Phonological skills have been found to be strongly related to early reading and writing development. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to examine the extent to which the development of phonological awareness facilitates reading acquisition in students learning to read a transparent orthography. Our research included 689 primary school students in first through third grade (Mean age 101.59 months, SD = 12,690). The assessment tools used to conduct this research include the Phonological Awareness Test and the Gray Oral Reading Test. According to the results from the present study, 13.7% of students have reading difficulties. Students with reading difficulties obtained low scores in phonological awareness within each subscale compared to students who do not have reading difficulties (p < 0.01). Components of phonological awareness which did not singled out as strongly related to early reading success include Phoneme Segmentation, Initial Phoneme Identification, and Syllable Merging. Thus, understanding the nature of the relationship between phonological awareness and reading should help effective program design that will be aimed at eliminating delayed development in children’s phonological awareness while they are still in preschool.

Introduction. Conditions in which speech therapy treatment is applied in autistic children are often not in accordance with characteristics of opinions and learning of people with autism. A systemic multimodal approach means motivating autistic people to develop their language speech skill through the procedure which allows reliving of their personal experience according to the contents that are presented in the their natural social environment. This research was aimed at evaluating the efficiency of speech treatment based on the systemic multimodal approach to the work with autistic children. Material and Methods. The study sample consisted of 34 children, aged from 8 to 16 years, diagnosed to have different autistic disorders, whose results showed a moderate and severe clinical picture of autism on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale. The applied instruments for the evaluation of ability were the Childhood Autism Rating Scale and Ganzberg II test. The study subjects were divided into two groups according to the type of treatment: children who were covered by the continuing treatment and systemic multimodal approach in the treatment, and children who were covered by classical speech treatment. Results. It is shown that the systemic multimodal approach in teaching autistic children affects the stimulation of communication, socialization, self-service and work as well as that the progress achieved in these areas of functioning was retainable after long time, too. Conclusion. By applying the systemic multimodal approach when dealing with autistic children and by comparing their achievements on tests applied before, during and after the application of this mode, it has been concluded that certain improvement has been achieved in the functionality within the diagnosed category. The results point to a possible direction in the creation of new methods, plans and programs in dealing with autistic children based on empirical and interactive learning.

Introduction. Hearing impairment, as a type of sensory disability affects the quality of life of adolescents. The aim of this study was to determine whether the quality of life of adolescents with hearing impairments was different from the quality of life of adolescents without disabilities, and to examine the correlation between self- reported quality of life and proxy- report by their parents. Materials and Methods. The study included 52 adolescents with hearing impairment and 122 adolescents without developmental disabilities, aged from 13 to 18 years and their parents. Data were collected by a standardized questionnaire, the PedsQLTM 4.0 Generic Core Scale. The survey was conducted during May and June 2011 in 6 schools in Novi Sad and Belgrade. Results. Adolescents with hearing impairment and their parents reported lower scores on all scales of questionnaire. The average score of physical health was 77.58; p

Serbian and Slovak are related languages and both languages belong to the group of Slavic languages. It is important to point out that bilingualism can have a negative impact on children's education, especially when they are not equally exposed to the use of both languages, as is the case with Slovaks in the Republic of Serbia. The aim of this paper is to determine the complexity of the syntactic structure in the non - mother tongue in bilingual children whose mother tongue is Slovak. The sample of children included forty children aged 7 years. The research was conducted at the Elementary School "Ljudovit Stur" in Kisac, and at the Elementary School "Jozef Marchok Dragutin" in Glozan. The assessment instruments used were: "Speech-language production test" and a bilingual questionnaire. The results obtained in this research speak in favor of a more complex syntactic sentence structure in bilingual children in their mother tongue compared to their non-mother tongue. We can conclude that bilingualism as a phenomenon has a great influence on the development of language, and thus on syntactic development. Slow language development can often occur due to the complexity of acquiring two languages at the same time.

Introduction. Writing is the most complex human ability and the most direct form of communication. Auditory discrimination is the ability to distinguish different sounds of language. After the age of seven, difficulties in auditory discrimination, even of similar sounds, are considered a pathological phenomenon. The aim of the research was to determine whether difficulties in auditory discrimination of phonemes are related to the manifestation of dysgraphia in children of younger school age. Methods. The research was conducted at the Elementary School "Vuk Karadzić" in Priboj, during 2020, with the previous consent of the school principal, as well as the students' parents. The research sample included fifty children of the third and fourth grade, aged 9 and 10. For the purpose of this research, two tests were used: the Phonemic Discrimination Test (Kostić, Vladisavljević, Popović, 1983) and the Dysgraphic Handwriting Assessment Test (Ajuriaguerra, Auzias. 1971). Results. There was no significant difference in achievement in the Phonemic Discrimination Test between boys and girls. Half of the tested students achieved the maximum score in the Phonemic Discrimination Test and they were fairly equal in their achievement in the Phonemic Discrimination Test. Girls generally had harmoniously developed handwriting, while more than half of the boys in the categories had inconsistent handwriting or dysgraphic handwriting when it came to the forms of dictation, free topic and transcription. No statistically significant correlations were found between the results in the Phonemic Discrimination Test and the Dysgraphic Handwriting Assessment Test, p > 0.05. Conclusion. Based on the assessment of writing ability and auditory discrimination in young school children, no statistically significant association was found between auditory discrimination of sounds and manifestations of dysgraphic handwriting in all three forms of written expression (dictation, free topic, transcription).

Reading consists of processing written data which are transmitted by text and thus reading is seen as a complex language skill. A prerequisite for the development of reading skills is developing phonological awareness and forming verbal representations. Success in solving tasks of phonological awareness is a predictor of reading abilities. For those reasons, this research attempts to determine the connection and mutual influence between these abilities. The research is designed as a cross-sectional study and it was conducted at Primary School "Dušan Radović" in Novi Sad from February to March 2020. The research sample consisted of 31 students (19 boys and 12 girls) whose average age was 8 years and 8 month. The included assessment instruments were the Three-dimensional Reading Test - "Samo jedan snežni dan" and the "FONT" test used for assessing phonological awareness. The findings of this research confirm the correlation between phonological awareness and reading errors in second-grade students. On the basis of this research, it can be concluded that there is a significant correlation between phonological awareness and reading ability and that their mutual influence is reciprocal, i.e. the development of one ability is a prerequisite for the development of the second one.