Phonological awareness development in children with and without spoken language difficulties: A 12-month longitudinal study of German-speaking preschool children

Purpose: There is strong empirical evidence that English-speaking children with spoken language difficulties (SLD) often have phonological awareness (PA) deficits. The aim of this study was to explore longitudinally if this is also true of preschool children speaking German, a language that makes extensive use of derivational morphemes which may impact on the acquisition of different PA levels.

Method: Thirty four-year-old children with SLD were assessed on eleven PA subtests at three points over a 12-month period and compared to 97 four-year-old typically developing (TD) children.

Result: The TD-group had a mean percentage correct of over 50% for the majority of tasks (including phoneme tasks) and their PA skills developed significantly over time. In contrast, the SLD-group improved their PA performance over time on syllable and rhyme but not on phoneme level tasks. Group comparisons revealed that children with SLD had weaker PA skills, in particular on phoneme level tasks.

Conclusion: The study contributes a longitudinal perspective on PA development before school entry. In line with their English-speaking peers, German-speaking children with SLD showed poorer PA skills than TD peers, indicating that the relationship between SLD and PA is similar across these two related but different languages.