Phonological awareness in different socioeconomic and age groups

Phonological awareness is the sensitivity to the segmental nature of the speech, an understanding that spoken language comprises of discrete units ranging from entire words and syllables to smaller intra-syllabic units of onsets, rimes and phonemes. Acquisition of phonological awareness skills has been found to be essential for the development of literacy. Measurement of phonological awareness has become crucial because, these abilities consistently predict reading ability in typically developing children (Ehri, 1999; Wood and amp; Terrell, 1998). Several studies have indicated that socioeconomic status and phonological awareness are related, but not many studies in this area, especially in Malayalam language, have examined the possibility that age moderates this relation (McDowell, Goldstein, 2007) i.e., that the effect of SES on phonological awareness is different at different ages. Therefore, the present study attempted to study the phonological awareness in different socio-economic status and age groups in Malayalam speaking children. 480 subjects were considered for the study and they were in the age range of three to seven years. They were divided into four groups, i.e., group I (3-4 years); group II (4-5 years); group III (5-6 years); group IV (6-7 years). Each group further divided into two subgroups again based on socio economic status: mid and high. Out of them 240 subjects were attending kindergarten and rest of them were attending Grade I and Grade II. The results of the analysis revealed that, the scores of the subjects for each of the tasks increased with an increase in age, the scores of the subjects from high socio economic status were higher when compared to scores of subjects from mid socio-economic status and no significant difference was found between the performance of males and females for all groups.