The Growth of Phonological Awareness by Children With Reading Disabilities: A Result of Semantic Knowledge or Knowledge of Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences?

Abstract

According to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998), children move from holistic representations of words, to syllabic representations, and finally to phonemic representations through a restructuring process driven by their developing lexical base. In contrast, the psycholinguistic grain size theory put forth by Ziegler and Goswami (2005) suggests that the awareness of individual phonemes is not possible without direct literacy instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine whether semantic knowledge and/or knowledge of grapheme/phoneme correspondences influenced the acquisition of word-blending skills by a sample of children with a reading disability. Participants were 211 second-grade and third-grade students from public elementary schools who were assigned to a reading intervention. Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques were used to model individual growth curves of word-blending skills. Overall, findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and suggest that instruction in the relationship between orthographic patterns and their corresponding sounds is necessary for the development of phonological awareness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Support for this research was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant HD30970 to Georgia State University, Tufts University, and the Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto, and by the Research Program Enhancement Fund of Georgia State University. We thank our participants and their families for their cooperation and support.