Phonological awareness skills in Thai-speaking children : a scoping review

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Ratanakul, Ketnipa and Cleland, Joanne and Cohen, Wendy (2025) Phonological awareness skills in Thai-speaking children : a scoping review. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 60 (5). e70099. ISSN 1368-2822 (https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.70099)

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Abstract

Background Phonological awareness is an important skill for literacy development. However, limited research has been conducted on tonal languages or non-alphabetic orthographies, including Thai. Understanding the development of phonological awareness in Thai-speaking children is important for identifying risk factors for dyslexia and for understanding the role of phonological awareness in Thai-speaking children with communication impairments. Aims This scoping review synthesised empirical studies on phonological awareness in Thai-speaking children. We aimed to describe the tasks and experiments typically used in studies, outline the performance of phonological awareness in typically developing and non-typically developing children across preschool to school age, and highlight the importance of phonological awareness skills to literacy development. Methods Peer-reviewed papers were retrieved from eight electronic databases, supplemented by manual reference and website searches for relevant articles on phonological awareness in Thai-speaking children. The inclusion criteria for eligible studies were articles published in English since 2000 investigating phonological awareness skills in preschool- and school-aged Thai-speaking children (2;0–12;0 years). Main Contributions Fourteen full-text articles were screened, and 13 met the inclusion criteria. Papers focused on the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills (n = 5), phonological awareness skills in children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia (n = 5), and lexical tone awareness (n = 2). The findings showed that phonological awareness was important for reading abilities across all reported ages, while lexical tone awareness significantly impacted reading abilities only when children were in kindergarten (3;0–6;0 years). Phonological awareness tests were also used as a tool for identifying children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia. Initial phoneme identification was the most commonly used phonological awareness task across all 13 studies. Conclusions Phonological awareness is essential for reading skills and identifying children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia. Future research is needed to investigate the acquisition of phonological awareness in Thai-speaking children and to examine the phonological awareness skills of children with communication impairments, such as speech sound disorders.

ORCID iDs

Ratanakul, Ketnipa ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1099-8227, Cleland, Joanne ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0660-1646 and Cohen, Wendy ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1271-9229;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)