title: Development of a test battery for assessing phonological awareness in German-speaking children.
abstract: The development of phonological awareness (PA), the ability to reflect on the sound structure of words independent of their meaning, has been extensively explored in English-speaking children. However, this is not the case for other languages. The aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive PA test battery for German-speaking preschool children, considering psycholinguistic, linguistic, and cognitive aspects and to carry out analyses of its psychometric properties. Cross-sectional data from a sample of 55 children (CA 4;0-6;11 years) were collected. Preliminary findings confirm validity and reliability of the test battery, and support previous findings that PA develops from larger to smaller linguistic units. Phoneme-level tasks were consistently associated with letter knowledge. The new instrument is a promising tool for basic research (e.g. cross-linguistic comparisons of PA development) as well as for clinical and educational practice (e.g. planning speech and language therapy or literacy-oriented intervention).
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. b.schaefer@sheffield.ac.uk
authors.forename: Blanca
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schaefer
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fricke
authors.forename: Marcin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Szczerbinski
authors.forename: Annette V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Fox-Boyer
authors.forename: Joy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Stackhouse
authors.forename: Bill
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wells
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods; D011932:Reading; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012737:Sex Factors