Phonological awareness intervention for verbal working memory skills in school-age children with specific language impairment and concomitant word reading difficulties

Abstract

This exploratory investigation examined the effects of explicit phonological awareness intervention on each subcomponent of Baddeley's verbal working memory model. Fifty school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and concurrent deficits in word reading were randomly assigned to either an experimental (n=25) or a control group (n = 25).Children in both groups received individual traditional language intervention for four, 1 hour sessions each week for 4 weeks (16 hrs). The experimental group received an additional 20 min of phonological awareness intervention each day (5.3 hrs). Participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed the children in the control group across all verbal working memory measures. The strongest effects were found for the digit recall and word list recall subtests, which were used to assess the verbal short-term memory component of the model (i.e., phonological loop). The next largest effect sizes were reported for the subtests of the verbal working memory functioning (i.e., phonological loop and central executive). The smallest change was found on the recalling sentences subtest, which was chosen to represent the episodic buffer component. These results suggest that school-age children with SLI and concomitant word-reading difficulties in second through third grade who receive explicit phonological awareness intervention can make significant gains on untrained verbal working memory skills in a relatively short period of time which underscores the importance of phonological awareness intervention beyond first grade.

Does learning to read shape verbal working memory?

“…Significant effects were also observed in verbal WM tasks (backwards digit recall and listening recall). The weakest gains were found on the recalling sentences subtest, a task depending more on attention, integration, and LTM than on phonological representations (Park et al, 2014).…”

“…As proposed by the authors, the phoneme-awareness training, but not the rhyme training, has led to new phonemically structured representations for these complex unfamiliar words, which then have facilitated their immediate recall. In another training study on second-and third-grade children with specific language impairment and concurrent difficulties with reading, explicit phonemic awareness training improved not only word decoding, the targeted skill, but also (untrained) verbal memory (Park, Ritter, Lombardino, Wiseheart, & Sherman, 2014). More precisely, after 4 weeks, the experimental group (who received an additional intervention designed to foster phonemic awareness) significantly outperformed the controls (who received individual traditional language intervention) in word reading skills, as well as on all verbal memory measures.…”

“…First, learning to read in an alphabetic writing system allows the emergence of explicit phonemic representations that could influence spoken word recognition (e.g., Morais, Alegria, & Content, 1987) and verbal memory performance (e.g., Ellis, 1990;Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2010;Park et al, 2014). Secondly, learning to read allows interconnecting of phonological and orthographic representations for words, along with semantic information (Ehri, 2014).…”

Working memory and language learning: A review

“…Consistent with principle one, several studies have examined working memory outcomes after treatment targeting phonological awareness skills in children with SLI (Bragard et al, 2012;Park et al, 2014;van Kleeck et al, 2006). Phonological deficits in SLI are well documented across a variety of measures including phonological segmentation (van Kleeck et al, 2006), phonemic categorization (Ramus et al, 2013), and phonological recall (Archibald and Gathercole, 2006a).…”

Pull the Andon Rope on Working Memory Capacity Interventions Until We Know More

“…Similarly, Park, Ritter, Lombardino, Wiseheart, and Sherman (2014) examined the impact of PA training on improving PA, decoding and verbal WM abilities in children with DLD. A total of 50 school-age children with DLD and word reading deficits were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group.…”