Internal Awareness of Phonological Representation in Children with Speech Sound Disorders

Objectives: This paper describes the development of the Internal Awareness of Phonological Representation (IAPR) task. This task was designed to assess a child's ability to be aware of sounds and manipulate them silently within their own stored representations while minimizing the impact of any output difficulties. The purpose of this study is to examine the underlying difficulties in phonological awareness of children with speech sound disorders (SSD) by comparing their performance on the IAPR task with typically developing children. Methods: We compared the correct response scores and reaction time on the IAPR task between a SSD group and a typically developing group of children. The correlations among the IAPR task, phonological awareness task, and phonological representation judgment task were then analyzed. Results: In the IAPR task, there were significant differences between the groups according to both correct response scores and reaction time. And there were positive correlations among the IAPR task, phonological awareness task, and phonological representations judgment task. Conclusion: The IAPR task can provide more information on both the accuracy and specificity of underlying phonological representations and phonological awareness ability. The results of the present study suggest the possibility that children with SSD have difficulties in the activation and operation of phonological representation and that this is one of the underlying factors of SSD.