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ABSTRACT:
Purpose: This study investigated the phonological awareness and early literacy development of 12 children who presented at 3 years of age with moderate or severe speech impairment. The children's response to early intervention that included specific activities to facilitate phoneme awareness and letter knowledge, in addition to improving speech intelligibility, was examined.
Method: Using a 3-year longitudinal design, the children's development in phonological awareness was monitored and compared to that of a group of 19 children without speech impairment. During the monitoring period from 3 to 5 years of age, the children with speech impairment received, on average, 25.5 intervention sessions. At 6 years of age, the children's performance on phonological awareness, reading, and spelling measures was also compared to that of the 19 children without impairment as well as to a matched control group of children with speech impairment who had not received any specific instruction in phonological awareness.
Results: The results indicated that (a) phoneme awareness can be stimulated in children with speech impairment as young as 3 and 4 years of age, (b) facilitating phoneme awareness development can be achieved concurrently with improvement in speech intelligibility, and (c) enhancing phoneme awareness and letter knowledge during the preschool years is associated with successful early reading and spelling experiences for children with speech impairment.
Clinical Implications: The data provide evidence to support the clinical practice of integrating activities to develop phoneme awareness and letter knowledge into therapy for 3- and 4-year-old children with moderate or severe speech impairment.
KEY WORDS: phonological awareness, intervention, preschool children, speech impairment
Many young children with phonologically based speech impairment experience difficulty in learning to read and/or spell (Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995; Larrivee & Catts, 1999). Despite therapy intervention that resolves these children's speech error patterns, children with speech impairment1 may exhibit delayed reading development or spelling weakness that persists well into their school years (Gillon, 2002; Lewis, Freebairn, & Taylor, 2000). One area that appears critical to these children's early literacy success is their phonological awareness ability (i.e., explicit awareness of the sound structure of spoken words). Phonological awareness and rapid naming are more closely related to first-grade written word recognition for these children than are measures of receptive and expressive language (Catts, 1993). This...