Word, syllable, and sound awareness in language-disordered children

The present investigation evaluated language-disordered children's metalinguistic awareness of words, syllables, and sounds. Subjects were 15 language-disordered children matched for mental age to 15 normally developing children and for language age to another 15 normally developing children. In the first task, children were asked to divide sentences, bisyllabic words, and monosyllabic words into smaller units. In the second task, children were asked several questions designed to assess their word awareness. The language-disordered children performed significantly poorer than both groups of normally developing children in dividing sentences and words. The language-disordered children also did not show the same level of responses to the word-awareness questions as the normally developing children. These findings indicate that language-disordered children's metalinguistic deficit is not limited to difficulty making grammatical judgments. Importantly, these disordered children's lack of word, syllable, and sound awareness places them significantly at risk for future academic difficulties, in particular, learning how to read.