Phonological awareness and the working memory of children with and without literacy difficulties

Purpose: To investigate phonological awareness and working memory skills as well as their influence on the literacy process in a group of intellectually normal children. Methods: Forty intellectually normal children (7.6–8.0 years) from the second and third grades of elementary school participated. Children were organized in two groups (20 children each): one with and another without literacy difficulties. These participants underwent RAVEN’s intelligence quotient test, audiometric assessment, CONFIAS test of phonological awareness, written spelling task, and working memory test. Results: Children in the alphabetic phase presented a good development of phonological awareness, and 85% of them showed a high-performance working memory. Children in the syllabic-alphabetic phase had changes in phonological awareness, and 91.6% of them showed an average working memory performance. The subjects at pre-syllabic and syllabic phases demonstrated more difficulties in phonological awareness than those at syllabic-alphabetic and had a poor working memory performance. Between-group differences were observed for CONFIAS and working memory tests (p<0.0001). There was also a significant correlation (r=0.78, p=0.01) between the skills of phonological awareness and working memory for the total sample of individuals. Conclusions: Based on these results, it was found that as phonological awareness and working memory levels increased, the literacy phase also advanced, therefore showing that these are directly proportional measures. 111 Consciência fonológica e memória de trabalho CoDAS 2013;25(2):110-14 INTRODUÇÃO O código escrito é uma forma de representação linguística que implica na habilidade de compreender ideias, memorizar informações e transmitir mensagens, possibilitando ao indivíduo a interação com o mundo letrado no qual está inserido. Durante o processo de aprendizagem escolar, muitas crianças apresentam dificuldade na alfabetização por diversas causas. A memória é um dos aspectos mais importantes que possibilita a aprendizagem. Alterações nela podem ocasionar uma dificuldade no armazenamento das informações ensinadas, dificultando, portanto, a aquisição da leitura e da escrita. O processo do aprendizado da leitura e da escrita requer esforço e um ambiente estimulante. Ser alfabetizado significa adquirir a habilidade de codificar a língua oral em escrita e decodificar a escrita em oral. Ler e escrever também se referem à apreensão e compreensão de significados expressos em língua escrita (ler) e expressão dos mesmos por meio da língua escrita (escrever). Os processamentos visoespacial e fonológico são importantes para a aquisição da linguagem escrita. As informações visuais e fonológicas, uma vez percebidas, são armazenadas na memória de trabalho e posteriormente transferidas para a de longo prazo, possibilitando o aprendizado da associação fonema-grafema. Por meio da memória é possível realizar o armazenamento e a recuperação das informações linguística, oral ou escrita. Uma disfunção nesses processos pode afetar a habilidade de leitura e escrita. Durante o processo de alfabetização, as informações fonológicas e visuais precisam ser registradas na memória de trabalho e devem ser transferidas para a de longo prazo a fim de ocasionar o aprendizado do idioma escrito. Devido a essa importância da memória de trabalho no processo de aprendizagem alfabética, tornam-se indispensáveis as avaliações da consciência fonológica e da memória de trabalho em crianças que se encontram na alfabetização. Nesse sentido, o objetivo do presente estudo foi investigar as habilidades de consciência fonológica e de memória de trabalho, bem como a sua influência no momento de aprendizagem da alfabetização em um grupo de crianças intelectualmente normais com e sem dificuldades. A integridade da memória de trabalho, além de outros aspectos, permite o processo de compreender a leitura e a escrita, possibilitando a formação de um cidadão funcionalmente letrado, ou seja, um sujeito capaz de fazer uso da linguagem escrita para sua necessidade individual.

CoDAS 2013;25(2):110-14 Group 1 comprised 14 boys and six girls, whereas Group 2 comprised 14 girls and 6 boys without literacy difficulties.The average age and the minimum and maximum ages were similar for both groups.
It was estimated that the subjects presented the same socioeconomic level because they were attending a public school located in the same municipality.Children with alterations in the audiometric test and the intelligence quotient (IQ) test were excluded.Children who had grade delay, school failure, language delay, and neurological and visual alterations, according to the information provided by the parents in the initial interview, were also excluded.
The following instruments were used: RAVEN IQ test-Colored Progressive Matrices (16) , tonal audiometry, CONFIAS phonological awareness test considering tasks of syllabic and phonemic awareness (17) , spelling written test by Capovilla and Capovilla (18) , and working memory test by Curi (1) .
Children were referred by teachers of municipal schools to IQ testing, which was administered by a psychologist of a City Health Unit.Next, the students underwent audiometric evaluation.All those who had alterations in these tests were excluded from the study and referred for medical and speech, language, and hearing follow-up.Thus, it was possible to select a sample of 40 cognitively normal children who had auditory thresholds within normal limits.Speech and language evaluations then were applied.The written spelling test was the first to be performed in order to identify the literacy level.Thus, two groups emerged, one comprising 20 children with delay in the literacy process, i.e., in the pre-syllabic, syllabic, or syllabic-alphabetic phases (Group 1), and another comprising 20 children at the level of writing in alphabetic phase (Group 2).The CONFIAS test was then used to assess phonological awareness.The working memory test was later performed by the psychologist.After the evaluations, the results were statistically analyzed using tests to estimate the correlation and differences between phonological awareness and working memory for each group (nonparametric Spearman correlation test, nonparametric paired t test, Wilcoxon test, and Kruskal-Wallis test).

RESULTS
Table 2 displays the mean, standard deviation, and minimum and maximum values of syllable, phoneme, and overall CONFIAS and working memory tests for Groups 1 and 2.
Table 3 shows the difference between the means and significance levels of the variables tested in groups with and without literacy difficulties.

INTRODUCTION
The written code is a form of linguistic representation that implies the ability to comprehend ideas, store information, and transmit messages, enabling the individual to interact with the literate world in which he is inserted (1)(2)(3) .During the learning process, many children develop literacy difficulties for different reasons.Memory is one of the most important aspects that enables learning.Memory deficits can cause difficulty in storing taught information, thus hindering the acquisition of reading and writing (4,5) .
The process of learning to read and write requires effort and a stimulating environment (6,7) .Being literate means acquiring the ability to encode oral in written language and decode writing into oral language.Reading and writing also refer to the apprehension and comprehension of meanings expressed in written language (reading) and their expression through the written language (writing) (6,8,9) .
Visuospatial and phonological processes are important for the acquisition of written language.Visual and phonological information, once perceived, are stored in the working memory and then transferred to long-term memory, enabling the learning of phoneme-grapheme association (1,10,11) .
Through memory, one can perform storage and retrieval of linguistic information (oral or written).A dysfunction in these processes can affect the ability to read and write (12,13) .
During the literacy process, phonological and visual information must be recorded in working memory and transferred to the long-term memory in order to bring about the learning of written language (14,15) .Because of this importance of working memory in alphabetical phonological awareness, working memory assessments become indispensable for children who are learning how to read and write.
Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the phonological awareness and working memory as well as their influence on literacy in a group of intellectually normal children with and without literacy difficulties.
The integrity of working memory, among other aspects, allows the process of comprehending reading and writing, enabling the formation of a functionally literate citizen, i.e, an individual who is able to make use of written language for his/ her individual needs (1,2,4,10) .

METHODS
This research was initiated after approval from the Ethics Committee of Universidade Veiga de Almeida, Rio de Janeiro, under resolution number 274/11.All parents or guardians involved in the research signed an informed consent.
Forty children with ages ranging between 7 years and 6 months and 8 years participated.Children were intellectually normal and were attending the second and third grades of primary education.They were organized into two groups of 20.The first group (Group 1) included children with literacy difficulty and the other (Group 2) included children without alterations in the literacy process (Table 1).

Correlation between phonological awareness and working memory
Tables 4 and 5 show the test results of Spearman correlations.Correlations between variables (syllables, phonemes, working memory, and CONFIAS) and their significance levels for each group are separately presented for each group (Table 4) and with the two groups combined (Table 5).Visual representations of such data can be found in Figures 1 (Group 1), 2 (Group 2), and 3 (Groups 1 and 2 combined).As can be noted in Table 4, there were positive correlations between the four variables (syllables, phonemes, working memory, and CONFIAS) in Group 1, whereas in Group 2, correlations were found between syllables, phonemes, and CONFIAS.Note that the variable CONFIAS is composed of the sum of the scores of the syllable and phoneme but not of the working memory.This result is justified by the fact that most of the subjects in Group 2 exhibited a high performance in phonological awareness and working memory, which is expected for the children in Group 2. For both groups combined, there were positive correlations between the four variables studied.With respect to the phonological awareness test (CONFIAS), the average performance of Group 1 was lower than Group 2 (32.8 and 64.1, respectively).The standard deviation of Groups 1 and 2 was 7.8 and 4.4, respectively.These numbers reinforce that the groups were sufficiently distinct regarding the variable of phonological skills.The group of 20 children in the alphabetic phase scored above 46 on CONFIAS, which determines a good development of phonological awareness.The other 20 participants, in pre-syllabic, syllabic, and syllabic-alphabetic phases, presented scores below 46 on CONFIAS exhibiting difficulties in phonological awareness skill.
In the working memory test, the average performance of Group 1 was 22.3, significantly lower than Group 2 (31.3).The standard deviation was 3.6 in Group 1 and 3.2 in Group 2. The results of the working memory test show a between-group difference (9 points, p<0.001).This indicates that the two groups were different in relation to working memory performance.Most individuals in the alphabetic phase presented high working memory performance.Of the 20 alphabetic, 85% exhibited high working memory performance and 15% exhibited an average performance.The group of children with delayed literacy process had more heterogeneous results.Individuals at pre-syllabic and syllabic phases showed lower performance of working memory.Of those in the syl-  Legends: WM = working memory; CONFIAS = sequential instrument of phonological awareness assessment

Between-group difference test results
The Wilcoxon and Kruskal-Wallis tests were also performed to investigate possible differences between Groups 1 and 2. Their findings confirm the hypothesis that the groups with and without literacy delay are different in all variables with a significance level of 0.01.

DISCUSSION
The present study showed that the majority of children in the alphabetic writing phase showed good development of phonological awareness, and most students who were not in this phase had difficulties in this task.These findings are in line with some studies on phonological awareness (6)(7)(8)17,(19)(20)(21)(22) , confirming the existence of correlation between levels of phonological awareness and written language acquisition.
Several studies report different author opinions regarding the relationship between phonological awareness and working memory.Some authors (1,3,13) argue that this relationship is positive, whereas others (4) argue that it is negative.However, most defend the idea that working memory and phonological awareness are a part of phonological processing.Therefore, there is a correlation between the two, indicating a dependent relationship between these two skills, as the nature of processed information is phonological.Memory operations represented by encoding, storage, and retrieval of information are needed in order to perform phonological awareness tasks.
This correlation is evident in that most of the children who had difficulties in phonological awareness and memory tests also had scores that characterized low or median performance of working memory.Most participants with good development of phonological awareness exhibited a high working memory performance.Thus, as the phonological awareness increased, the level of working memory performance also increased.
From the hypothesis of correlation between phonological awareness and working memory, some authors sought to determine the influence of both on the learning process of written language.These researchers state that working memory maintains phonological and symbolic information of written language that are temporarily stored and active, allowing its transfer to long-term memory which, in turn, would result in learning (2,10,14) .The results of the current study demonstrate that participants at the alphabetic writing level showed good development of phonological awareness, and most of them exhibited a high memory performance.Children in the syllabic-alphabetic phase had phonological awareness alterations, and most of them exhibited a median working memory performance.In contrast, most participants in the pre-syllabic and syllabic phases showed more difficulties in phonological awareness skills than those in the syllabic-alphabetic phase and exhibited a low memory performance.Thus, these results are consistent with the studies cited, once they show the influence of phonological awareness and working memory alterations in the literacy process of children.However, this study complements other studies by demonstrating that intellectually normal children may have changes in phonological awareness and working memory, causing a difficulty in the literacy process.
Previous studies have shown that phonological awareness and working memory are inter-related and associated with cognitive activities (10,11) .The present study supports these findings, showing that these skills are concurrently developed and in this process, they have an influence on the literacy process.As phonological awareness develops, the performance level of working memory also increases and vice versa.However, this does not mean that phonological awareness determines the development of working memory or vice versa.It is only possible to affirm that the higher the levels of phonological awareness and working memory, the better the literacy phase of a child will be.Thus, these are directly proportional measures.Further, one can say that the phonological awareness development occurs in conjunction with that of working memory, helping in determining the literacy phase of an individual.

CONCLUSION
The current study verified the correlation between phonological awareness and working memory as well as that phonological awareness and working memory alterations may influence the literacy process of intellectually normal children.
The phonological awareness skills are developed in conjunction with working memory, and as phonological awareness develops, the level of memory performance increases and vice versa.The higher the levels of phonological awareness and working memory, the more advanced the literacy phase of a child will be.This means that these are directly proportional measures.Data from this study indicate that the evaluation of phonological awareness and working memory performance before beginning the literacy process can facilitate the prediction of written language acquisition.

Table 1 .
Distribution of participants according to age and gender

Table 2 .
Descriptive statistics of Groups 1 and 2

Table 3 .
Difference between means of groups with and without literacy difficulties

Table 4 .
Results of correlations between CONFIAS and working memory tests of Groups 1 and 2 * statistically significant correlation at 0.05 (two-tailed); ** statistically significant correlation at 0.01 (two-tailed)

Table 5 .
Results of correlations between the tests CONFIAS and working memory of the total sample