title: Phonological awareness in French-speaking children at risk for reading disabilities.
abstract: We report the phonological awareness abilities of preliterate French-speaking children. The performance of a group of children identified At Risk (n = 26) for reading disabilities was compared to that of normally developing age-matched controls (n = 22) on a range of standardised and experimental tests. Results showed the At Risk children to have a selective impairment in expressive relative to receptive language, whereas Controls performed at equivalent levels on both measures. Although the children At Risk performed at a significantly lower level than Controls on all but one of the metaphonological tests, their pattern of performance was similar to that of Controls, suggesting a developmental delay. Interestingly, both groups showed a superiority of awareness for syllables over phonemes, reflecting the phonological structure of the French language.
authors.affiliation: Centre de Recherche, Institut universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal, Université de Montréal.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Courcy
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Béland
authors.forename: N J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Pitchford
mesh_terms: D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D011446:Prospective Studies; D012720:Severity of Illness Index