Does "reading" develop "phonological awareness" in Down's syndrome?

Abstract

The casual connection between learning to read and metaphonological awareness has been a much-researched but controversial issue. It has been argued extensively that phonological awareness is crucial for literacy development, and they even have a casual relationship for alphabetic scripts. Results discussed in this paper do not support this view as far as reading ability and phonological awareness go in Down's syndrome. The present study compared a sample of children with Down's syndrome (N=10, Age range 8.3 to 12.5 years, Mean age=10.5) with a group of younger, typically developing Oriya children (N=15, Age range 6.3 to 8 years, Mean age=7.2 Years) matched for their reading ability and investigated the relationship between phonological awareness and reading performance. 150 Oriya words and 47 Oriya letters were given to read and name respectively. For accessing metaphonological skills, tasks such as phoneme deletion, phoneme counting, syllable deletion and syllable counting were used. Children with Down's syndrome read and named letters well but performed poorly on all the phonological tasks, performing better in "syllable" based tasks than "phoneme" based tasks. The results indicate that children with Down's syndrome do not develop so called phonological awareness skills as part of their literacy development, and particularly, Oriya Down's syndrome children demonstrate greater knowledge of "syllables" than "phonemes" when measured.