Long-term association between articulation quality and phoneme sensitivity: A study from age 3 to age 8

Abstract

The role of articulation quality in the development of phonological sensitivity was examined in a 5-year longitudinal study. A sample of 80 children was assessed at age 3. They were assessed yearly to age 6. Forty-three of the original sample were traced and reassessed at age 8. As predicted, the results revealed that articulation quality of the phoneme /r/ predicted phoneme sensitivity for the phoneme /r/ at ages 3–5 after controlling for vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phoneme sensitivity for a control phoneme. Later analyses showed that articulation quality at age 3 explained unique variance in phoneme sensitivity and decoding at age 8, after entering appropriate control variables. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that weakened phonological representations for specific phonemes linger after articulation has normalized.