The causal role of phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge in learning to read: combining intervention studies with mediation analyses.

There is good evidence that phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge are reliable longitudinal predictors of learning to read, though whether they have a causal effect remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results of a mediation analysis using data from a previous large-scale interv...

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Hlavní autoři: Hulme, C, Bowyer-Crane, C, Carroll, J, Duff, F, Snowling, M
Médium: Journal article
Jazyk:English
Vydáno: 2012
Popis
Shrnutí:There is good evidence that phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge are reliable longitudinal predictors of learning to read, though whether they have a causal effect remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results of a mediation analysis using data from a previous large-scale intervention study. We found that a phonology and reading intervention that taught letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness produced significant improvements in these two skills and in later word-level reading and spelling skills. Improvements in letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness at the end of the intervention fully mediated the improvements seen in children's word-level literacy skills 5 months after the intervention finished. Our findings support the conclusion that letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness are two causal influences on the development of children's early literacy skills.