Phonemic Awareness: A Core Phonological Skill in Learning English

Well-developed phonological awareness skills are central to the ultimate achievement of fluent alphabet-scripted literacy. This workshop at JALT2019 was focused on the benefits that can flow from short bursts of phonemic awareness activities in daily English classes, revolving around a sequence of nonprint activities that have been designed to heighten learners’ auditory reception and oral production of the smallest units of sound in the English language. These sounds, or phonemes, may or may not be present in learners’ primary languages. A sharpened awareness of individual phonemes and the ability to isolate and manipulate them can have the potential to open up the sound elements of alphabetic written text to those biscriptal learners who may have previously relied on the visual memorisation of spelling patterns. Phonemic insights into the alphabetic written code are especially important for learners with established literacy in the Chinese or Japanese written script. 発達した音韻認識スキルは、アルファベット表記テキストを読み書きする優れた能力を最大限習得するのに重要である。JALT2019のこのワークショップでは、日々の英語のクラスで音素認識活動を大量に行うことから生じる効果に焦点を当て，学習者による英語の最小単位の音の聴覚受容と口頭表現を高めるために設計された一連の非印字活動を提示した。これらの音や音素は、学習者の第一言語に存在する場合とそうでない場合があります。個々の音素に対する鋭敏な認識、およびそれらを区別し操作する能力は、これまでスペルパターンの視覚的記憶に頼っていたバイスクリプト（非アルファベット文字使用地域の）学習者に、アルファベット表記テキストの音声要素の理解への”道を切り開く”可能性がある。アルファベットの記述コードに対する音韻的洞察は、中国語や日本語の記述形式に慣れている学習者にとって特に重要である

Executive functions in children with dyslexia

ABSTRACT This study aimed to verify whether children with dyslexia have difficulties in executive functions (shifting, working memory, inhibition). Methods: A sample of 47 children (ages 8-13 years) participated in the study: 24 who were dyslexic and 23 controls with typical development. A battery of neuropsychological tests was used. Results: Results revealed executive function difficulties among the dyslexic children when compared with controls, encompassing selective attention modulation processes, shifting, and inhibitory control. These difficulties appeared to be affected by phonological working memory deficits, typically associated with dyslexia. Conclusion: Our findings support the consensus among scholars regarding the central involvement of phonological skill dysfunctions in dyslexia.

Auditory sequence analysis and phonological skill

This work tests the relationship between auditory and phonological skill in a non-selected cohort of 238 school students (age 11) with the specific hypothesis that sound-sequence analysis would be more relevant to phonological skill than the analysis of basic, single sounds. Auditory processing was assessed across the domains of pitch, time and timbre; a combination of six standard tests of literacy and language ability was used to assess phonological skill. A significant correlation between general auditory and phonological skill was demonstrated, plus a significant, specific correlation between measures of phonological skill and the auditory analysis of short sequences in pitch and time. The data support a limited but significant link between auditory and phonological ability with a specific role for sound-sequence analysis, and provide a possible new focus for auditory training strategies to aid language development in early adolescence.

How adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia use texting

Adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia have some phonological skill deficiency and/or visual-attention deficit. Knowing that these same skills are required to use SMS codes, the main objective of this study is to understand how these subjects use texting language. To understand this, we compared the SMSs of adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia with the SMSs of typical writers in a dictation task. We analyzed the number and the type of SMS codes used by the subjects. This study shows less use of SMS codes in quantitative terms in adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia (DD), but globally equivalent use in terms of quality, in comparison with normal writers. Keywords: adolescent; SMS language; dyslexia; dysorthographia; writing; development

The use of articles by monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment

The present investigation sought to evaluate patterns of article use in a group of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). In particular, because of conflicting results reported in previous studies, it was of interest to discern specific types of nontarget responses and how these corresponded to what has been reported in other Spanish-speaking children with SLI. Eleven children with SLI and 11 age-matched peers participated in the study. Three different spontaneous speech samples were gathered from each child. In addition, an experimental task that assessed the children's use of articles with a variety of nouns was also administered to the children. The results of the study for both spontaneous speech and experimental data indicated that the children with SLI performed significantly poorer in their use of Spanish articles than their age-matched peers. Most of the nontarget responses consisted of omission of the target article. In contrast to a previous study by Restrepo and Gutiérrez–Clellen, the children did not present with deficits in noun phrase gender agreement. The gender errors that were observed appeared to be due to difficulties accessing the correct article form and not due to deficits in knowledge of the gender agreement paradigm. Possible theoretical explanations were explored suggesting that both processing and linguistic explanations, in particular optionality of determiners, could explain the observed patterns. Reasons for cross-study differences in error patterns are suggested, including relative phonological skill and language learning environment.