Emergent bilinguals (EBs) who are exposed to societal language at school but use another language at home may experience difficulties in mastering the societal language, especially those at risk for language and reading disabilities. Learning phonologically specific new words that discriminate between phonemes may foster phonological awareness and word reading. This study examined the effectiveness of a lexical specificity intervention program that targeted phoneme discrimination in EBs at risk for reading disabilities. EBs who scored below the 25th percentile on the screening measures were selected and randomly assigned to one of two conditions: at-risk intervention or at-risk control. Of the 76 EBs in the at-risk group, 40 were randomly assigned to receive the intervention. A group of 51 typically developing EBs who did not meet the risk criteria were selected as typical controls. The pre- and post-tests include phoneme discrimination, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, fluency, and decoding. The at-risk intervention group showed improvement on the phoneme discrimination task after the intervention and outperformed the at-risk control group but not the typical control group. In addition, growth was observed during both the training and testing sessions of the intervention. The lexical specificity intervention could be a good resource to enhance a key precursor to literacy development for at-risk EBs.

在学校接触社会语言但在家里使用另一种语言的新兴双语者 (EB) 在掌握社会语言方面可能会遇到困难，特别是那些有语言和阅读障碍风险的人。学习区分音素的特定语音新单词可能会促进语音意识和单词阅读。这项研究检验了词汇特异性干预计划的有效性，该计划针对有阅读障碍风险的 EB 中的音素歧视。得分低于 25分的 EB选择筛查措施的百分位并随机分配给以下两种情况之一：风险干预或风险控制。在高危组的 76 名 EB 中，有 40 名被随机分配接受干预。选择一组 51 名不符合风险标准的典型发育 EB 作为典型对照。前后测试包括音素辨别、语音意识、快速自动命名、流畅性和解码。高危干预组在干预后在音素辨别任务上表现出改善，并且优于高危对照组，但不优于典型对照组。此外，在干预的训练和测试期间都观察到了生长。