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Children with speech difficulties often have delayed phonological awareness development and associated literacy problems. Speech-language pathologists (S-LPs) typically use phonological and articulatory approaches in their treatment of such children. However, it is unclear to what extent phonological awareness training, originally designed to promote literacy skills, might also improve children's speech output. This article adopts a psycholinguistic approach to examine the nature and development of phonological awareness and to explore the relationship between phonological awareness training and phonological therapy. The role of phonological awareness in predicting literacy development in children is discussed, and principles for analyzing the psycholinguistic properties of therapy tasks are presented. Phonological awareness cannot be dealt with independently as it is an integral part of articulation and phonological intervention. Further, phonological awareness is a necessary "on-line" skill in the dynamic communication process between therapist and child. Failure to take this into account will result in inappropriately targeted therapy and pragmatic breakdown between the child and S-LP.

Purpose: We developed and evaluated in a randomized controlled trial a computerized speechreading training program to determine (a) whether it is possible to train speechreading in deaf children and (b) whether speechreading training results in improvements in phonological and reading skills. Previous studies indicate a relationship between speechreading and reading skill and further suggest this relationship may be mediated by improved phonological representations. This is important since many deaf children find learning to read to be very challenging. Method: Sixty-six deaf 5- to 7-year-olds were randomized into speechreading and maths training arms. Each training program was composed of a 10-min sessions a day, 4 days a week for 12 weeks. Children were assessed on a battery of language and literacy measures before training, immediately after training, and 3 months and 11 months after training. Results: We found no significant benefits for participants who completed the speechreading training, compared to those who completed the maths training, on the speechreading primary outcome measure. However, significantly greater gains were observed in the speechreading training group on one of the secondary measures of speechreading. There was also some evidence of beneficial effects of the speechreading training on phonological representations; however, these effects were weaker. No benefits were seen to word reading. Conclusions: Speechreading skill is trainable in deaf children. However, to support early reading, training may need to be longer or embedded in a broader literacy program. Nevertheless, a training tool that can improve speechreading is likely to be of great interest to professionals working with deaf children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the possibility that similar speech error patterns in children may arise from different patterns of underlying speech processing difficulties. Four Greek children (aged 4;7–5;6 years) with similar speech output difficulties were assessed with a range of experimental tasks with phonologically matched items in order to profile a selection of the consonants and clusters, with which they experienced production difficulties. To check that the skills and words tested were typically acquired by this age, the tasks were also conducted on a control group of five typically developing children (aged 4;4–5;11 years). Tasks included nonword auditory discrimination, mispronunciation detection, naming, real word repetition and nonword repetition. For the experimental group, comparison of performance across tasks for each consonant or cluster identified different loci of difficulty across children. The findings suggest that this kind of profiling could reveal underlying speech processing difficulties, leading to implications for intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that French Cued Speech (CS) can enhance lipreading and the development of phonological awareness and literacy in deaf children but, as yet, there is little evidence that these findings can be generalized to English CS. This study investigated the possible effects of English CS on the speech perception, phonological awareness, and literacy skills of a 9-year-old boy, H.V., who had been exposed to English CS from the age of 1 year and been fitted with a right-sided cochlear implant at 2:03 years. Scores in subtests of standardized assessments for phonological processing, reading, and spelling were in per centile ranks from 50 to 98. Speech perception was assessed in three conditions: auditory alone, audio-visual without CS (AV) and AV with CS (+CS). To hypothesize on the effects of CS on H.V.'s ability to identify English phonemes in novel words he was asked to perceive and write non-words with predictable spellings (e.g. drump) dictated live in the two AV conditions (without and with CS). There was a significant difference between his performance in the two conditions for this dictation test where he scored 100 per cent in the +CS condition and 5 per cent in the AV condition. This suggests CS was helping H.V. to perceive and store novel words and that this effect could have contributed to his development of vocabulary, phonological awareness, and literacy skills that were generally in advance of those expected for his age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]