Predictors of Phonological Awareness in Five-Year-Olds: Contrasting Measures of Phonological Knowledge

Abstract

A host of variables have been proposed as correlates of phonological awareness (PA). For young children, there are strong theoretical and experimental arguments that PA is predicted by different components of phonological knowledge, speech perception, nonword repetition accuracy and speech production, as well as vocabulary and nonverbal cognition; however, research has yet to consider these variables together within a coherent model. The current study seeks to extend the developmental framework of PA with a population of children at the approximate age of school entry. Data from 92 typically developing children (age 4;4-5;4) were selected from a longitudinal study on vocabulary and PA based on completion of tasks of interest to the current study. Performance was modeled using path analysis to evaluate a variety of models of PA, including models inspired by Rvachew and Grawburg (2006), and additional models including a measure of higher-level phonological knowledge, the lexicality effect (Cychosz et al., 2021), and nonverbal cognition. Results challenged previous models that support speech perception as a strong predictor of PA and show speech production, instead, as a robust predictor of phonological knowledge. Variance in PA was enhanced by the addition of a lexicality effect but not nonverbal cognition.