Тузла, Босна и Херцеговина PHONOLOGICAL SKILLS AMONG CHILDREN WITH READING DISABILITIES

Главната цел на ова истражување беше да се испитаат фонолошките вештини кај децата со пречки во читањето на босански/ хрватски/српски јазик каде секоја фонема е претставена со графема која го следи фонолошкиот принцип. Примерокот е составен од 15 деца со пречки во читањето и 15 деца без пречки во читањето. „Дијагностички сет за оценување на говорот, јазикот, читањето и пишувањето кај децата“ е употребен за испитување на нивните фонолошките способности. Фонолошките вештини кај децата се многу важни при учењето да читаат и пишуваат. Резултатите од ова истражување покажаа дека децата со пречки во читањето даваат посиромашни резултати во сите задачи кои ги испитуваа фонолошките вештини споредено со децата без пречки во читањето. Резултатите од ова истражување се усогласуваат со резултатите од други истражувања спроведени во други јазици и укажуваат на важноста на споменатите вештини при учењето читање на босански/хрватски/српски јазик, како и значајноста на дефицитарните фонолошки способности за етиологијата на тешкотиите во читањето. Врз основа на спроведеното истражување, може да се заклучи дека фонолошките способности се многу значајни за стекнување на способноста на читање и пишување. The main purpose of this study was to examine the phonological skills among children with reading disabilities of the Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian language, where each phoneme is represented by a grapheme following a certain phonemic principle. The sample consists of 15 children with reading disabilities and 15 children without reading disabilities, where "The diagnostic set for examination of the speech, language, reading and writing abilities among children" was used for examination of their phonological capacity. Phonological skills in children are very important for reading and writing acquisition. The results of the study showed that children with reading disabilities achieved poorer results in all tasks examining the phonological skills, compared to children without reading difficulties. The results of our study comply with results of studies conducted for other languages. The study highlights the importance of the mentioned skills for acquiring reading skills in the Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian language and the significance of deficient phonological abilities for the etiology of reading disabilities. Based on the conducted study, it can be concluded that phonological skills are very important for acquiring reading and writing abilities.

coding, where letter patterns are transformed into phonological codes (9).Dyslexia involves deficiency within the language system, especially at the level of a phonological module.Children with dyslexia need more time to retrieve appropriate phonemes and sometimes while speaking these children retrieve a phoneme that sounds similar to the one they intended to pronounce.The children with dyslexia lack phonemic awareness and they experience difficulty noticing basic sounds -phonemes that make up all spoken and written words (10).The majority of studies about phonological skills among children with dyslexia have been conducted in English speaking countries.The Bosnian language is characterized with a phonemic alphabet, where each letter corresponds to one sound.The English language has fewer consistent relationships between sounds and letters than many other languages; for example, the letter sequence ough can be pronounced in 10 different ways (11).It takes longer for students to become completely fluent readers of English than of many other languages (12).The main purpose of this study was to examine phonological abilities among children with reading difficulties in a language where each phoneme is represented by grapheme following a phonemic principle.The phonemes and graphemes are defined as the smallest units that enable differentiation of meaning between written and spoken language; and phonemic principle dominates and words are written in the way they sound.

Method of the study and measuring instruments used for assessment
We used "The diagnostic set for examination of speech, language, reading and writing abilities of the children", for examination of their phonological abilities, part related to examination of the conditions of a language system of students with reading and writing disabilities -Phonemic processes.

Auditory discrimination of sounds within words
The condition of phonemic discrimination of acoustically related phonemes which determine the word semantics was examined in the following way: we requested that the child listen attentively to the sentences which included one incorrect word and then correct the errors; i.e. to replace the incorrect word with a semantically correct one.Each of the sentences included one word which semantically did not correspond to this sentence, but it was acoustically related to a semantically appropriate word.The child listened to the whole sentence, segregated the semantically incorrect word and replaced it with the correct one by changing one acoustically related sound.The examiner noted the sound that the child omitted, and for each omitted sound one point was assigned.
examination was performed by perceiving the specific word in the string of semantically related words and in the string of semantically unrelated words.Afterward, we requested that the child carefully listen to the given text and to clap hands upon hearing the given word.If the child clapped his/her hands immediately after hearing the given word, 3 points were assigned.If the child clapped his/her hands with a delay, 2 points were assigned and if the child did not perceive the given word, no points were assigned.

Phonemic synthesis of the sounds within words
The ability to synthesize separated sounds into one word unit was examined in the following way: the examiner pronounced isolated sounds one by one and requested from the child to guess the word and to pronounce it.In uniform rhythm, the examiner clearly pronounced sounds one by one.We started with twosyllable words, then went on to one-syllable and multi-syllable words.One point was assigned for each correct answer.

Phonemic analysis and synthesis
The examination of all stages of phonemic word analysis was conducted in the following way: a) Separation of initial, medial and final sound in the word The examiner was reading the words to the child and requested that the child raise cards with the signs + or -, depending on the situation, whether the given sound is at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the word or not.The examiner first practiced with the child in order to check whether the child understood the task or not.One point was assigned for each correctly performed task.
offering the child to read aloud and at the same time to move his/her finger on the ordinal numbers.For each correctly performed task, one point was assigned.

c) Identification of order and position of the sound within words in relation to other sounds
The examiner demonstrated to the child the picture and scheme of the word and requested from the child to mark (colour) in the scheme the position of a given sound.If the child was not able to mentally determine the position of the requested sound, the examiner facilitated the task by offering the child to pronounce the sounds aloud and at the same time to move his/her finger on the circles of the scheme.For each correctly performed task, one point was assigned.

Methods of data analysis
SPSS for MS WINDOWS Release 10.0 and Statistica for Windows Release 4.5.were used for data processing.Basic statistics were calculated for all variables by groups.The differences between the groups were determined by t-test and discriminate analysis.
concluded that those children had strong auditory attention.The mean value for the variable related to synthesis of sounds within two-syllable words was 3,80, for synthesis of one-syllable and multi-syllable words was 3,53.It can be concluded that the children with reading disabilities had the best scores for synthesis of sounds within two-syllable words.In the mentioned tasks, children without reading difficulties achieved maximum results.The mean value of the variable related to separation of initial sound within the word, obtained from the children with reading disabilities was 37,13.The value of the variable for separation of medial sound within the word was 33,40 and the variable for separation of final sound within a word had a mean value of 42,60.The best results were obtained from the variables related to separation of final sound within a word.The children without reading difficulties also achieved the best results for the variable related to the separation of a final sound within a word.The mean value for the children with reading difficulties for the variable related to identification of number of sounds within a given word was 7,20.The assessment of the abilities related to the identification of order and position of the sound within a word was performed by demonstrating seven pictures for the subject.It was then requested from him/her to mark in the scheme the position of the given sound.The mean value of that variable among children with reading difficulties was 6,47.The mean value for variables related to identification of number of sounds within a given word among children without reading difficulties was 8,00.The mean value for the variable regarding the identification of order and position of the sound within a word in relation to other sounds was 7,00.The standard deviation for both variables was 0,00.It can be concluded that all the subjects without any difficulty achieved maximum results for the two mentioned variables.The discriminative analysis and the t-test were used to examine the differences between the two examined groups by measuring variables related to the assessment of phonological skills.

Табела 1. Основни статистички параметри за оценување на фонолошките вештини
One discriminative function was obtained by the discriminative analysis.The discriminative function, considering the Wilks lambda for the first function of 0,13 with a 12 degree of freedom and the χ 2 test with a value of 44,84 were statistically significant at a 0,00 level (Table 2).The analysis of the discriminative coefficients revealed that the discriminative function was created by the following variables: auditory discrimination of sounds within words (AD_SOUND), phonemic synthesis of sounds within a two-syllable word (TWOSYLL) and a variable with negative sign: identification of sounds within words (NR_SOUND).The value of centroids for the sample of children with dyslexia was 2,50 and for children without dyslexia was -2,50.This indicates that the discriminative function was rotated in such a way that higher negative values signify higher possibility that the subject belongs to a group of children without dyslexia and disgraphy, and higher positive values signify that a subject belongs to the group of children with dyslexia.Разликите помеѓу двете групи беа испитани преку т-тест.Резултатите на т-тестот покажаа статистичка разлика помеѓу двете групи на субјекти во сите испитани променливи.

Табела 2. Дискриминантна анализа
The differences between both groups were examined with the t-test.The results of the t-test showed statistically significant difference between the two subject groups in all examined variables.(19).И други истражува-language.Children who understand that the sounds in a language represent the letters used for reading and writing typically learn to read more easily than children who do not (13).Phonetic synthesis represents knowledge of segmentation which is related to decoding.Successful decoding of a new word depends on the child's ability to synthesize phonemes (6).

Табела 3. Идентификација на разликите помеѓу децата со пречки во читањето и децата без пречки во читањето во средните вредности на променливите кои ги оценуваат фонолошките вештини
In our study, the phonetic synthesis of sounds into words was used as an instrument in order to determine the child's ability to synthesize separated sounds into one word unit.We obtained differences between the two examined groups in relation to sound synthesis.The children with reading disabilities achieved the best results in the sound synthesis within the two-syllable words.Phonological assessment battery was useful in identifying reading difficulties (14).The deficient phonological awareness and automatic rapid naming very often precede and are closely related to the difficulties in the process of spoken word recognition (8).The basic disorder in dyslexia is the deficiency of phonemic awareness (15).Although there are acoustic measuring instruments which indicate where the syllables are divided, in the spoken language no measurement exists which would indicate where the phonemes are divided (16).By second grade, children should have developed the ability to segment words into phonemes (17).In our study, we obtained differences between the two examined groups in all tasks assessing the phonemic analysis and the synthesis skills.The best results for both groups were obtained for recognition of the final sound within the word.A similar study was conducted for the Bosnian language and the results showed statistically significant differences between the children with and without reading disabilities in auditory discrimination of initial and final sound within the word (18).Research from the English speaking world also showed that subjects with dyslexia exhibited lower scores in tasks assessing phonemic awareness compared to the control subjects (19) (20).The children with dyslexia showed fewer correct responses and spontaneous recalls than the control group assembled of typically developing readers (21).
Several studies resulted with the hypothesis of phonological deficit among individuals with dyslexia, proposed on the basis of long term research done by the experts from Haskins laboratory (22) and repeated by other researchers (23).Different researchers consider that the deficiency in phonological processing leads to poor reading skills (24).
In our study, we obtained significantly higher values for children with reading disabilities compared to the children without disabilities in the task related to auditory discrimination of sounds within words.The children with reading disabilities had the best perception of the word in a string of semantically unconnected words, which could be explained by the assumption that their auditory attention was strongest at the beginning of the assessment.Dyslexia involves difficulties in the phonological processing (25).Ability to recognize phonemes within words is closely related to reading success in children with speech and language difficulties (23).Similar results were obtained in other studies assessing children who are at a risk of reading difficulties.In addition, the correlation between the reading problems and the specific phonological errors was noted within multi-syllable words and phonetically complex phrases (26).The differences between the two examined groups were also obtained by measuring the ability to determine order and position of sound within a given word, i.e. to determine the number of sounds within the word and to determine the order and position of a sound in relation to other sounds.The results of the discriminative analysis revealed that the two examined groups were discriminated by the variables: auditory discrimination of sounds within words, phonemic synthesis of sounds синтеза на гласови во составот на повеќесложен збор и идентификација на бројот на гласови во состав на даден збор.Други истражувачи ја открија разликата во способноста за броење фонеми, мерена помеѓу субјекти со дислексија и контролна група (27).within a multi-syllable word and identification of number of sounds within a given word.Other researchers have found a difference between subjects with dyslexia and control group in the ability to count phonemes (27).

Table 1 .
Basic statistical parameters for assessment of the phonological skills