We don't have language at our house: Disentangling the relationship between phonological awareness, schooling, and literacy

Abstract

Background: A strong link between phonological awareness (PA) and literacy exists,

Literacy effects on language and vision: Emergent effects from an amodal shared resource (ASR) computational model

“…There is substantial evidence indicating that, over the course of development, individuals become increasingly sensitive to smaller linguistic units within the speech signal. Children first gain awareness of larger units such as syllables before they are able to display an awareness of smaller units such as onsets and rhymes (Alcock, Ngorosho, Deus, & Jukes, 2010;Anthony & Francis, 2005;Goswami, 2003). However, debate remains as to the cause of this improvement.…”

“…Experiments that require children to make explicit judgements regarding a word's phonological structure show that children perform largely at chance prior to literacy training, however once engaged in training their performance on such tasks greatly improves (Alcock et al, 2010;De Jong & Van Der Leij, 2003;Hulme, Snowling, Caravolas, & Carroll, 2005;Morrison, Smith, & Dow-Ehrensberger, 1995;Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). Critically, similar tests have been conducted on illiterate adults with such individuals also displaying chance level performance on tasks requiring explicit phoneme manipulation or judgments (Adrián, Alegria, & Morais, 1995;Loureiro, Willadino Braga, Souza, Queiroz, & Dellatolas, 2004;Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979;Scliar-Cabral, Morais, Nepomuceno, & Kolinsky, 1997).…”

The role of the home environment in phonological awareness and reading and writing ability in Tanzanian primary schoolchildren

“…The blending task was originally developed and used in a study that examined phonological awareness and literacy in children attending or not attending school in rural East Africa (Alcock et al 2010). Blending included words and syllables, and there were ten items.…”

“…The distribution of the fathers according to their education was thus significantly skewed, with consequences for the analysis (Bhargava et al 2009;Ngorosho, 2009). The findings from the studied context were also contradictory compared to most findings from developed countries in that the fathers' education was not related to phonological awareness and reading and writing ability (Alcock et al 2010). Thus, this study intends to provide pieces of the puzzle missing in earlier studies so as to create knowledge and understanding of the described phenomenon in Tanzania (Alcock et al, 2010;Bhargava et al, 2005;Ngorosho, forthcoming).…”

“…Researchers (Alcock et al, 2010;Ngorosho, forthcoming) have also looked at the relevance of the home environment for the development of phonological awareness and reading and writing ability. Findings of a recent study in a rural area in Tanzania show that, of the home environment factors, only fathers' education had a significant correlation with children's performance in phonological awareness, reading and cognitive measures (Alcock et al, 2010). The significance was, however, weak.…”