What term describes the ability to hear individual sounds in spoken words?

Phonological awareness

Phonological awareness, a metalinguistic skill, is among the most important links between children’s oral language and literacy skills. Instruction in phonological awareness trains children to recognize and manipulate individual sounds, or phonemes, as well as clusters of phonemes (e.g., rimes) in spoken words. It is this ability that allows students to map or link the sounds in words with the letters that represent these sounds in written words. Converging research has shown that students who do not develop this ability at the discrete level of the individual phoneme (phonemic awareness), struggle with learning to read and spell, and are at risk for reading disabilities. Fortunately there is a robust research base demonstrating that students can be taught to develop their phonemic awareness skills through systematic, explicit instruction. Additionally, combining phonological awareness instruction in the presence of text and linking this instruction to letter–sound instruction appears to be more effective and to contribute to stronger reading skill development for students.

Ideally, most children receive such instruction and develop phonological awareness during the ‘pre-reading’ phase. Initially, they are taught and thus learn to identify words that rhyme or words that start with the same sound, then they can blend and segment short words at the onset and rime level (e.g., /c/ /at/ is ‘cat’). Eventually, with instruction, they are able to blend and segment at the level of the individual sound (i.e., the sounds in ‘man’ are /m/ /a/ /n/), to count the sounds in words, and to manipulate and delete sounds (e.g., say ‘mat’, then say it again without the ‘m’). However, many children, particularly those at risk for reading difficulties, continue to struggle with these later, more difficult phonological awareness skills well into the learning-to-read phase.

Phonological: The Structure and Sequencing of Speech Sounds

Phonological awareness refers to the conscious awareness of the sound structure of words, including phonemes, the smallest unit of sounds. These skills are tested in a variety of ways, including the ability to rhyme, to match words with beginning sounds, and to blend sounds into words. Based on the chapters in their special issue, Dowker and Nuerk (2016) claim that although phonological skills are not directly related to general mathematical functioning, they are specifically associated with verbal representations of and operations on numbers. For example, Jordan, Wylie, and Mulhern (2015) found that the impairments in phonological processing experienced by children with reading disabilities and co-occurring reading and mathematical difficulties played a negligible role in mediating performance on a battery of seven mathematics tasks. However, Pixner, Leyrer, and Moeller (2014) demonstrated that deaf and profoundly hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants who had experienced atypical language development exhibited specific difficulties with place-value understanding, which appears to be directly mediated by language. Chapter 6 by Donlan describes how phonological processing difficulties in children with specific language impairment can adversely impact numerical transcoding—the formation of associations between spoken number words and Arabic numerals. Finally, Chapter 13 by Bender and Beller discusses how phonological codes can mediate the effect of one of our numeration systems on the acquisition of number words. Namely, they explain that learning to count on one's fingers actually helps the learner distinguish between number words by associating their different phonological patterns with unique finger patterns.

Phonological Awareness

Although phonological awareness is an aspect of oral language, it may be placed under the category of basic skills because a substantial body of research supports the link between phonological processing abilities and the subsequent development of reading and spelling skills (Lyon, 1995; Perfetti, 1992; Torgesen, 1992, 1993; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Deficits in phonological skills have been identified as the major cause of severe reading problems (Ehri, 1998; Morris et al., 1998; Wagner, Torgesen, Laughon, Simmons, & Rashotte, 1993). Results from longitudinal studies suggest that 75% of the children who struggle with reading in third grade, particularly with the development of phonological awareness, will still be poor readers by the end of high school (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Lyon, 1998). Another longitudinal study of nearly 4000 students found that children who are not proficient readers by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers (Hernandez, 2012). Thus, early interventions that promote the development of phonological awareness and basic reading skills are critical.

The WJ IV COG includes two measures of phonological abilities: Phonological Processing and Nonword Repetition. The Phonological Processing test consists of three subtests: Word Access, Word Fluency, and Substitution. In Word Access, the examinee is required to provide a real word that includes a specified phoneme in a stated location (i.e., beginning, middle, or end of the word); in Word Fluency the examinee is required to name as many words as possible in 1 minute that begin with a specific phoneme; and in Substitution the examinee is required to substitute a word part or phoneme to create a new word. The Nonword Repetition test requires the examinee to listen to and then repeat nonwords that increase in length and difficulty. Performance on this type of task is closely associated with language development (Nation & Hulme, 2011). If a more in-depth analysis of phonological awareness abilities is needed, two tests from the WJ IV OL, Segmentation and Sound Blending, can be administered to obtain the Phonetic Coding cluster. In addition, the Sound Awareness test on the WJ IV OL, a screening test designed primarily for younger students, may also be administered to assess the abilities to rhyme words and delete phonemes.

Phonological awareness is an important underlying linguistic ability for reading and spelling unfamiliar words. Phonetic coding, an aspect of auditory processing (Ga), is especially important in kindergarten through third grade (McGrew & Wendling, 2010). Reading unfamiliar words requires blending skill and is required to arrive at a unified pronunciation of the parts; spelling unfamiliar words requires segmentation skill; one must pull apart the phonemes so that the graphemes can be selected (Ehri, 2000). The ability to blend individual sounds into spoken words and segment spoken words into their individual sounds are two central phonological awareness abilities that lead to fluent word recognition and enable comprehension (Allor & Chard, 2011).

Subword Level

Because a measure of phonological awareness is the best single predictor of reading achievement in young children (Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Berninger, 1998), Word Reading includes pre-reading items such as letter naming and requires both application of the alphabet principle with sound-symbol relationships and identification of beginning or ending sounds and of rhyming words. Pseudoword Decoding measures the student's ability to identify the appropriate sounds of letters or groups of letters and blend them into a new word by applying acquired phonetic and structural analysis skills. Nonsense words are best suited for this task so that it mimics the act of reading a new, unfamiliar word and taps word-attack skills instead of stored reading vocabulary. It was therefore essential that WIAT II pseudowords be linguistically correct and phonemically representative of the developmental sequence of grapheme-phoneme relationships. According to Joshi (1995), many tests utilizing nonsense words have been developed without knowledge of these requirements.

Phonological Awareness in the Indian Context

Appreciation of the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading has its origin in the English-speaking nations. However, this awareness and understanding spread to both European nations and other non-English-speaking nations. Although the sequence of phonological awareness development is similar across languages, the subsyllabic units of which children become aware differ from one language to the next [22,23]. Researchers generally agree that the relationship between phonological awareness and the ability to read words holds for languages such as Spanish, German, English, and French, but not for nonalphabetic scripts [23]. Harris and Hatano [24] and Gowswami [22] agree that more cross-cultural research would be required before firm conclusions could be drawn, a claim that remains relevant today.

Eastern scripts, such as those of China, Japan, and India, do not support a strong relationship between phonological awareness and early reading skills [23]. Prakash et al. [25], Prakash and Rekha [26], and Prema and Karanth [27] have together established that phonological awareness is neither as evident nor as crucial to successful reading in Indian writing systems. The researchers found that children learning to read alphasyllabaries and adults who learned only one Indian language (Kannada or Hindi) performed well in rhyme recognition and syllable deletion tasks but did not perform well on segmentation tasks. In contrast, those who studied in both English and one Indian language (Kannada or Hindi) were able to carry out the phoneme segmentation tasks. Prakash and Rekha [26] found that children from Kannada medium schools showed a spurt in their performance on phoneme awareness tasks such as phoneme isolation and deletion after being introduced to English in the fourth grade. Karanth [23] concluded that the kinds of connections beginning readers make with phonology and orthography depend on the orthography of the language being learned.

Sharma (2000, unpublished dissertation) investigated the language skills of 23 Hindi-speaking children (7–15 years old) with reading disorder. None of the children was known to have oral language deficits. All were assessed on the Hindi version of the Linguistic Profile Test [28] (Sharma, 1995, unpublished dissertation), which evaluates language at phonological, syntactic, and semantic levels. The study indicated that the children with reading disorder had a lower language age (below 6 years) than those without. The deficits of the older children were more pronounced, especially relative to the more complex aspects of language abilities. A similar finding was reported for 21 Malayalam-speaking children (6–15 years of age). (Malayalam is another Indian language.) All 21 children had greater language deficits than phonological deficits. The older children showed a higher incidence of deficits than did the younger children.

3 Other Readers and Other Scripts

The posited reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and reading has sound empirical evidence from research on children’s learning to read (e.g., Ellis, 1990; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987; Stuart & Coltheart, 1988). More interesting, though, is the evidence for these interactive relationships that is obtained by examining the emergence of phonological awareness in a variety of special populations. Such studies have been reported for dyslexies (Morais, 1987), learning-disabled children (Liberman & Shankweiler, 1987), adult illiterates (Morais, Alegria & Content, 1987; Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979), Chinese adults who read characters but not pinyin alphabetic script (Perfetti & Zhang, 1991; Read, Yun-Fei, Hong-Yin, & Bao-Qing, 1986), and Japanese children who could read kana (syllabary) and kanji (characters) but not an alphabetic script (Leong, 1991; Mann, 1986). In all these cases, preliterates, illiterates, and nonalphabetic literates were able to manipulate sounds at the larger syllable level, that is, phonemic awareness. None of them, however, demonstrated phonetic awareness at the level of individual sound units. This appears to be a special skill that functions only in reading an alphabetic script. At the same time, alphabetic literacy enhances these skills and promotes phonetic awareness.

2.4 Experimental setup

Both, the behavioral test assessing PA as well as the ASSR-paradigm were performed at the same day. First, the PHOG-test was performed in a quiet room with the participant and the experimenter facing each other. This part of the experiment took about 15 min including instructions. Subsequently, in order to measure the ASSR, participants were seated in a comfortable chair in a dimly lit, acoustically, and electromagnetically shielded room. Stimuli were presented via E-A-RTONE Gold 3A Insert Earphones (3 M Auditory Systems, Indianapolis, USA) using Presentation® software (Version 18.1, Neurobehavioral Systems, Inc., Berkeley, CA, https://www.neurobs.com). Loudness was individually adjusted to a comfortable level. During acoustic presentation of the ASSR stimuli, the subjects watched a silent movie to maintain a constant level of attention (Poulsen et al., 2007, 2009; Rojas et al., 2006).

Letter Knowledge

Though not as robust as tests of phonological awareness in predicting whether the young child is at risk for dyslexia, a child’s knowledge of letter names and sounds may also serve as a helpful guide to how ready he or she is to read. Testing letter knowledge is straightforward; it can be assessed informally by asking the child to name letters presented one at a time on a card. Similarly, knowledge of letters and sounds is tested by asking the child, “Can you tell me the sound(s) this letter makes in words?” More formal testing can be obtained by using a reading test that contains a letter-identification section; for example, the letter-word subtest on the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test—Third Edition (WIAT-III) (Wechsler, 2009); the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement—Third Edition (KTEA-III) (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2014); or the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Achievement (WJ-IV Achievement) (Schrank, McGrew, Mather, & Woodcock, 2014).

In addition, it is often helpful to assess a child’s familiarity with the conventions of print (i.e., that there are spaces between words and that books are read from top to bottom and from left to right), to ensure that a young child is aware of what books are and how they work.