Productive phonology and phonological awareness in preschool children

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reports on a longitudinal examination of the relationship between productive phonological ability and phonological awareness in children under 6 years of age. This study followed 45 subjects with variant productive phonology levels from the mean age of 3;6 to 6;0. The Khan-Lewis Phonological Analysis (KLPA) (Khan & Lewis, 1976), which ranks children from 0 to 4 on phonological process usage, was given at 6-month intervals, along with two measures of phonological awareness. Logit analysis showed that children with poor productive phonology, as measured by process usage, had a lower probability of meeting criterion on both of the phonological awareness measures. Further, a change in KLPA rank from poor to good speech predicted significant exponential increases in the probability of success on the two dependent variables. We concluded that, as a child matures in productive phonology, accompanying exponential growth in phonological awareness occurs.