A Study On The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness And Reading Ability In Chinese Down 's Syndrome Children

There has always been a debate over whether Down syndrome (DS) children’s phonological awareness abilities is related to reading skills. However, there is no research about the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills specially for Chinese children with DS or individuals of mental retardation. This study refers to the experimental paradigm at home and abroad considering the characteristics of Chinese to investigate whether Chinese DS children possess an impairment in phonological awareness abilities and to discuss the association between phonological awareness and reading skills.This study chose ten Chinese children with DS and ten typically developing comparison children matched by reading skills. One reading task and five phonological awareness tasks including syllable detection, syllable deletion, rhyme detection, phoneme detection and tone detection were utilized to investigate the performance of two groups of subjects and to discuss the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills for these two groups through the statistical analysis.The children with DS performed significantly less well than the control group on all tasks of phonological awareness which means they possess an impairment in the phonological awareness abilities. It is worthy to note that phonological awareness difficulties persisted also when mental age differences between DS and typically developing groups were taken into account. This finding suggests that results on phonological awareness may not directly depend on their reduced mental age. Specifically, although children in DS group found final syllable more difficult to detect than initial syllable in syllable detection task and they detected the initial phoneme of zero initial syllables less well than the initial consonant in phoneme detection task the two groups of children were approximately equivalent on two kinds of rhyme detection task which were different in the number of vowels. This indicates the reason why DS children possess an impairment in phonological awareness abilities is that their sensitivity to sounds at the end of the words are impaired compared to beginning sounds and they are not able to understand that the initial consonant is optional.Our results indicated that the phonological awareness of Chinese children with DS, especially the syllable awareness, was significantly related to their reading skills, which proved that DS children’s phonological awareness abilities is related to reading skills from the Chinese point of view. The performance of both groups of subjects showed the importance of syllable awareness to Chinese reading and the reson may be that syllable is explicitly represented in the Chinese orthography. Different from the typically developing children, DS children’s tone awareness was not related to reading skills and when mental age was controlled the correlation between syllable awareness and reading skills did not remain significant.From the above, it can be seen that compared to the typically developing children, Chinese children with DS are impaired in phonological awareness abilities but their phonological awareness, especially the syllable awareness, is significantly related to their reading skills, which proves that DS children’s phonological awareness is related to their reading skills from the perspective of the Chinese language.