Browsing by Author "Patronen, Senni"
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Patronen, Senni (2021)Aims: The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of a new phonemic awareness test to study children who have potential problems in their reading skills. The children were second graders whose reading skills either had or had not caused worry at home or school. The phonemic awareness test was developed for investigating and providing intervention on phonemic awareness. This new method includes ten different ways to change phonemes in a word. We determined if some of these phonemic changes are better at separating the groups from each other and whether there are differences between the tasks in the degree of difficulty. In addition, the children were also tested with standardized neuropsychological tests that measure reading-related skills. The study was done completely remotely and one of its aims was also to get additional information on feasibility of neuropsychological testing in remote environments. Methods: 16 participants took part in the study. Eight of them were children whose reading skills had caused worry and other eight whose reading skills had not caused such worry. The study was done remotely using Zoom and the experiment took about 1-1,5 hours depending on how quickly the child completed the tasks. There were 11 tasks altogether, which assessed the child’s reading and writing skills and skills that can affect these, such as phonological skills, working memory and rapid naming. Results: The groups differed from each other almost in every standardized test and also in the new phonemic awareness test. In the new phonemic awareness test children who had caused worry on their reading skills got less points in every part, but the groups differed statistically significantly in five of them only. These five included changing the beginning or the ending of the word, diphthong, diphthong to long vowel and changing a vowel to a consonant. The degree of difficulty varied between the subtests of the phonemic awareness task, the pattern of performance being comparable in the two groups. Detecting differences between word beginnings and syllables was the easiest and detecting diphthong and vowel to consonant or consonant to vowel changes were the most difficult. These results are promising, suggesting that the phonemic awareness test could serve to identify problems in phonemic awareness in children whose reading skills are suspected to be poor. This study also suggested the feasibility of carrying out neuropsychological tests remotely.
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