An Investigation of the Differences in Phonological Awareness Performance Based on Cognitive Style

Abstract

Purpose: Research in cognitive style has shown its relevance in predicting reading ability. However, its effect on phonological awareness, which plays a central role in reading acquisition, remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in phonological awareness based on cognitive style. Method: Twenty-nine monolingual English speaking African American and Caucasian 6-year-old 1st grade students from the Washington DC metropolitan area participated in the study. Participants were distributed as follows: 11 females, 18 males, 21 African Americans, and 8 Caucasians. Participants were of middle-class socioeconomic background with no evidence of cognitive, language, phonological, articulation or hearing deficits. Testing occurred over two sessions scheduled on different days. During the first session, participants were individually administered the Cognitive Style Assessment Protocol (CSAP) to measure cognitive style and assigned to either the wholistic or analytic cognitive style group. In the second session, the Phonological Awareness Assessment Protocol (PAAP) was administered to measure the main components of phonological awareness. Raw data consisted of participant scores on the CSAP and PAAP. Data were analyzed using two-tailed t-tests to determine if there were significant group differences between the analytic and wholistic groups in phonological awareness and its components. Results: Results showed that students with an analytic cognitive style performed better than those with a wholistic cognitive style on overall phonological awareness and on the following phonological awareness components: syllable segmentation, phoneme substitution, and phoneme blending. No significant group differences were found on rhyming, phoneme isolation, phoneme deletion, and phoneme segmentation tasks. Conclusion: Findings showed some differences in phonological awareness between analytic and wholistic students with analytic students performing better than wholistic students. These differences in aspects of phonological awareness seem to implicate cognitive style in reading acquisition given the central role that phonological awareness pays in reading development and suggest that wholistic students may experience reading difficulties that stem from their cognitive orientation.