An Examination of the Relations Between Oral Vocabulary and Phonological Awareness in Early Childhood

Abstract

This article reports a post hoc analysis conducted as part of a larger study in which 61 typically developing, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were assessed in phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional), and grammatical skill at baseline and 3, 6, and 9 months later. The larger study's purpose was to shed light on the theory of lexical reorganization claim that increases in receptive vocabulary provide the basis for PA development. Its results showed that expressive vocabulary accounted for additional PA growth in 4-and 5-year-olds but not in 3-year-olds. The post hoc study involved a closer analysis of PA growth in relation to expressive vocabulary. Its results suggest that increases in receptive vocabulary might be necessary as a foundation for initial PA development but that expressive-level vocabulary might be needed to hold words in memory to perform complex manipulations required in higher level PA tasks.

Exploring Assessment Demands and Task Supports in Early Childhood Phonological Awareness Assessments

“…The second research question examined response modes and the supports/demands that could increase or decrease the complexity of the phonological awareness tasks. This portion of the examination was not straightforward, however, because response mode is often confounded with task support/demands (Cassano, 2013). As noted previously, response modes were categorized as verbal or nonverbal (e.g., pointing).…”

“…Syllable segmentation tasks have also been found to be particularly challenging for children, especially given the demands of the assessment (i.e., vocal–motor match). For example, Cassano and Schickedanz (2015) found that 3- and 4-year-olds performed unexpectedly poorly on syllable segmentation tasks compared to phoneme-level tasks because, despite the larger linguistic unit, an accurate response typically requires a vocal–motor match for each item. That is, the child must repeat the target word aloud (i.e., vocal) while clapping (i.e., motor demand) at each syllable juncture (i.e., vocal–motor match).…”

“…This study builds on recent research that suggests that receptive and expressive vocabulary and grammatical skill are highly predictive of growth in phonological awareness (Cassano, 2013). Moreover, high levels of expressive vocabulary knowledge are associated with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children’s performance on complex phonological awareness tasks (Cassano & Schickedanz, 2015). One limitation of this research, however, was that phonological awareness tasks varied in terms of their complexity.…”

“…This level of support is not available with a task word such as lunch (i.e., ''What is lunch without /ch/?''). Because of the variations in response mode and task support, children might complete this task using global sound similarities (Gombert, 1992) not the more complex, two-step manipulation (i.e., segmenting the last phoneme from the word and then deleting it; Cassano & Schickedanz, 2015). For example, on the TOPEL (Lonigan et al, 2007), a child might have pointed to the picture of tea steaming in a cup because its name ''sounds the most like'' the target word in the prompt: ''Point to tease without /z/''.…”

“…This approach is likely to be far more efficient than assessing children using numerous tasks (and assessments) that along the developmental hierarchy (Ukrainetz et al, 2011). For example, Cassano and Schickedanz (2015) found that, during the administration of phoneme segmentation tasks on the Yopp–Singer, it was not uncommon for a child to segment a three-phoneme word incorrectly (e.g., grew) into onset and rime (i.e., gr—ew). Although a space to record how the child segmented the word is available, the scoring protocol does not allow for partial credit to be recorded.…”