Metaphonological skills of children with phonological disorders before and after phonological and metaphonological intervention

This study investigated the relationships between the phonological and metaphonological skills of 19 children aged 3-5 years with moderate to severe phonological disorders, and the effects of intervention on the children's awareness skills. Seven tasks were used which required children to produce alliterations and rhymes, to segment sentences, disyllabic and monosyllabic words, and to change the names of objects. Children's metaphonological skills were tested (a) before intervention, (b) following phonological intervention and (c) following phonological plus metaphonological intervention. Evaluation of children's segmental and syllable/wordshape profiles before intervention indicated that children with larger phonetic inventories and better word and syllable shapes tended to have higher metaphonology task scores. Individual variation, however, suggested that children's overall phonological profiles rather than particular characteristics of their speech were more important for good metaphonological task performance. Children's phonological awareness skills were also related to their morphosyntactic production skills. Intervention outcomes indicated that both phonological and metaphonological intervention may result in a significant increase in children's metaphonological task performance. It was further observed that children with more moderate phonological disorders and good morphosyntactic production skills tended to improve on the metaphonological tasks after phonological intervention alone. Children with more severe phonological and morphosyntactic disorders tended to increase their task performance only after phonological plus metaphonological intervention.