Abstract (eng)
According to the motor theory of speech perception, the perception, reading and writing of words is only made possible through the retrieval of articulatory gestures which underlie single sounds. Up to now, research results of this topic have only been published in the English-speaking area. The aim of this study is to examine the influence of the articulatory awareness in the narrower sense on the reading and writing performance in the German-speaking area. For this purpose, reading and writing skills of Viennese second grade pupils (N=98) of a primary school were operationalised by the standardised SLRT II test as well as the teacher's assessment through marks. For measuring the articulatory awareness and following Montgomery (1981), a survey tool was developed and tested in a former pilot study. Taking into account further important control variables (sex, mother tongue, attendance of preschool, grade repetition, highest educational qualification of parents, optical differentiation ability, kinesthetic differentiation ability, parents’ assessment of the linguistic development), a significant influence of the articulatory awareness in the narrower sense was evidenced in the area of writing, more precisely on the number of correctly written words, the number of mistakes in phonetically accurate spelling and the teacher’s assessment of the spelling performance. In the area of reading, a considerable influence of the articulatory awareness on the number of correctly read pseudowords and on the teacher’s assessment of the reading skills was shown, but not on the number of correctly read meaningful words. In general, it can be said that the influence of the articulatory awareness in the narrower sense on the reading and writing skills, operationalised by the teacher’s assessment through marks, is the strongest. Considering these results, a training of the articulatory awareness in early reading and writing education seems indispensable.