Phonological Processing Ability of Children with Speech Sound Disorders and Developmental Dyslexia in Early Elementary School Years

Lee, Rayeon; Ha, Seunghee

doi:2025.30.1.76

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2025;30(1): 76-86.
Published online March 31, 2025.
doi: https://doi.org/10.12963/csd.250104

Phonological Processing Ability of Children with Speech Sound Disorders and Developmental Dyslexia in Early Elementary School Years

Rayeon Lee^a

, and Seunghee Ha^b

^aGraduate Program in Speech Language Pathology, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea
^bDivision of Speech Pathology and Audiology, Research Institute of Audiology and Speech Pathology, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea

Corresponding Author: Seunghee Ha ,Tel: +82-33-248-2215, Fax: +82-33-256-3420, Email: shha@hallym.ac.kr

Received January 5, 2025 Revised: February 10, 2025 Accepted February 10, 2025

ABSTRACT

Objectives
This study aimed to compare the phonological processing abilities of four groups of early elementary school children: typically developing (TD) children, children with speech sound disorders (SSD only), children with speech sound disorders and co-occurring developmental dyslexia (SSD+DD), and children with developmental dyslexia (DD).
Methods
The participants included 14 TD children, 4 children with SSD only, 10 children with SSD+DD, and 13 children with DD in the first to third grades. Phonological awareness was assessed at the syllable and phoneme levels. To examine phonological memory ability, nonword repetition, sentence repetition, and picture-pointing tasks were conducted. Rapid automatized naming was assessed using number and letter stimuli.
Results
Significant differences were observed among the groups in all phonological processing subcomponent tasks. No significant differences were found among the TD, SSD only, and DD groups. Additionally, the TD and SSD only groups demonstrated similar performance. The SSD+DD group exhibited significantly lower performance across all tasks, indicating severe deficits in phonological processing.
Conclusion
This study demonstrated that school-age children with SSD+DD show distinct vulnerabilities in phonological processing skills compared to children with SSD only or DD. Although establishing a clear causal relationship between deficits in phonological processing skills, speech production, and reading problems is challenging, this study suggests a complex interplay between these issues.

Keywords: Phonological processing | Speech sound disorders | Developmental dyslexia | School-aged | Co-occurring disabilities