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

BACKGROUND

A strong link between phonological awareness (PA) and literacy exists, but the origins of this link are difficult to investigate, since PA skills are hard to test in young, pre-literate children, and many studies neither include such children nor report children's initial literacy levels.

AIMS

To examine PA and literacy in children who are attending or not attending school in rural East Africa.

SAMPLE

One hundred and eight children ages 7-10 years, with no education, or in grade 1 or 2, randomly selected from a community survey of all children in this age group.

METHODS

PA skill, reading, cognitive abilities, and socio-economic status were examined.

RESULTS

Implicit and explicit PA skill with small or large units is related to letter reading ability, and this effect is independent of age, schooling, and cognitive ability. Some PA tasks are performed above chance levels by children who cannot recognize single letters.

CONCLUSIONS

Basic PA develops prior to the attainment of literacy, and learning to read improves PA both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Interaction between phonological and grammatical processing in single word production in Kiswahili

Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing (discordant) or neutral prime before seeing a picture of a common object and being asked to name the object. Priming was found, with naming following concordant primes being faster than naming following the neutral prime ('say'). However, more interestingly, effects were found such that where two noun classes share a prefix, the grammatical prime from each of these two noun classes also primed words that have the same prefix but are not in the same noun class, and hence for which the prime was not grammatical. It is concluded that the prime appears to be facilitating the phonological form of the prefix rather than the syntacto-semantic group of words that are known as a noun class, and that the phonological form associated with a grammatical entity may be more significant in its processing than has previously been supposed.