Phonological awareness skills in Danish-speaking children: a pilot study

Background: The development of phonological awareness (PA) is a prerequisite for learning to read. Several studies have shown that children with speech and language disorders often exhibit poor PA skills and are at risk of developing reading disorders. Therefore, PA assessment tools for children in preschool and kindergarten are essential to evaluate whether a child is developing typically or if intervention is needed to support the process of learning to read. In Denmark, no tool for assessing PA skills currently exists, and very little is known about Danish-speaking children’s PA development. Thus, the aim of the present study was to pilot a newly developed digital PA assessment and investigate initial data on the PA competence of 5-6-year-old Danish-speaking children.Method: The new PA assessment battery consists of 12 subtests which vary in terms of linguistic units (words, syllables, and phonemes) and task complexity (identification, segmentation, synthesis, and deletion). Each subtest consists of three practice items and 12 test items. Thirty Danish-speaking children aged 5;0-6;11 from different preschools and kindergartens participated. Statistical analyses were performed to investigate the complexity of subtests and test items, as well as the relationship between PA skills and age.Results: The mean scores for the subtests assessing larger linguistic units (segmentation of words, rhyme identification, rhyme production and syllable segmentation) were higher than for subtests assessing smaller linguistic units (onset-rhyme synthesis, onset identification, phoneme synthesis and deletion). The 6-year-olds performed significantly better than 5-year-olds on most tasks.Conclusions: The preliminary data from Danish-speaking children support previous findings for other languages that PA develops with increasing age and from larger to smaller linguistic units. More data from typically developing Danish-speaking children as well as children with speech and language disorders are needed to confirm the findings and validate the new assessment material.