Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement, Coventry University, Coventry, UK.
Dev Sci. 2018 May;21(3):e12588. doi: 10.1111/desc.12588. Epub 2017 Sep 7.
Children with reading difficulties and children with a history of repeated ear infections (Otitis Media, OM) are both thought to have phonological impairments, but for quite different reasons. This paper examines the profile of phonological and morphological awareness in poor readers and children with OM. Thirty-three poor readers were compared to individually matched chronological age and reading age controls. Their phonological awareness and morphological awareness skills were consistently at the level of reading age matched controls. Unexpectedly, a significant minority (25%) of the poor readers had some degree of undiagnosed mild or very mild hearing loss. Twenty-nine children with a history of OM and their matched controls completed the same battery of tasks. They showed relatively small delays in their literacy and showed no impairment in morphological awareness but had phonological awareness scores below the level of reading age matched controls. Further analysis suggested that this weakness in phonological awareness was carried by a specific weakness in segmenting and blending phonemes, with relatively good performance on phoneme manipulation tasks. Results suggest that children with OM show a circumscribed deficit in phoneme segmentation and blending, while poor readers show a broader metalinguistic impairment which is more closely associated with reading difficulties.
患有阅读障碍的儿童和有反复耳部感染（中耳炎，OM）病史的儿童都被认为存在语音障碍，但原因却截然不同。本文研究了阅读障碍儿童和 OM 儿童的语音和形态意识特征。33 名阅读障碍儿童与个体匹配的年龄和阅读年龄对照组进行了比较。他们的语音意识和形态意识技能与阅读年龄匹配的对照组水平一致。出乎意料的是，相当一部分（25%）阅读障碍儿童存在一定程度的未确诊的轻度或非常轻度听力损失。29 名有 OM 病史的儿童及其匹配的对照组完成了相同的任务集。他们在读写方面的延迟相对较小，在形态意识方面没有表现出障碍，但语音意识得分低于阅读年龄匹配的对照组。进一步的分析表明，这种语音意识的薄弱是由音位切分和组合的特定弱点引起的，在音位操作任务上表现相对较好。结果表明，OM 儿童在音位切分和组合方面存在局限性缺陷，而阅读障碍儿童则表现出更广泛的元语言障碍，与阅读困难密切相关。
