Psychology, Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, WA, Australia.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2010 Jul-Aug;45(4):411-23. doi: 10.3109/13682820903111945.
The development of children's speech, language, and literacy skills is considered to build on a robust and intact speech-processing system, with normally functioning skills at all levels of input and output processing, as well as storage. There are a range of tasks available that assess input and output processing skills, however there are few tasks described in the literature that require a child to reflect on and analyse the internal structure of their own phonological representations.
This paper will describe the development of the Silent Deletion of Phonemes (SDOP) task. This task is designed to assess a child's ability to delete and manipulate sounds silently within their own stored representations while minimizing the impact of any output difficulties.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: The SDOP task was presented to 69 typically developing mainstream Year 2 children (aged 7;2-8;1 years) as part of a battery of phonological processing skills and literacy measures.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Scores for the population of typically developing Year 2 children were normally distributed and above a basal level but not approaching ceiling. Performance on the SDOP was significantly correlated with other measures of phonological processing but not a measure of non-verbal ability. It was most highly correlated with the measure of phonological awareness as expected, as both tasks measure awareness of the internal structure of words. However, the SDOP provided more information about the accuracy and specificity of a child's underlying phonological representations. The SDOP explained a significant amount of concurrent variance in both reading and spelling performance beyond the variance accounted for by the predictors that have been used by researchers to date. In combination, the SDOP and rapid-naming measure accounted for 58.8% of variance in performance on the reading measure and 54.4% of variance in spelling performance.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The SDOP task appears to be a valid and reliable tool to assess the internal structure of a child's stored phonological representations. Profiling phonological representations allows clinicians to explore children's speech-processing skills which may be particularly useful with children with complex literacy difficulties.
儿童言语、语言和读写能力的发展被认为是建立在强大而完整的言语处理系统之上的，该系统在输入和输出处理的各个层面以及存储层面都具有正常运作的技能。有一系列可用于评估输入和输出处理技能的任务，但是在文献中很少有描述需要儿童反思和分析自己语音表象内部结构的任务。
本文将描述音位静默删除（SDOP）任务的开发。该任务旨在评估儿童在自己存储的表象中无声删除和操作声音的能力，同时最大限度地减少任何输出困难的影响。
SDOP 任务作为一系列语音处理技能和读写测量的一部分，呈现给 69 名典型发展的主流二年级儿童（年龄 7；2-8；1 岁）。
典型发展的二年级儿童群体的分数呈正态分布，高于基础水平但未接近上限。SDOP 的表现与其他语音处理测量显著相关，但与非言语能力测量无关。与预期一样，它与语音意识测量高度相关，因为这两个任务都测量对单词内部结构的意识。然而，SDOP 提供了有关儿童潜在语音表象的准确性和特异性的更多信息。SDOP 解释了阅读和拼写表现的大量同时方差，超出了迄今为止研究人员使用的预测因子所解释的方差。SDOP 和快速命名测量相结合，解释了阅读测量表现中 58.8%的方差，拼写表现中 54.4%的方差。
SDOP 任务似乎是一种评估儿童存储语音表象内部结构的有效且可靠的工具。语音表象分析使临床医生能够探索儿童的言语处理技能，这对于具有复杂读写困难的儿童可能特别有用。
