Hearing or Seeing? What factors of reading acquisition lead to more detailed phonological processing? A training study with preschoolers.
Final Report Abstract
Two skills that are confounded and improve during literacy acquisition – namely phonological awareness and phoneme-grapheme-mapping (letter knowledge) – may sharpen implicit phonological representations in spoken word processing. To disentangle the potential influence of these two variables we trained 102 kindergarteners either in phonological awareness only (phonological group) or in phonological awareness and letter knowledge (phonological-grapheme group) in an intensive daily intervention study over a period of ten weeks. Children of both phonological groups improved in an explicit phonological awareness test compared to children receiving a finger-number training of similar duration (control group). Accordingly, implicit phonological representations recorded within an EEG-word-priming-experiment were different between both phonologically trained and control group children. However, the phonological group and the phonological-grapheme group did not differ in event-related potentials. This suggests that sensitisation towards the phonological structure of words may play the core role in gaining detailed implicit phonological representations during literacy acquisition. Knowledge of visual graphemes matching the speech sounds might play a less important role. Nonetheless, all groups improved from pre- to post-intervention in most of the language tests. In fact, in some tests the phonological groups and the control group had similar improvements suggesting a “sensitive period” before children enter school where a “natural” interest in schoolrelated activities becomes active. Alternatively, domain-specific as well as domaingeneral factors might have affected all kinds of trainings leading to similar improvement across all groups of children. Surprisingly, responses in lexical decisions within the priming experiment were gradual for all children irrespective of the training they received. This may mean that variation in the speech signal can be used for strategic decisions without being used for word processing. This unexpected result deserves further examination in future studies. Finally, and unexpectedly, our two phonologically trained groups showed an equal improvement in all numerical skills as our finger-number training group. Moreover, finger gnosis was not a predictor for initial arithmetic skills. Thus, our training might have been ineffective at this age for normally developing children. Alternatively, as for the phonological groups, domain-general and domain-specific factors may have driven these improvements. This undermines the importance of an active control group for all studies in the field.
Publications
- (2020) A Finger-Based Numerical Training Failed to Improve Arithmetic Skills in Kindergarten Children Beyond Effects of an Active Non-numerical Control Training. Frontiers in psychology 11 529
Schild, Ulrike; Bauch, Anne; Nuerk, Hans-Christoph
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00529) - (2021) Phonemic Training Modulates Early Speech Processing in Pre-reading Children. Frontiers in psychology 12 643147
Bauch, Anne; Friedrich, Claudia K.; Schild, Ulrike
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643147)
