Phonological Awareness and Reading in Assamese, an Understudied Abugida

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Abstract: This study examines phonological awareness and reading development in Assamese middle school learners (Grades VI–VIII), an understudied South Asian language. Ninety-six children (56 females, 40 males; mean age = 12.59) participated. Reading skills were assessed using an Assamese-adapted version of the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Torgesen et al., 1999), with 108 real words and 66 nonwords selected for familiarity and syllable structure. Phonological awareness tasks were based on PAT-2 (Robertson & Salter, 2007), including syllable- and phoneme-level deletion, segmentation, blending, and rhyme discrimination. ANOVA and regression analyses revealed grade-level progression in real word reading but not nonword reading. Children consistently outperformed on syllable-level tasks compared to phoneme-level tasks. Phoneme segmentation showed improvement between Grades VI and VII, but no difference between Grades VII and VIII, suggesting a developmental plateau. Nonword decoding was influenced by both syllable and phoneme awareness, indicating dual phonological representations, while real word reading relied more on whole-word processing.

By Chandni Khaund and Shakuntala Mahanta