Background: Phonological sensitivity skills develop as a continuum in a hierarchical pattern from shallow to deep stages. This is an important component in a child’s literacy development, especially in spelling and reading performance. Shallow stages of phonological sensitivity skills set the stage for future proficiency in literacy. Development of phonological sensitivity skills must be studied in various languages as the age at which each stage is acquired can be variable depending on the uniqueness and complexity of the language. Aim of the study: The present study aimed to investigate the shallow stage of phonological sensitivity skill in typically developing Tamil speaking children. Material and methods: Two sub skills - Concept of Spoken Words (CSW) and Rhyming - Non-Rhyming (R & NR) skills were chosen in shallow stage of phonological sensitivity skills. To assess these, 210 children between the age ranges of 4-9.11yrs were studied. They were divided into three groups based on the grade in which they were studying. Each group had 70 children, out of which 35 were boys and 35 were girls. Test Tokens – Sentences to assess CSW and Word pairs to assess R &NR were prepared in Tamil. Familiarity and order of difficulty were considered while constructing the same. Pilot study was carried out. Later, the tokens were administered on the subjects. The raw scores obtained were computed and subjected to statistical analysis. Qualitative analysis was done to determine the frequency and the percentage of responses across each age group and also the performance difference between boys and girls were seen. Results: It could be observed that both Concept of Spoken Word (CSW) and Rhyming and Non-Rhyming (R&NR) skills were achieved only 61.7% and 66.7% respectively in Group I but there was a significant improvement in scores for group II and the scores reached a plateau for Group III. Pearson’s chi square value did not show any significant difference across gender, whereas the difference among overall groups irrespective of gender was statistically significant with a value of 0.00. Conclusion: It could be concluded that typically developing Tamil speaking children develop the shallow stages of phonological sensitivity at around 4 years of age and masters around 7.11 years. This study helps understand the normal development of PSS, to identify children at risk for reading difficulties, to plan assessment and treatment protocols.
