Dorofeeva, S. V. 1 , Reshetnikova, V. 1 , Serebryakova, M. 2 , Laurinavichute, A. 3 , Artemova, A. 1 , Goranskaya, D. 1 , Akhutina, T. V. 4 & Dragoy, O. 1, 5
1 National Research University Higher School of Economics
2 Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation
3 Potsdam University
4 Lomonosov Moscow State University
5 Federal Center for Cerebrovascular Pathology and Stroke
It has long been acknowledged that phoneme detection is associated with reading acquisition. It is also one of the phonological awareness tasks which are better predictors of early reading skills than onset-rime awareness. (Bryant et al., 1990; Hulme et al., 2002). To investigate, if this task is effective for diagnosing the phonological processing deficit in dyslexic children in Russian, we developed the phoneme detection test and conducted the study in two groups of Russian-speaking children of elementary school: typically developing (N=90) and dyslexic (N=50).
The test contained 24 1-to-3-syllable items, it was programmed in Java and administered using a Samsung Galaxy Tab A SM-T585 (2016), screen size 10.1?. Audio stimuli were recorded by a professional speaker. Participants heard a phoneme followed by a word and had to press the ?Yes? button if the phoneme was present in the word, and ?No? otherwise (e.g., ?l ? rak (a crayfish)?, ?sh ? loshad?(a horse)?, ?k ? podarok (a present)? ).
We found significant differences between typically developing and dyslexic children (?=0.07, SE=0.016, t=4.3, Pr(>|t|) <0.001) in phoneme detection. We did not find systematic gender differences, but we revealed that the performance reliably increased with grade (?=0.03, SE=0.007 t=4.26, Pr(>|t|) <0.001).