ارتباط بین مهارت های پردازش واج شناسی و عملکرد شناسایی واژه ای و غیرواژه ای در کودکانی که ناتوانی های ذهنی خفیف دارند

Word and nonword identification skills were examined in a sample of 80 elementary school age students with mild intellectual disabilities and mixed etiologies who were described as struggling to learn to read by their teachers. Performance on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, measures of phonological awareness, and measures of word and nonword identification were included for analyses. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that, after controlling for chronological age and vocabulary knowledge, phonological processing accounted for a large and significant amount of unique variance of both word and nonword identification. In addition, the pattern of results found in this study is similar to that obtained with typically developing learners. As with typically developing children, measures of phonological awareness were significantly correlated with measures of both reading achievement and vocabulary knowledge.

Limited research exists concerning the literacy skills of children with intellectual disabilities. Recent research conducted with this population suggests that phonological awareness is related to reading performance by these individuals and that they can benefit from phonemic literacy instruction. The limited corpus of research documenting the literacy skills of children with intellectual disabilities mainly has been conducted with very small samples of children with Down syndrome. Data reported here are part of a larger ongoing project with children who have mild intellectual disabilities resulting from various etiological factors that examines the impact of two reading programs on both early developing reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness, word decoding) and the development of fluency and comprehension skills.