Investigating the relationship between phonological awareness and phonological processes in children with speech sound disorders

Some children with speech sound disorder (SSD) have difficulty with phonological awareness skills; therefore, the purpose of this study was to survey the correlation between phonological processes and phonological awareness. Twenty-one children with speech sound disorder, aged between 5 and 6, participated in this cross-sectional study. They were recruited from speech therapy clinics at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences. They were selected using the convenience sampling method. Language, speech sound, and phonological awareness skills were investigated by the test of language development-third edition (TOLD-3), the Persian diagnostic evaluation articulation and phonology test, and the phonological awareness test. Both Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlations were used to analyze the data. There was a significant correlation between the atypical phonological processes and alliteration awareness (p=0.005), rhyme awareness (p=0.009), blending phonemes (p=0.006), identification of words with the same initial phoneme (p=0.007), and identification of words with the same final phoneme (p=0.007). Analyzing the correlation on the basis of the phoneme and syllable structure separately showed there was a significant correlation between the atypical phoneme structure and alliteration awareness (p=0.001), rhyme awareness (p=0.008), blending phonemes (p=0.029), identification of words with the same initial phoneme (p=0.007), and identification of words with the same final phoneme (p=0.003). Results revealed a relationship between phonological processes and phonological awareness in children with speech sound disorder. Poor phonological awareness was associated with atypical phonological processes especially at the phoneme level.