension questions relating to story structure elements, there was little change in oral narrative production performance as a result of the intervention, and transfer to reading comprehension was not evident.

Exploring the Relationship Between Phonological Awareness, Speech Impairment, and Literacy

Intervention focusing on phonological awareness activities for children with spoken language disorders is currently being promoted. This article raises issues about the appropriateness of intervention targeting phonological awareness abilities and cautions against the wide scale adoption of new interventions for children with differing symptoms of disorder. Relatively little is known about the phonological awareness development of children with speech impairment. A review of the literature on normal acquisition of phonological awareness abilities reveals wide variation in childrens development. It is affected by educational exposure and socioeconomic class. Many 4year-old children with typically developing speech and language skills exhibit limited phonological awareness knowledge and subskills and do not necessarily show a steady improvement with maturation. Recent research indicates that phonological awareness intervention holds promise for children with speech impairment (e.g., Gillon, 2000). However, march needs to establish criteria for idetifiying those children who will benefit from phonological awareness training, and evaluate the efficacy of differing programme content. The article concludes by posing four questions for future research.