Assessing phonological awareness in Italian children with and without developmental dyslexia: The contribution of a new pseudo-word blending task

The current study investigated the capacity of a new test assessing phonological awareness to detect differences between Italian children with and without developmental dyslexia. Specifically, the task involves blending of a list of pseudo-words, and excludes lexical knowledge as a source of task performance. Fifty-four third to fifith Italian graders were presented a battery of tests assessing phonological awareness, reading, writing, and verbal short-term memory abilities. A multivariate analysis of covariance, with age as a covariate, revealed that proficient readers outperformed students with developmental dyslexia in all cognitive measures considered, except verbal short-term memory. Moreover, high concordance was found between the new pseudo-word blending task, and well-known word blending, writing, and reading tests, respectively. In conclusion, the new phonological awareness task seems to be a useful tool for the detection of poor blending abilities of Italian children and thus it could be used to...