Syllable-based reading improvement: Effects on word reading and reading comprehension in Grade 2

This study examined the effects of a syllable-based reading intervention for German second graders who demonstrated difficulties in the recognition of written words. The intervention focused on fostering word reading via syllable segmentation. The materials consisted of the 500 most frequent syllables typically read by 6- to 8-year-old children. The aims were to practice phonological recoding, consolidate orthographic representations of syllables, and routinize the access to these representations. Compared to children randomly assigned to a wait-list group, poor readers in the treatment condition showed significant improvements in standardized measures of phonological recoding, direct word recognition, and text-based reading comprehension after the 24-session intervention. Poor readers in the treatment condition also showed greater improvements in development of word recognition compared to children with efficient word recognition skills. The results provide evidence that a syllable-based reading intervention is a promising approach to increase struggling readers’ word recognition skills, which in turn will improve their reading comprehension.     

Auditory Sensitivity,Speech Perception,and Reading Development and Impairment

While the importance of phonological sensitivity for understanding reading acquisition and impairment across orthographies is well documented, what underlies deficits in phonological sensitivity is not well understood. Some researchers have argued that speech perception underlies variability in phonological representations. Others have investigated the role of more general auditory sensitivity for reading development and reading difficulties, arguing that poor phonological representations may actually be due to broad underlying auditory deficits, which are not restricted to speech stimuli. We argue that these hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In this review, we demonstrate that auditory sensitivity and speech perception can be integrated into a single developmental model, in which auditory sensitivity may have an indirect impact on reading; this impact is mediated by speech perception. In the model, we distinguish general auditory sensitivity as falling into at least two general categories: rhythmic and temporal. Correspondingly, speech perception itself can be distinguished as suprasegmental and segmental. Theoretically, the proposed model integrates a broad range of studies on general auditory and speech perception to suggest a developmental trajectory for reading acquisition that can be explored from before birth. Practically, the proposed model points to different ways of understanding and diagnosing reading difficulties and distinguishing reading difficulties across languages and orthographies.     

Dyslexia in adults: Evidence for deficits in non-word reading and in the phonological representation of lexical items

Difficulties in reading and language skills which persist from childhood into adult life are the concerns of this article. The aims were twofold: (1) to find measures of adult reading processes that validate adults’ retrospective reports of difficulties in learning to read during the school years, and (2) to search for indications of basic deficits in phonological processing that may point toward underlying causes of reading difficulties. Adults who reported a history of difficulties in learning to read (n=102) were distinctly disabled in phonological coding in reading, compared to adults without similar histories (n=56). They were less disabled in the comprehension of written passages, and the comprehension disability was explained by the phonological difficulties. A number of indications were found that adults with poor phonological coding skills in reading (i.e., dyslexia) have basic deficits in phonological representations of spoken words, even when semantic word knowledge, phonemic awareness, educational level, and daily reading habits are taken into account. It is suggested that dyslexics possess less distinct phonological representations of spoken words. This research was supported by a grant from the Danish Research Council to the first author.     

Letter‐position encoding and dyslexia

This article focuses on applying the SERIOL model of orthographic processing to dyslexia. The model is extended to include a phonological route and reading acquisition. We propose that the temporal alignment of serial orthographic and phonological representations is a key aspect of learning to read, driving the formation of a phonemic encoding. The phonemic encoding and the serial representations are mutually reinforcing, leading to automatic, proficient processing of letter strings. A breakdown in any component of this system leads to the failure to form string‐specific phonological and visual representations, resulting in impaired reading ability.     

General auditory processing,speech perception and phonological awareness skills in Chinese–English biliteracy

This study focused on the associations of general auditory processing, speech perception, phonological awareness and word reading in Cantonese‐speaking children from Hong Kong learning to read both Chinese (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]). Children in Grades 2–4 (N=133) participated and were administered measures of IQ, word reading, phonological awareness, speech perception and auditory processing in both L1 and L2. Auditory processing uniquely explained both L1 and L2 word reading. While L1 speech perception accounted for unique variance in L1 word reading, L2 phonological awareness explained unique variance in L2 word reading. In cross‐language comparisons, L1 phonological awareness and speech perception were uniquely associated with L2 word reading, suggesting cross‐language transfer from L1 to L2 only. Results underscore the importance of auditory processing for reading across variable learning contexts.     

Phonological basis in reading disability: A review and analysis of the evidence

Poor readers are known to do consistently worsethan their normal reading peers on tasks ofphonological processing. They are characterizedby their difficulties in printed wordrecognition, phonological awareness andphonological decoding. An increasing body ofevidence points to deficits in speechperception as a source of subtle but ramifyingeffects in reading impaired children andadults. These deficits may be traced to poorlycoded phonological representations. Thisarticle will attempt to explain poor readers'difficulties in phonological coding by drawingon a gestural account speech development.Implications of this approach for readingintervention will be presented.     

Sensorimotor Control of Speech and Children’s Reading Ability

Studies of the role of phonological representations in learning to read have almost exclusively focused on speech perception. In the current study, we examined links between sensorimotor control of speech, reading, and reading-related abilities. We studied two languages, English and Dutch, which vary in the regularity of their spelling-to-sound mappings. There were 236 American and Dutch children, 4 to 8 years old, who performed an altered auditory feedback task in which the first formant of the /?/ vowel was altered. A stronger response to altered feedback for literate relative to preliterate children was observed, and this was particularly the case for the Dutch children. Moreover, the magnitude of the responses was related to precursors of reading in preliterate children and to reading skill in literate children. We propose that these findings could be related to changes in children’s speech production skills that facilitate the integration of orthographic and phonemic information.     

Basic research in speech and lateralization of language: Some implications for reading disability

Basic research in speech and the lateralization of language is shown to illuminate the problems of reading and some of its disabilities. First, it is pointed out how speech, or language for the ear, differs markedly from reading, or language for the eye. Though the sounds of speech are a very complex code and the optical shapes of written language are a simple cipher or alphabet on the phonemes, we all perceive speech easily but read only with difficulty. Perceiving speech is easy because, as members of the human race, we all have access to a special physiological apparatus that decodes the complex speech signal and recovers the segmentation of the linguistic message. Reading is hard because the phonemic segmentation, which is automatic and intuitive in the case of speech, must be made fully conscious and explicit. The syllabic method supplemented by phonics (used with certain reservations) is suggested for remediation of segmentation problems. Second, it is posited that since the sounds of speech are processed differently from non-speech sounds, the two should not be diagnosed and remediated interchangeably. Third, it is shown that the relationships among cerebral lateralization for language, handedness and poor reading can now be studied more meaningfully because of the recent development of new techniques. A truism often heard in the opening lecture of graduate classes in education is that we have few answers to the problems that beset us, only questions. In the field of reading, the difficulty may be owing at least in part to our impatient attempts to find immediate solutions for the teacher and the student in the classroom, and our consequent neglect of basic research. I should like to suggest today how knowledge of basic research in related disciplines may lead to clues for improving beginning reading instruction and the lot of the disabled reader—if only by affording us a deeper understanding of the reading process. Paper based on a talk given at the Twenty-first Annual Conference of The Orton Society, Washington, D.C., November 14, 1970.     

Reading and reading-related skills in children using cochlear implants: prospects for the influence of cued speech

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory were assessed respectively through a phonemic similarity judgment task and through a word span task measuring phonological similarity effects. To assess the use of sublexical and lexical reading procedures, children read pseudowords and irregular words aloud. Results showed that cued speech improved performance on both the phonemic awareness and the reading tasks but not on the phonological short-term memory task. In phonemic awareness and reading, CS+ children obtained accuracy and rapidity scores similar to CA controls, whereas CS- children obtained lower scores than hearing controls. Nevertheless, in phonological short-term memory task, the phonological similarity effect of both CI groups was similar. Overall, these results support the use of cued speech to improve phonemic awareness and reading skills in CI children.     

Correlates of orthographic learning in third‐grade children's silent reading

This study examined word identification, phonological recoding efficiency, familiar word reading efficiency, orthographic choice for familiar words and serial naming speed as potential correlates of orthographic learning following silent reading in third‐grade children. Children silently read a series of short stories, each containing six repetitions of a different target non‐word. They subsequently read target non‐words faster than homophones and preferred target non‐words to homophones in an orthographic choice task, indicating that they had formed functional orthographic representations of the target non‐words through phonologically recoding them during silent story reading. Target non‐word orthographic choice was correlated with all measures bar non‐symbol naming speed. The association between phonological recoding efficiency and orthographic learning lends support to the hypothesis that self‐teaching occurs through phonological recoding even in silent reading. Our findings were not generally consistent with the view that serial naming speed assesses orthographic learning aptitude.     

Morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia

This study examines morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. While the poor phonological awareness of dyslexic children has been related to their difficulty in handling the alphabetical principle, less is known about their morphological awareness, which also plays an important part in reading development. The aim of this study was to analyze in more detail the implications of the phonological impairments of dyslexics in dealing with larger units of language such as morphemes. First, the performance of dyslexic children in a series of morphological tasks was compared with the performance of children matched on reading-level and chronological age. In all the tasks, the dyslexic group performed below the chronological age control group, suggesting that morphological awareness cannot be developed entirely independently of reading experience and/or phonological skills. Comparisons with the reading-age control group indicated that, while the dyslexic children were poorer in the morphemic segmentation tasks, they performed normally for their reading level in the sentence completion tasks. Furthermore, they produced more derived words in the production task. This suggests that phonological impairments prevent the explicit segmentation of affixes while allowing the development of productive morphological knowledge. A second study compared dyslexic subgroups defined by their degree of phonological impairment. Our results suggest that dyslexics develop a certain type of morphological knowledge, which they use as a compensatory reading strategy.     

Early linguistic abilities and reading development: A review and a hypothesis

This article is concerned with aspects of phonological processing and linguistic awareness that may set the stage for initial reading development. The aims are first to provide a current review of phonological processes (both underlying and metaphonological) that have been found to be associated with initial reading achievement, secondly to present a new hypothesis relating differences in the nature of phonological representations in the lexicon to the development of phonological awareness and other phonological processes. The hypothesis is concerned withdistinctness of phonological representations, i.e. the separateness of phonological representations. Phonological representations of high distinctness are distinguished from other representations by many features. The distinctness hypothesis is compared to the lexical restructuring hypothesis which suggests that lexical representations gradually become increasingly segmental between one and eight years of age. Implications of each hypothesis (emphasizing the distinctness hypothesis) for the development of language abilities and reading are presented, along with suggestions regarding future research directions.     

The relationship between speech impairment,phonological awareness and early literacy development

Although children with speech impairment are at increased risk for impaired literacy, many learn to read and spell without difficulty. Around half the children with speech impairment have delayed acquisition, making errors typical of a normally developing younger child (e.g. reducing consonant clusters so that spoon is pronounced as ‘poon’). A smaller group make disordered speech errors that are atypical of normal development (e.g. marking all consonant clusters with /f/ so bread is pronounced as ‘fed’). Profiles of surface speech errors may provide a way of identifying underlying deficits that account for differences in literacy development. This paper investigates the relationship between type of speech impairment, phonological awareness and literacy acquisition. Thirteen children, aged 5;2–7;9, with either delayed or disordered speech and six typically developing controls were compared on tasks measuring onset-rime awareness, letter knowledge, phonological rule knowledge, real and non-word reading. Children with delayed speech development performed like typically developing controls on all phonological awareness and reading measures. Children with speech disorder, who consistently made errors atypical of normal development, had difficulties on all phonological awareness tasks with the exception of syllable awareness. They showed no measurable emergent reading ability. The results suggest the need to differentiate between speech delay and disorder when planning intervention, particularly for literacy skills.     

Processing orthographic structure: associations between print and fingerspelling

Two lexical decision experiments are reported that investigate whether the same segmentation strategies are used for reading printed English words and fingerspelled words (in American Sign Language). Experiment 1 revealed that both deaf and hearing readers performed better when written words were segmented with respect to an orthographically defined syllable (the Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure [BOSS]) than with a phonologically defined syllable. Correlation analyses revealed that better deaf readers were more sensitive to orthographic syllable representations, whereas segmentation strategy did not differentiate the better hearing readers. In contrast to Experiment 1, Experiment 2 revealed better performance by deaf participants when fingerspelled words were segmented at the phonological syllable boundary. We suggest that English mouthings that often accompany fingerspelled words promote a phonological parsing preference for fingerspelled words. In addition, fingerspelling ability was significantly correlated with reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. This pattern of results indicates that the association between fingerspelling and print for adult deaf readers is not based on shared segmentation strategies. Rather, we suggest that both good readers and good fingerspellers have established strong representations of English and that fingerspelling may aid in the development and maintenance of English vocabulary.     

Children’s concepts of language in learning to read

Conclusion To summarize, acceptance of reading as secondary to, and dependent on, the primary activities of speaking and listening does not mean that reading is simply speech in print, albeit reading is a language-based activity. Listening and speaking seem to proceed from the meaning of the discourse to analysis; whereas written language comprehension proceeds from analysis to meaning, at least for some beginning readers and some poor readers. Analysis of speech takes place at the unconscious or tacit level; conscious analysis of segments of print (sentences, phrases, words, syllables and phonemes) is often required in reading, especially at the initial stage. Good readers pass this decoding stage relatively effortlessly; poor readers may still need to deal with the mechanics of reading before these become automatic. Thus, while children should be introduced to reading through a variety of rich language experiences, there should be a parallel process of the development of subskills. This paper was presented at the 29th Annual Conference of The Orton Society in Minneapolis, November 1978.     

Effects of independent word practice with segmented and whole-word sound feedback in disabled readers

Reading-disabled children seem to have considerable difficulties in acquiring phonological recoding skills, which are considered to be very important in becoming a proficient reader. It is hypothesized that speech feedback may support the development of phonological recoding skills. The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of speech feedback during independent word reading and its effects on the remediation of reading skill. Three different conditions for independent practice were employed. For 17 subjects high-quality digitized speech was available on call. When speech feedback was requested either whole-word sound was provided (n = 8) or segmented-word sound was presented (n = 9). A control group (n=14) did not receive speech feedback at all. In a posttest both practised and nonpractised words were presented. Both help call behaviour during practice and changes in reading rate and accuracy from pretest to posttest were analyzed. It was found that speech feedback requests were not dependent on word difficulty. More calls for whole-word sound were made than for segmented-word sound, while latency times for whole-word sound requests were shorter than for segmented-word sound requests. Both forms of speech feedback were equally effective in reading practice words which were initially read incorrectly. However, there was a tendency for the learning effect on nonpractised initially hard-to-read words to be largest when segmented-word sound had been available. It is concluded that, whenever the goal of reading instruction is to memorize particular words, whole-word sound as well as segmented-word sound can be used. However, when more productive skills are aimed at, the most promising way of giving support is to present segmented-word sound, although only a nonsignificant tendency for transfer was found in the present study.     

Morphological analysis,phonological analysis and learning to read French: a longitudinal study

This paper presents a longitudinal study, from kindergarten to secondgrade, which aims to examine the relationship between morphologicalanalysis, phonological analysis and learning to read. Three phonologicalawareness tasks, five derivational and four inflectional subtests wereadministered to fifty children at each of the three levels. Evolution ofperformance was analyzed through the three years. Data showed that withthe exception of two subtests, performance increased from kindergarten tofirst grade and from first grade to second grade, without reaching ceilingperformance in second grade, at least for morphological subtests. Linksbetween morphological and phonological analyses were very strong: inparticular, syllable segmentation was highly correlated with themorphological subtests in kindergarten while phonemic segmentation wascorrelated with morphological subtests in first and second grade. Therewere also strong links between morphological analysis and reading.Regression analyses showed that while phonological awarenessexplained a major part of variance in first grade, both phonologicaland morphological scores explained significant part of variance of bothdecoding and comprehension reading scores in second grade. Thus, thislongitudinal study contributes to the evidence of a link between bothphonological and morphological analysis and learning to read French.