Not all phonological awareness deficits are created equal: evidence from a comparison between children with Otitis Media and poor readers

Abstract

Children with reading difficulties and children with a history of repeated ear infections (Otitis Media, OM) are both thought to have phonological impairments, but for quite different reasons. This paper examines the profile of phonological and morphological awareness in poor readers and children with OM. Thirty‐three poor readers were compared to individually matched chronological age and reading age controls. Their phonological awareness and morphological awareness skills were consistently at the level of reading age matched controls. Unexpectedly, a significant minority (25%) of the poor readers had some degree of undiagnosed mild or very mild hearing loss. Twenty‐nine children with a history of OM and their matched controls completed the same battery of tasks. They showed relatively small delays in their literacy and showed no impairment in morphological awareness but had phonological awareness scores below the level of reading age matched controls. Further analysis suggested that this weakness in phonological awareness was carried by a specific weakness in segmenting and blending phonemes, with relatively good performance on phoneme manipulation tasks. Results suggest that children with OM show a circumscribed deficit in phoneme segmentation and blending, while poor readers show a broader metalinguistic impairment which is more closely associated with reading difficulties.

Morphological spelling in spite of phonological deficits: Evidence from children with dyslexia and otitis media

“…Children with a history of OM offer an opportunity to examine the effects of atypical phonology in the absence of other language difficulties. Breadmore and Carroll (2016) did not find deficits in morphological processing during online reading, despite OM children having phonological awareness impairments (Carroll & Breadmore, 2016). Thus, the limited evidence available supports the view that children with OM have phonological awareness impairments but normal morphological awareness.…”

“…4 OM children were significantly poorer on all three measures than were CA children (raw scores), F (1, 54) = 10.4, p = .002, η p 2 = 0.16; F (1, 54) = 9.9, p = .003, η p 2 = 0.16; and F (1, 54) = 7.6, p = .008, η p 2 = 0.12, and did not differ significantly from RA on reading or spelling: F (1, 54) = 0.0, p = .90, η p 2 = 0.00 and F (1, 54) = 0.2, p = .64, η p 2 = 0.00. However, OM children's phonological awareness score was significantly below that of RAs: F (1, 54) = 5.4, p = .024, η p 2 = 0.09 (see Carroll & Breadmore, 2016, for more discussion of this issue).…”

“…Children filled in the missing word. This task was part of a larger study into children's literacy development (Carroll & Breadmore, 2015).…”

A2ML1and otitis media: novel variants, differential expression, and relevant pathways

“…Otitis media is a very common and costly disease in young children that can cause hearing loss and further lead to speech and reading difficulties (Cai & McPherson, ; Carroll & Breadmore, ; Khavarghazalani, Farahani, Emadi, & Hosseni Dastgerdi, ; le Clercq et al, ). Known risk factors for otitis media include young age, lack of breastfeeding, allergies, upper respiratory infection, second‐hand smoke, low social status, daycare attendance, multiple siblings, and family history (Brennan‐Jones et al, ; Y. Zhang et al, ).…”

Early Identification of Dyslexia: Understanding the Issues

“…Children with dyslexia tend to show weak or atypical morphological skills (Breadmore & Carroll, 2016a, 2016bCarroll & Breadmore, 2017;Joanisse, Manis, Keating, & Seidenberg, 2000). There is some debate about when morphological skills become important for literacy, with classic theories arguing that children initially focus on phonology (e.g., Ehri, 1995;Gentry, 1982), while more recent statistical learning frameworks suggest that children use their knowledge of morphology from the beginning of development (Deacon, Conrad, & Pacton, 2008;Treiman, 2017).…”