PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS OF PRE-SCHOOL AND YOUNGER SCHOOL AGE CHILDREN

Phonemic awareness development in children influences the child's speech development. The influence of phonemic awareness development on the development of speech comprehension and correct sound articulation can be considered key. Problems in phonological awareness also often leads to difficulties in learning to read and write.

Within the presented research framework, the presence of children with aural and phonological difficulties in the population of pre-school and younger school-age children in the Czech Republic is monitored and their specific difficulties are defined.

The research aim is to specify the frequency of children with problems at the level of phonetic and phonological awareness in pre-school and younger school age children in the Czech Republic, in a sample of 210 children. Furthermore, to find out whether there’s a statistically significant correlation between difficulties in phonetic-phonological awareness and the occurrence of speech defects in pre-school and younger school age children in the Czech Republic.

The research has been implemented using a mixed research design. Research methods are based on standardised test methods. To determine the auditory memory quality, a sub-test from the Heidelberg Speech Evolution Test (H-S-E-T) was used. To verify the phonetic-phonological awareness quality, subtests from BTFS (authors: Gabriela Seidlová Málková, Markéta Caravolas) are used. The Kolmogorov - Smirnov test and the Spearman test were used for statistical data processing.

Research results point to the fact that 42 (approximately 37%) of children constituting the research sample have difficulties at the phonetic-phonological awareness level. The research assumption, which pointed to the link between the quality of phonetic-phonological awareness in children and the occurrence of speech defects, has been confirmed.

Analysis of the data obtained shows that the ability of hearing sounds differentiation is impaired the least in pre-school and younger school age children (note: at the level of identifying the first and last sound in a word), on the other hand, the ability to handle phonemes is most often reduced (note: at the phenomena elision level or syllables transposition), and issues also often occur in the area of weakening verbal auditory memory at sentence level.

Research results confirm the close relationship between the delayed/disturbed development of the child in the phonological awareness area and speech defects occurrence (note: most commonly it’s the diagnosis of dyslexia and developmental dysphasia), in the pre-school and younger school children group. In the context of pre-primary and primary education, it’s therefore necessary to focus on fostering the development of phonemic awareness in pre-school children, in order to reduce the risk of impaired communication skills and consequently the specific developmental learning disabilities in school age.