title: Assessment of three-and-a-half-year-old children's emerging phonological awareness in a computer animation context.
abstract: Four computer-animated tasks were created to analyze the underlying structure of emerging phonological awareness at 3.5 years of age and to explore the factors that influence children's (N = 91) performance on the tasks. Our findings indicated that already at this young age, children are able to master tasks demanding identification, blending, and continuation of phonological units when the tasks are presented in a motivating assessment context. In line with earlier research, children showed higher mastery in dealing with words and syllables than in dealing with phonemes. Targets in the initial position of a word were easier for children to identify than those in the final position. Our analysis provided support for two major dimensions of emerging phonological awareness based on the cognitive operations of the tasks: identification and blending of phonological units.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology (Agora/Poikkeus), University of Jyväskylä, Finland. puolaan@jklmlk.fi
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Puolakanaho
authors.forename: Anna-Maija
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Poikkeus
authors.forename: Timo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ahonen
authors.forename: Asko
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tolvanen
authors.forename: Heikki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lyytinen
mesh_terms: D001364:Awareness; D002359:Cartoons as Topic; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception