The articulation abilities and phonological awareness of five- to seven-year-olds

The development of the child's speech sound articulation ability and phonological awareness goes through different stages during the child's preschool years. The aim of our research was to determine the articulation abilities and phonological awareness level in children with typical development. Our sample comprised 195 children aged five to seven. Speech sound articulation abilities and phonological awareness were assessed by means of the Global Test of Articulation and the FONT Phonological Awareness Test. The research results indicate that, depending on age, 42% to 78.3% of children are able to articulate clearly all 30 sounds of the Serbian language. An analysis of the Phonological Awareness Test results shows children performed best in the following tasks: syllable blending (99.1%), syllable segmentation (85%) and initial phoneme identification (86.1%), while they were least successful in the task of initial phoneme deletion (48.8%). Results have shown that children's success in most tasks within the framework of the elements of phonological awareness assessed - such as initial phoneme identification, rhyme recognition, phoneme segmentation, final phoneme identification, initial phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution (initial phoneme) - increases with children's age. The development of final phoneme identification, initial phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution (initial phoneme) abilities continues after children start school, as shown by data on the success rate among seven-year-olds. In view of the fact that phonological awareness plays an important role in the development and acquisition of reading ability, when working with preschool-age children particular attention should be devoted to tasks that stimulate the development of phonological awareness.