Jing Linye, Vermeire Katrien, Mangino Andrea, Reuterskiöld Christina
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, New York University, New York, NY, United States.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, United States.
Front Psychol. 2019 Sep 12;10:2072. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02072. eCollection 2019.
Phonological awareness is a critical component of phonological processing that predicts children's literacy outcomes. Phonological awareness skills enable children to think about the sound structure of words and facilitates decoding and the analysis of words during spelling. Past research has shown that children's vocabulary knowledge and working memory capacity are associated with their phonological awareness skills. Linguistic characteristics of words, such as phonological neighborhood density and orthography congruency have also been found to influence children's performance in phonological awareness tasks. Literacy is a difficult area for deaf and hard of hearing children, who have poor phonological awareness skills. Although cochlear implantation (CI) has been found to improve these children's speech and language outcomes, limited research has investigated phonological awareness in children with CI. Rhyme awareness is the first level of phonological awareness to develop in children with normal hearing (NH). The current study investigates whether rhyme awareness in children with NH ( = 15, median age = 5; 5, IQR = 11 ms) and a small group of children with CI ( = 6, median age = 6; 11.5, IQR = 3.75 ms) is associated with individual differences in vocabulary and working memory. Using a rhyme oddity task, well-controlled for perceptual similarity, we also explored whether children's performance was associated with linguistic characteristics of the task items (e.g., rhyme neighborhood density, orthographic congruency). Results indicate that there is an association between vocabulary and working memory and performance in a rhyme awareness task in NH children. Only working memory was correlated with rhyme awareness performance in CI children. Linguistic characteristics of the task items, on the other hand, were not found to be associated with success. Implications of the results and future directions are discussed.
语音意识是语音处理的一个关键组成部分，它能预测儿童的读写能力发展结果。语音意识技能使儿童能够思考单词的声音结构，并有助于在拼写过程中对单词进行解码和分析。过去的研究表明，儿童的词汇知识和工作记忆能力与他们的语音意识技能相关。单词的语言特征，如语音邻域密度和正字法一致性，也被发现会影响儿童在语音意识任务中的表现。读写能力对于听力障碍和重听儿童来说是一个困难的领域，他们的语音意识技能较差。虽然已经发现人工耳蜗植入（CI）可以改善这些儿童的言语和语言发展结果，但针对人工耳蜗植入儿童的语音意识的研究却很有限。押韵意识是听力正常（NH）儿童语音意识发展的第一阶段。本研究调查了听力正常儿童（n = 15，中位年龄 = 5岁5个月，四分位距 = 11个月）和一小部分人工耳蜗植入儿童（n = 6，中位年龄 = 6岁11.5个月，四分位距 = 3.75个月）的押韵意识是否与词汇和工作记忆的个体差异相关。使用一个对感知相似性进行了良好控制的押韵奇异性任务，我们还探讨了儿童的表现是否与任务项目的语言特征（如押韵邻域密度、正字法一致性）相关。结果表明，听力正常儿童的词汇和工作记忆与押韵意识任务的表现之间存在关联。在人工耳蜗植入儿童中，只有工作记忆与押韵意识表现相关。另一方面，未发现任务项目的语言特征与成功相关。本文讨论了研究结果的意义和未来的研究方向。
