The impact of intervention on production, feature awareness, and general phonological awareness

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effects of a specific intervention program on production and feature awareness, as well as on general phonological awareness skills, in four children with moderate-to-severe phonological impairments. The program, which combined conceptual awareness with production rather than focusing solely on production, included components of the Metaphon (Howell & Dean, 1991) and the "cycles" (Hodson & Paden, 1991) intervention approaches.Four children (2 boys, 2 girls) whose ages at the beginning of the study were 3;5, 3;7, 3;11, and 4;2 served as subjects. For each child, at least three basic target classes (features and/or syllable shapes) were present on no more than 20% of the opportunities for their occurrence, based on the Assessment of Phonological Processes-Revised (Hodson, 1986). All of the subjects were monolingual English speakers, and were within normal range ($\pm$1 s.d.) on other aspects of speech, language, hearing and nonverbal intelligence.Improvement was evaluated in the context of a multiple-probe design (Horner & Baer, 1977) across target classes and across subjects. Assessments across children for four target classes as well as within each child across three different target classes were conducted to determine change in the dependent variables. Production and feature awareness were assessed repeatedly throughout the intervention program. General phonological awareness skills were assessed on four occasions.Results indicated that all four subjects showed improvement in their production skills during participation in this study. These improvements were noted in single word productions, conversation, and when comparing pre- and post-assessments. Feature awareness, measured by means of four different tasks, revealed inconsistent results. The most consistent improvement was noted in the subjects' performances on target class recognition and accompanied gains in production in most cases. Accessory effects were observed to varying degrees in the subjects' rhyming, blending, and segmentation skills.These findings indicate that the phonological awareness skills of children with phonological impairments can be improved, along with production, through training. The specific intervention program promoted the children's ability to incorporate new phonological rules into their repertoires in a relatively short period of time. Results also suggest some relation between intervention for phonological impairments and rhyming, segmentation, and blending skills.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio