Phonological

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness refers to the capacity to hear and be able to fragment spoken language Gillon, (2004). It is one’s capability to manipulate speech sounds into words.

The relationship between phonological awareness and dyslexia can be shown as below. Dyslexia show learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or the comprehension accuracy in being able to read and it arises from the difficulties in phonological awareness, processing speed, phonological decoding, auditory short-term memory orthographic coding, and language skills. In addition, dyslexic children are more impaired in phonological awareness.

Research shows that direct training involves teaching kids to read, spelling and writing ordinary single syllable words through making analogies. Training includes reading lists, use of worksheets, recording forms and dictations. Poor reading abilities results to deficits in phonological awareness which results to children with RD. Research show that children with RD have less skills and experience in using alphabets and that phonological awareness deficits are evident in at-risk children before start reading instructions.

Kindergarten assessment involves meeting with students face to face, saving projects and group works and carrying out informal observations daily. Research show that phonological awareness within the kindergarten children is not caused by inadequate exposure to alphabets and that high-risk children with disabilities perform less than low-risk children in tests concerning phonological awareness.

Phonological Retrieval

A child with phonological retrieval issues has the following behaviors: non respond to sound, developmental and feeding problems, lack of interest to socialize and speech, less eye contact, attachment problems, overuse words lacking specificity and have word finding difficulties.

Rapid naming task involves naming objects, colors, letters, digits and pictures loudly and quickly. It is a task that uses the tip of the tongue which indicates that dyslexic children have more tip of the tongue incidents. Children with RD problems are slow in tasks that involve rapid naming. It is also used to indicate future reading abilities for children.

Lexical knowledge problems may occur if the child has problems in the use of compound words and idiomatic expressions while phonological retrieval problems occur when targeted words are substituted with a similar sounding word.

If a child with dyslexia performs similarly to a typical child then the typical child has problems in phonological processing and ability to make sound and symbol associations.

Phonological Memory

Phonological working memory is a process of obtaining, analyzing, and processing sound elements. It may also refer to the process of coding and storing phonological information in the memory.

Phonological memory can assessed through nonword repetition which ensures that words are logically written or spoken without repeating themselves or by recalling rhyming and nonrhyming words.

 Phonological memory can also be tested by doing tasks that involve memory of single items and not stringed items.

Reading difficulties in children are caused by insuffient practice in reading so as to achieve fluency in vocabulary so as to make written texts meaningful and they are also caused by the quality of phonological representations.

Phonological Production

Children who are poor readers have poor speech productions in repeating phonological complex words and naming complex pictures. The children also are unable to segment words into sounds and manipulate these words into different ways.

Problems in phonological memory make individuals with RD to have difficulties in producing complex phonological sequences and thus they are required to produce real novel words, which involve words that have a flow or are in sequence.

According to Catts (1989b), college students with dyslexia are poor readers and are slow and very inaccurate namers in tests that require rapid naming. He clearly showed that students with RD had difficulties in producing correct complex phrases.

Factors that make a child at risk for reading disabilities include the level of phonological awareness, phonological disorder severity and abilities of other languages.