Effect of Phonological Awareness-Focused Interventions on Phonological Errors and Phonemic Awareness in Young School-Age Children.

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the effects of an integrated phonological awareness intervention on phonological errors and phonemic awareness among young school-age children. Three children with at least one phonological error pattern and below-average phonological awareness skills participated in a non-concurrent multiple baseline single-subject design across participants' investigation. The integrated phonological awareness intervention consisted of completing blending and segmenting activities using 20 trained words, with a dose of 70 to 100 productions of the targeted phonological error pattern for 10, 30-minute sessions. All participants showed improvement in the primary dependent variable of percent consonants correct for their targeted error pattern for trained words. Results for percent phonemes correct showed gains for both blending and segmenting for all participants. All the participants transferred targeted skills to untrained words with their error pattern and generalized blending and segmenting to consonant-vowel-consonant words that did not contain their target error pattern in a pretest/posttest. Integrated phonological awareness intervention was an effective method of simultaneously improving speech production and phonemic awareness skills for young school-age children across 5 hours of treatment. The intervention was designed to be replicable by school-based speech-language pathologists seeking to efficiently support students with phonological errors and phonological awareness deficits.