Phonological Awareness: A Phonological Study

Phonological awareness (PA) is generically defined as the conscious ability to break words into individual sounds and manipulate these sounds. PA abilities have been shown to affect early literacy skills in normal hearing children and deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children alike. Even though advanced cochlear implant (CI) and hearing aid (HA) technology is making tremendous strides for the DHH community, these hearing devices still cannot completely restore normal hearing or fully represent all aspects of normal speech sounds. Therefore, children within this population are potentially at a higher risk for speech disorders, delays, and language difficulties. If research studies can lead to a better understanding of how PA develops in young children with CIs or HAs, then educators and Speech Language Pathologists (SLP) will be able to identify which children are at a higher risk for literacy delays later in life; consequently, preventing these delays by facilitating early development of PA skills. This

Firstly, Dillon, de Jong, and Pisoni (2011) define PA as the “conscious awareness that individual words have an internal phonological structure and can be broken down into linear sequences of sound units…”

Secondly, Webb and Lederberg’s (2014) define PA as “Phonological awareness of spoken language is broadly defined as the sensitivity and ability to manipulate the sound units in words”. Ching and Cupples (2015) combine and simplify the two prior definitions by referring to PA as “awareness or conscious knowledge of the sound structure of a language and/or the ability to manipulate this sound structure”. Overall, these explanations are quite similar. This is important and significant because without a shared understanding and classification of PA, these studies would not be achieving valid, comparable