Early phonological awareness and reading skills in children with Down syndrome

Increasingly, children with Down syndrome receive literacy instruction with the expectation of acquiring functional reading skills. Unfortunately, little is known about the processes underlying literacy skills in this special population. Phonological awareness contributes to literacy development in typically developing children, however, there is inconclusive evidence about these skills in younger children with Down syndrome. 9 children with Down syndrome (5.6-8.10 years) participated in this investigation. Due to the paucity of standardised phonological awareness measures for children with special needs, in particular children with Down syndrome, a variety of tasks were adapted from the literature. The assessment battery examined the skills of phonological awareness, literacy, speech production, expressive language, hearing acuity, speech perception, and auditory-visual memory. The results suggest that children with Down syndrome are at risks for reading acquisition difficulties due to reduced phonological awareness skills. These deficits are in addition to delays caused by reduced cognitive skills. Only one of the participants was able to demonstrate rhyme awareness, which may have been due to task effects. Written word recognition ability was correlated with tests of phonemic awareness, and error analysis of the spelling and non-word reading tasks suggested grapheme-phoneme connections deficits. Further research is needed to determine the best methods of assessment and intervention for phonological awareness in children with Down syndrome.