The Effects of Phonological and Metaphonological
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THE EFFECTS OF PHONOLOGICAL AND METAPHONOLOGICAL INTERVENTION ON THE METAPHONOLOGICAL SKILLS OF CHILDREN WITH PHONOLOGICAL DISORDERS by EVA M. MAJOR B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1990 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (School of Audiology and Speech Sciences) We accept this thesis as cortforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April 1996 © Eva M. Major, 1996 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) u ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between the phonological and metaphonological skills of nineteen 3- to 5-year-old children with moderately severe to severe phonological disorders, and to observe the effects of two types of intervention on the children awareness skills. Seven metaphonological tasks were used which required children to recite nursery rhymes, to produce alliterations and rhymes, to segment disyllabic and monosyllabic words, and to change the names of objects. Children's metaphonological skills were tested (a) before intervention (b) following phonological intervention, and (c) following metaphonological plus phonological intervention. The results suggested that children's metaphonological abilities were related to their phonological and morphosyntactic production skills. Intervention outcomes indicated that both types of intervention may result in a significant increase in children's metaphonological task performance. It was further observed that children with more moderate phonological disorders and good morphosyntactic production skills tended to improve on the metaphonological tasks following phonological intervention alone. Children with more severe phonological and morphosyntactic disorders tended to increase their task performance only following phonological plus metaphonological intervention. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii LIST OF TABLES v LIST OF FIGURES .vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii DEDICATION viii 1. INTRODUCTION 1 Overview 1 LANGUAGE PRODUCTION DISORDERS 3 Phonological and Morphosyntactic Production Disorders 3 Explaining Children's Phonology with Nonlinear Theory 4 DEFINITION OF METALINGUISTIC S AND METAPHONOLOGY 7 TASK VARIABLES 8 Task Type 9 Size of the Phonological Unit 11 Cognitive Variables 12 Experimental Procedure 12 DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 14 Onset-Rime Awareness 15 Children's Phonemic Awareness Skills 16 Studies with Adult Subjects 18 Comparing Adult and Child Studies 20 Summary 21 DEVELOPMENT OF WORD AWARENESS 21 METAPHONOLOGICAL DELAY 23 Language Skills and Metaphonological Awareness 23 Metaphonological Skills of Children with Language Comprehension and Production Disorders 24 Metaphonological Skills of Children with Phonological and/or Morphosyntactic Production Disorders 26 Summary 27 COGNITION 28 Phonological Awareness and Phonological Working Memory 30 PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS AND METAPHONOLOGICAL SKILLS 31 METAPHONOLOGICAL INTERVENTION 33 iv RESEARCH OBJECTIVES 34 2. METHOD 35 Research Questions and Hyp otheses 35 SUBJECTS 37 METAPHONOLOGICAL AND LANGUAGE MEASURES 37 Language Comprehension : 37 Productive Syntax 40 Phonology 41 Metaphonology 46 Phonological Intervention 51 Metaphonological Intervention 51 3. RESULTS 52 4. DISCUSSION 62 Overview 62 AGE 62 PHONOLOGY 63 Segmental Development 64 Word and Syllable Shapes 65 Severity 66 Individual Variation 67 MORPHOSYNTACTIC PRODUCTION 67 INTERVENTION OUTCOMES 70 Phonological Intervention 70 Phonological Plus Metaphonological Intervention 72 Summary 74 ISSUES OF REPRESENTATION 74 Phonological Productions of Children with Poor Performance on the Metaphonology Tasks 77 CONCLUSION 80 CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS 81 Intervention 81 Tasks 82 DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 82 5. REFERENCES 84 APPENDIX A 89 APPENDIX B 110 TASK DESCRIPTION, SCORING PROCEDURES AND TYPICAL RESPONSES 110 TASK PERFORMANCE 113 Task Hierarchy 113 V LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1: Language comprehension scores before intervention 39 Table 2.2: Language production scores before intervention 41 Table 2.3: Percentage of Consonants Correct and Percentage of Vowels Correct for all time periods 44 Table 2.4: Percentage of wordshape measures for all time periods 45 Table 2.5: Metaphonology scores before intervention 48 Table 2.6: Metaphonology scores following phonological intervention 49 Table 2.7: Metaphonology scores following phonological plus metaphonological intervention 50 Table 3.1: Spearman correlation coefficients between age and phonology and metaphonology scores 52 Table 3.2: Correlation coefficients between metaphonology and phonology scores 53 Table 3.3: Summary of children's phonological and metaphonological skills 54 Table 3.4: Correlation coefficients between phonology and metaphonology measures at Tl 56 Table 3.5: Regression coefficient values 61 Table 4.1: Metaphonology scores in relation to PCC and PVC scores 64 Table 4.2: Relationships between children's improvements on the metaphonology tasks and phonology measures 72 Table 4.3: Samples of words produced at Tl (Brad) 79 Table Al: Craig 89 Table A2: Jeanie 90 Table A3: Marcy 91 Table A4: Brad 92 Table A5: Lloyd 93 Table A6: Faith 94 Table A7: Dan 95 Table A8: Kendra 96 Table A9: Ben 97 Table A10: Miles 98 Table All: Mandy 99 Table A12: Dylan 100 Table A13: Stuart 101 Table A14: Gary 102 Table Al5: Roger 103 Table A16: Serena 104 Table A17: Terry 105 Table Al 8: John 106 Table A19: Colin 107 Table A20: Feature establishment for Tl 108 Table A21: Percentage of consonants correct by word position for all time periods 109 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Representation of syllable structure according to onset-rime theory 6 Figure 1.2: Sp ecified feature geometry for English 6 Figure 3.1: Changes in metaphonology scores from Tl to T3 56 Figure 3.2: Changes in phonology measures from Tl to T3 58 Figure 3.3. Changes in wordshape scores from Tl to T3 59 Figure 3.4: Group scores on metaphonology tasks from Tl to T3 60 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the cooperation and efforts of the children, their families and clinicians. I thank them for their participation and interest. I would also like to express my appreciation to everyone who helped me throughout this endeavour: Foremost, Barbara Bernhardt for her guidance, encouraging words and support, and for hours of careful editing. Thanks as well for allowing me to take over her lab space and computer. John Gilbert and Lisa Avery for their helpful comments and availability on some very short notices. Judith Johnston for her time and valuable suggestions for the Results Chapter. My friends and family for their support and understanding. Thanks especially to my mom, Katalin, and my sister, Kathy, for their support, patience and enthusiasm. To rny father Laszlo Major (1930-1992) 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Overview Studies investigating children's phonological awareness (metaphonological) abilities often focus on the relationship between children's awareness and early literacy skills. This body of research suggests that the performance of preschoolers on phonological awareness tasks may predict their future reading and spelling success. It has been found that children's metaphonological and decoding skills tend to improve following phonological awareness training. The relationship between literacy and phonological awareness, however, appears to be bi-directional; while phonological awareness skills may facilitate literacy acquisition, children's awareness tends to increase with literacy instruction. It has been hypothesized that the ability to break down words into smaller constituents promotes the acquisition of the sound-symbol correspondences required for reading and spelling (Goswami, 1986; Goswami and Mead, 1992). The acoustic variations and complexity of words make it difficult for children to establish good grapheme-phoneme conversion rules, unless they have some awareness of the phonological structure of words (Liberman and Shankweiler, 1985). Studies also indicate that children with severe phonological disorders tend to be the least phonologically aware (Green, 1991) (phonological disorders are discussed later in this chapter in the section on language production disorders). Few studies, however, have investigated the relationship between children's phonological and metaphonological skills, and few have focused on the potential benefits of metaphonological training for children with phonological impairments. Some researchers have found that severity of the phonological disorder, as measured by the degree of deviance from adult speech, may predict children's awareness skills (Green, 1991; Webster and Plante, 1992a, 1992b). It has also been suggested, however, that children may have difficulty with awareness tasks because they are unable to process phonological information efficiently (Liberman and Shankweiler, 1985), or because their phonological representations are deviant or incomplete (Magnusson