By Sarah Sainty, Assessment Consultant
By Sarah Sainty, Assessment Consultant
The term ‘phonological processing’ refers to the cognitive aspects of perceiving, storing and retrieving the sounds of spoken language. Phonological processing is essential for the development of speech and language, and is also important for literacy. It is identified within the Delphi definition of dyslexia as being ‘the most commonly observed cognitive impairment in dyslexia’ (Holden et al, 2024), with three aspects of it being particularly relevant:
Phonological processing, speech and language develop alongside each other and are intricately linked. Even young babies have some implicit phonological knowledge; they will react to speech sounds in preference to other sounds, particularly the sounds that their own mother makes (DeCasper, 1980). They can also discriminate between different speech sounds. Babbling is not random but draws on the consonant-vowel combinations babies hear around them, so that they are effectively experimenting with units of sounds that they will use later in mature speech. Through babbling, babies build the foundations for the physical articulation skills needed for talking, whilst simultaneously starting to learn the communicative value that speech sounds can have. Receptive language (the understanding of language) begins as children attach meaning to strings of sounds, and expressive language follows – as they start using these sounds in meaningful ways.
An early challenge in phonological processing is to identify individual words as single units, separable from the phrase or sentence in which they are heard. This is a fundamental part of vocabulary development and there can be trial and error involved in the process.
My own daughter’s first word was “heeyar”, which she would say if she wanted someone to give something to her. It is debatable whether this really counts as a first word, as in the adult version it was in fact the three words “Here you are!” Also, she would say it when she wanted something, rather than when giving something to someone else, so had not grasped its true meaning. In the first few years of life however, children become more and more adept at identifying, storing and retrieving the specific sequences of sounds that make up individual words, and in combining words effectively to convey meaning.
Not to be confused with phonological processing, the term ‘phonological processes’ refers to patterns of sound errors that typically developing children use in early development to simplify speech. A sound that is usually made at the front of the mouth may be used instead of one made at the back of the mouth (e.g. ‘dod’ for dog), a ‘weak syllable’ may be dropped (e.g.‘nana’ for banana), or a sound in a consonant cluster may be dropped (e.g. ‘pider’ for spider).
Children constantly improve the way they say things, not only because the relevant motor skills for speech are developing, but also because they become increasingly sensitive to the sound structure of the words they hear around them, and the way they say things themselves. Typically developing children gradually correct their own errors. At first this is an automatic, unconscious process, but later it may be done with deliberate intent. There was a memorable moment of mixed emotions in our household when my son made his normal request to watch a ‘viddydo’ and then corrected it to ‘video’.
As a child’s vocabulary expands, there is an ongoing need to differentiate new words from other words they already know. The mental models they have of the sound structure of words (phonological representations) become more sophisticated, accompanied by stored information about word meanings (semantic representations), how to physically produce the words (motor representations) and how to use words in sentences (grammatical representations). The stronger a child’s phonological awareness, the more refined their phonological representations are likely to be. Strengths in phonological memory facilitate vocabulary growth, as the child can retain unfamiliar sequences of words more accurately and for longer, giving opportunities for repeating them and for storing them in long-term memory. When phonological memory is weak, many more repetitions of new words may be needed for accurate and secure retention. Strengths in phonological processing speed will mean that sound-based information may be retrieved quickly, accurately and easily when talking. When phonological representations are imprecise or when phonological processing is slow, it may be hard to retrieve specific words accurately in the moment they are needed (word-finding difficulties).
As children approach school age, an explicit awareness of the sound structure of words is likely to be emerging, characterised by sensitivity to increasingly small units of sound. Typically, they will already have some awareness of syllables and enjoy rhyme and alliteration, and some children may be becoming aware of individual speech sounds (phonemes) in words. At school this conscious awareness of phonemes will soon become an expectation, as it is the foundation for learning and applying the alphabetic code and the rules of phonics that determine how those sounds are represented with letters.
Through mastery of phonics, children can decode words when reading by systematically mapping letters to sounds (‘sounding out’ words) and then ‘blending’ those sounds together. Phonological awareness combined with phonics knowledge also provides a route to encoding when spelling – where words must be broken down or ‘segmented’ into their component sounds, and the letters that correspond to each sound are written down. ‘Orthographic representations’ or mental representations of the spellings of words can be added to the other types of information that children have already stored about words.
Phonological awareness is the aspect of phonological processing that has attracted the most attention in the context of literacy, but phonological memory and phonological processing speed are important too. As well as supporting the growth of vocabulary, phonological memory is needed for example to hold sequences of sounds to be held in mind for long enough to blend them together when reading, and to write down the correct letters when spelling. Phonological processing speed contributes to reading by enabling phonological information to be retrieved in a timely way in response to the words on the page. People with dyslexia may have difficulties in one or more areas of phonological processing, affecting the accuracy and/or fluency of their reading and spelling.
There are many tests available for assessing different aspects of phonological processing. Phonological awareness tasks may require such skills as rhyming, segmenting, blending, and phoneme identification or manipulation. Phonological memory is usually tested with nonword repetition tasks or digit span tests. Phonological processing speed may be assessed with a rapid naming task.
DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P. (1980). Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers' voices. Science, 208(4448), 1174–1176. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7375928
Holden, C., Kirby, P., Snowling, M.J., Carroll, J., & Thompson, P.A. (2024) forthcoming. Towards a consensus for dyslexia practice: Findings of a Delphi study on assessment and identification. https://osf.io/preprints/edarxiv/g7m8n [Accessed 22 May 2024]