Exploring relationships between phonological awareness and phonological productive abilities of kindergarten-aged children

Abstract

Numerous language acquisition studies have identified relationships between phonological awareness, which refers to a speaker’s ability to identify and manipulate syllable constituents, and other developmental skills, including vocabulary, literacy, and future academic achievement. In contrast, fewer studies have explored the nature of the relationship between phonological awareness and phonological abilities measured through performance in speech production. In this thesis, I explore the nature of this relationship by using statistics to compare the performance of 26 children on three developmental tasks (Phoneme Isolation, Verbal Fluency, and Letter Naming) and two measures of phonological abilities in production (Picture Naming Task and Semi-Directed Narrative). I divide the participants into three separate speaker groups (children with suspected speech disorders, younger children with typical speech, and older children with typical speech). I identify the measures for which lower scores consistently pattern with the former two speaker groups, in comparison to the latter group, and I establish that less mature phonological systems may also influence performance on these assessments. I show that differences in behaviours observed among these speaker groups can most clearly be identified through ‘marked’ (i.e. complex) phonological contexts, as opposed to those that are ‘unmarked’ (i.e. simple). In addition to contributing research on the relationship between phonological awareness and phonological abilities in production, this study also provides evidence of the potential for phonological markedness as a principal consideration toward both the future development of phonological assessments and early diagnosis of phonological disorders.