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Research indicates that deficits in phonological awareness, one's sensitivity to the sound structure of language, underlie most early reading difficulties. However, language skills that facilitate the emergence of phonological awareness are not well understood. Two accounts present opposing views. Both state that children with low phonological awareness have poorly specified representations of the sounds in words; however, the point at which a deficit occurs is disputed. The phonological deficit hypothesis focuses on phonological processing as a fundamental component of phonological awareness and subsequent point of breakdown in those with low phonological awareness. In contrast, the lexical restructuring model posits a link between lexical processing and the emergence of phonological awareness. According to this model, children with low phonological awareness have processing deficits apparent at the lexical level.
This study is the first to simultaneously investigate both of these claims by examining phonological and lexical processing during the course of word learning in preschool children. Because the same stimuli were used, contrasts involving phonological processing and contrasts involving lexical processing were able to be examined across tasks. Moreover, most studies have examined phonological or lexical processing in poor readers, assuming that they had poor phonological awareness. This study directly examined phonological and lexical processing in preschool children differing in phonological awareness.
Results clearly supported the phonological deficit hypothesis. Children with low phonological awareness demonstrated a phonological processing deficit in a same-different task involving phonological processing of nonwords. The results revealed that this phonological processing deficit permeated the formation of lexical representations, which in turn impacted performance on word learning and mispronunciation tasks. Lexical restructuring was not supported as a theory able to explain the deficits associated with low phonological awareness; however, lexical restructuring was shown as a mechanism for increasing the segmental nature of lexical representations. Thus, tenets of the phonological deficit hypothesis and the lexical restructuring model have theoretical and clinical ramifications for early identification-intervention of phonological awareness deficits and subsequent risk for reading impairment.