Phonological awareness in French-speaking children at risk for reading disabilities

We report the phonological awareness abilities of preliterate French speaki ng children. The performance of a group of children identified At Risk (n = 26) For reading disabilities was compared to that of normally developing a ge-matched controts (n = 22) on a range or standardised and experimental te sts. Results showed the At Risk children to have a selective impairment in expressive relative to receptive language, whereas Controls performed at eq uivalent levels on both measures. Although the children At Risk performed a t a significantly lower level than Controls on all but one of the metaphono logical tests, the ir pattern of performance was similar to that of Control s, suggesting a developmental delay. Interestingly, both groups showed a su periority of awareness for syllables over phonemes, reflecting the phonolog ical structure of the French language. (C) 2000 Academic Press.