Phonemic awareness deficits in an alphasyllabary language: Effects of task type and linguistic complexity in children with Specific Learning Disorder-Reading

Background Phonemic awareness deficits are a core feature of Specific Learning Disorder-Reading (SLD-R). How task- and language-specific factors influence these deficits in alphasyllabary languages may help clarify the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading impairment in SLD-R. Methods Thirty children with a DSM-5 diagnosis of SLD-R (mean age 11.4 years) and 29 age-matched typically developing children were given phoneme blending (words and pseudowords) and segmentation tasks in Malayalam. The effects of age and consonant clusters on task performance were evaluated. Results Children with SLD-R performed significantly worse than controls across most phonemic awareness tasks, with the largest deficits observed in pseudoword blending and word blending, and smaller deficits in segmentation. No significant difference was observed for initial phoneme deletion. In typically developing children, age showed strong positive correlations with phonemic performance across most tasks, whereas the SLD-R group showed weak or absent correlations, except in word blending and initial phoneme deletion. Consonant clusters significantly affected performance in both groups, with SLD-R showing more severe deficits. Conclusions Phonemic awareness deficits observed in SLD-R in alphasyllabary languages like Malayalam are more prominent in tasks where lexical support is absent, like pseudoword blending. These deficits vary across task types and linguistic complexity. Phonemic awareness improves with age in typically developing children, while improvement is uneven in children with SLD-R. The findings suggest that phonemic awareness deficits are a core feature of SLD-R across languages, but their manifestation is shaped by orthographic and linguistic characteristics of the writing system.