The Role of Phonological Skills in Nonword Repetition and Reading Tasks in Children Diagnosed with Developmental Learning Disorders
Open Access
- Author:
- Gonzalez, Karen
- Graduate Program:
- Communication Sciences and Disorders (MS)
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 07, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Diane Williams, Program Head/Chair
Carol Anne Miller, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nicole Etter (She/Her), Committee Member - Keywords:
- phonological processing
Exploratory study
nonword reading
phonemic awareness
remote administration - Abstract:
- Phonological processing is the skill used to attach meaning to sounds. It is part of the fundamental tools integrated when using spoken or written communicative forms. Another integral subcategory of phonological processing is phonemic awareness. This skill is used when manipulating phonemes in spoken words and attaching meaning to them. In turn, mastering this skill is what allows us to generalize this skill into literacy. These are important skills that children develop and utilize as they learn to read, write, and spell. Traditional assessments that evaluate phonemic awareness and phonological skills include nonword repetition and nonword reading tasks. Twelve children between the ages of 8;2 and 11;1 years old with no neurodevelopmental disorders participated in this study. The parents of two children reported they struggled with reading and one participant received speech therapy for articulation from a Speech-Language Pathologist. The tests were administered online through Zoom. Tests included were the Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-4 (TONI-4), subtests of the Test of Integrated Language & Literacy Skills (TILLS), and Test of Phonological Structure (ToPhS). Three questions that we aim to answer is: 1) Are there correlations among RAN, ToPhS, Nonword Repetition, and Phonemic Awareness and is there a correlation between RAN, ToPhS, Nonword Repetition, and Nonword Reading? 2) Can a child’s performance on the NonWord Reading subtest of the TILLS be predicted by the ToPhS, RAN, and Nonword Repetition subtest of the TILLS? 3) Can a child’s performance on the Phonemic Awareness subtest of the TILLS be predicted by the ToPhS, NonWord Repetition subtest of the TILLS, and RAN? The results from this study demonstrated that there was a statistically significant correlation between Nonword Reading and ToPhS and a small significant correlation between Nonword Reading and RAN (sum of subtests Colors and Objects). There was no correlation with Phonemic Awareness and the other tests administered. To obtain regressions with a small sample size, some scores had to be transformed. This is an exploratory study and to analyze the data, we used scaled scores for NWRead, NWRep, RAN. For ToPhS scores an arcsin transformation was applied to approximate a normal distribution. Scores for PA were transformed using a Box-Cox transformation. We acknowledge that a sample size of 12 is small for regression analysis. Since this is an exploratory study, we decided to continue with the analysis and interpreted the results with caution. The results yielded provide future directions that we can take to further explore the predictive value of these tasks for phonological processing.