Implications of articulatory awareness in learning literacy in English as a second language

The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby suggesting that poor articulatory awareness is not unique to dyslexia but rather to reading difficulty in general, and (2) There was a weak but significant positive correlation between articulatory awareness and English reading ability. Implications are that while articulatory awareness may not function only in dyslexia, it is embedded in a complex information-processing network involving reading acquisition. Specifically, a revised Articulatory Awareness Deficit Hypothesis is formulated, which states that poor articulatory awareness is part of articulation difficulty associated with poor phonological awareness that in turn tends to underlie dyslexia and reading difficulty.