Using a Computer Intervention to Support Phonological Awareness Development of Adults with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments

The present study investigates the effectiveness of a computerbased intervention to support adults with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) in developing their phonological awareness, an essential contributory factor to literacy acquisition. Three participants with SSPI undertook seven intervention sessions during which they were asked to play a training game on an iPad. The game was designed to enable learners to practice their phonological awareness skills independently with minimal instruction from human instructors. Results of post-intervention assessments showed that participants P1 and P2 achieved improvements on most phonological awareness and literacy tasks. Participant P3 only obtained higher scores for two tasks but was able to generate novel words using phonemes during the intervention. All participants reported highly positive feedback on the iPad training software. These results support the use of mainstream technologies to aid learning for individuals with disabilities.