Phonological Awareness Skills Flashcards

A 10-year-old student with a confirmed dyslexia diagnosis scores at the 48th percentile on phoneme segmentation but at the 7th percentile on a phoneme elision task (e.g., 'Say CLAMP. Now say it without the /l/.'). What does this score discrepancy MOST likely reflect about the student's phonological processing?

Answer: Elision requires holding a phonological representation in working memory, isolating and deleting a target phoneme, then reassembling the remainder — placing greater demands on phonological manipulation than segmentation alone

Phoneme elision (deletion) tasks demand a multi-step process: maintain the full phonological representation in working memory, locate the target phoneme, delete it, and blend the remaining phonemes. This is fundamentally more demanding than segmentation, where the student simply partitions a word into its phonemes without manipulation. Students with dyslexia characteristically show larger deficits on manipulation tasks than on segmentation, because phonological manipulation places higher demands on the phonological working memory system that is impaired in dyslexia. The discrepancy is therefore diagnostically meaningful and consistent with the profile.

A CALT is sequencing phonological awareness tasks from least to most complex for a group of struggling readers. Which ordering correctly reflects the established developmental hierarchy?

Answer: Syllable segmentation → Onset-rime blending → Phoneme blending → Phoneme elision

Phonological awareness develops along a continuum from larger to smaller units of sound. Syllable-level tasks (segmentation, blending) emerge first, followed by onset-rime awareness, then phoneme-level tasks. Within phoneme-level tasks, blending is generally easier than full segmentation, and manipulation tasks (elision, substitution) are the most cognitively demanding. Option C correctly captures this sequence: syllable → onset-rime → phoneme blending → phoneme elision (manipulation). Option A places phoneme blending before syllable segmentation, reversing the hierarchy. Option D incorrectly places onset-rime before syllable tasks.

A 13-year-old student demonstrates intact phoneme segmentation and blending but struggles to recognize that 'electric' and 'electricity' share a common root despite the phonological shift from /k/ to /s/. She also fails to notice that 'sign' and 'signal' are morphologically related despite the different vowel qualities. The skill this student lacks is BEST classified as:

Answer: Morphophonological awareness, the ability to recognize that morphologically related words share underlying phonological representations despite surface alternations

Morphophonological awareness refers to the metalinguistic ability to recognize that words sharing a morphological root are phonologically related even when surface phonology changes — as with the /k/→/s/ alternation in electric/electricity or the vowel shift in sign/signal. This skill is distinct from basic phonological awareness (which operates at the phoneme, onset-rime, and syllable levels) and is critically important for advanced decoding, spelling of morphologically complex words, and vocabulary development. It typically develops in middle childhood and adolescence and is frequently targeted in CALT intervention for older students with persistent literacy difficulties.

A CALT chooses to supplement a standardized phonological awareness battery with a nonword (pseudoword) phoneme segmentation task (e.g., segmenting /frɪb/ or /stæmp/). Compared to real-word segmentation tasks, nonword tasks provide a purer measure of phonological processing primarily because:

Answer: Nonwords eliminate the influence of stored lexical-phonological representations, preventing students from relying on whole-word memory rather than phonological processing

When students segment real words, they can draw on stored whole-word phonological representations in long-term lexical memory — essentially recalling a word they have heard and segmented before — rather than assembling phonemes from scratch. Nonwords have no stored lexical entry, so the student must apply phonological processing skills directly. This makes nonword tasks a more valid measure of phonological processing ability, particularly for identifying students who appear to perform adequately on real-word tasks through lexical compensation but have underlying phonological deficits. This principle also underlies the diagnostic value of nonword reading (pseudoword decoding) in assessments like the CTOPP-2.

A CALT is differentiating between a primary phonological processing deficit (consistent with dyslexia) and a broader developmental language disorder (DLD) in a second-grade student. Which student profile presents the GREATEST diagnostic challenge for this differential?

Answer: A student with weak vocabulary, weak phoneme awareness, and weak morphological awareness — all approximately equally impaired

When phonological awareness, vocabulary, and morphological awareness are all uniformly depressed to approximately equal degrees, it becomes very difficult to determine whether the phonological deficit is the primary, causally central impairment (as in dyslexia, where a core phonological deficit drives downstream vocabulary and literacy effects) or whether the deficits reflect a broader language impairment in which phonological awareness is one of many affected systems (as in DLD). In contrast, the profile in option A — weak phoneme awareness with intact morphology — more strongly suggests a discrete phonological deficit. Option B is a clear dyslexia profile. Option D is more consistent with a phonological working memory or processing speed issue.

A CALT is designing phonological awareness intervention for two second-grade students who share a phoneme-level deficit but also have co-occurring weaknesses in phonological working memory (as measured by digit span and nonword repetition tasks). When modifying intervention design specifically to address their phonological working memory limitation, which adjustment should the CALT implement FIRST?

Answer: Introduce external memory supports — such as Elkonin boxes, colored tiles, or finger-tapping — to offload storage demands so students can direct attentional resources to the phonological manipulation itself

When phonological working memory is a co-occurring weakness, the primary instructional modification is to provide external memory supports that compensate for the internal storage limitation. Elkonin boxes, colored tiles, and finger-tapping give the student a physical representation of the phoneme sequence, reducing the cognitive demand on the phonological loop so the student can practice the manipulation skill itself rather than spending resources on maintenance. Restricting word length (option C) is also helpful but is a secondary accommodation. Avoiding blending (option D) is incorrect — blending is actually less demanding than segmentation for most students. Returning to onset-rime (option A) is a regression that abandons the phoneme-level goal.