Visual and phonological processing of words: a comparison of good and poor readers

At the beginning of the school year, 80 first graders, half receiving phonics instruction and half receiving whole word instruction, were asked to spell, read aloud, and recognize 60 regular and exception words. A standardized reading test and phoneme segmentation test were also administered. Those above grade level in reading excelled in phonological recording and application of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules and were weaker in utilization of visual-orthographic knowledge. Those below grade level applied visual more than phonological coding and benefited from the visual-orthographic knowledge available in a clue word. Results support a continuum of visual and phonological analysis skills in first-grade reading consistent with Frith's (1985) logographic, alphabetic, and orthographic skill levels.     

A randomised efficacy study of Web‐based synthetic and analytic programmes among disadvantaged urban Kindergarten children

This study explores whether two computer‐based literacy interventions – a ‘synthetic phonics’ and an ‘analytic phonics’ approach produce qualitatively distinct effects on the early phonological abilities and reading skills of disadvantaged urban Kindergarten (Reception) children. Participants (n=53) were assigned by random allocation to one of the two interventions. Each intervention was generally delivered three times per week for 13 weeks as part of a reading centre approach in Kindergarten classrooms with small groups of children. In the synthetic programme children showed, as predicted, significant (p<.05) improvement in CV and VC word blending and the articulation of final consonants. The children in the analytic phonics programme showed, as predicted, significant (p<.05) improvements in articulating shared rimes in words. These results suggest that synthetic and analytic programmes have qualitatively different effects on children's phonological development. These phonological differences are not however immediately reflected in any qualitative differences in the way children undertook word reading or nonword decoding.     

Automatic activation of phonological code during visual word recognition in children: a masked priming study in grades 3 and 5

The present study aimed to investigate the development of automatic phonological processes involved in visual word recognition during reading acquisition in French. A visual masked priming lexical decision experiment was carried out with third, fifth graders and adult skilled readers. Three different types of partial overlap between the prime and the target were contrasted: orthographic and phonological overlap (O+P+; ren-RENDRE [give] pronounced /?ɑ?/-/?ɑ?d?/ respectively), orthographic overlap (O+P?; re-RENDRE pronounced /??/-/?ɑ?d?/ respectively), or without orthographic and phonological overlap with the beginning of the target, namely unrelated (UR; pi-RENDRE pronounced /pi/-/?ɑ?d?/, respectively). The number of letters was controlled throughout the priming conditions. The results showed an interaction between grade and priming condition in children. In third graders, the results displayed a masked phonological priming effect (the O+P+ condition was compared to the O+P? condition) but not a masked orthographic priming effect (the O+P? condition was compared to the UR condition). On the contrary, in fifth graders, the results showed a masked orthographic priming effect but not a masked phonological priming effect. Adult skilled readers displayed the same pattern as fifth graders. These results are interpreted in the multiple-route model of reading development.     

Phonology,Orthography, and Decoding Skills Within and Across English and Chinese

The current study examined the construct of word-reading skills within and across English and Chinese. One hundred forty-three 5th graders who were native Chinese (Mandarin) speakers learning English as a second language completed 19 tasks representing phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and word decoding in both English and Chinese. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted within each language, and the results showed that the best-fitting model for both languages was the 3-factor model involving phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and word decoding. Across the 2 languages, the language-specific model fit better than other models with 1 or 2 language-general factors. These results suggest that word reading is not a unified, language-general ability within and across English and Chinese among Chinese children learning English as a second language. Instruction and intervention may need to target phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and word decoding in each language.     

Predicting reading ability over the long term: The changing roles of letter naming,phonological awareness and orthographic processing

A cohort of 92 children was followed through sixth grade to investigate the relationship of preschool skills and first grade phonological awareness to reading and spelling. In particular, the focus was on the changing roles of letter naming, orthographic awareness, and phonological processing in prediction, as reading experience increased. Preschool letter naming was a consistently significant predictor of reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, and spelling at each grade level, but the preschool orthographic task contributed most to reading comprehension and spelling at the higher grades. Conversely, the contribution of the first grade phonemic awareness measures to reading skills dropped sharply after third grade, although they continued to contribute to spelling prediction. When preschool precursors of phonological processing were examined, letter naming was found to be a predictor of first and third grade phonemic awareness. Findings confirm the importance of letter naming as a predictor and of the role of phonemic awareness in early reading acquisition, but also highlight the contribution of orthographic processing skills to later reading.     

Are nonword and other phonological deficits indicative of a failed reading process?

Phonological processing problems have been consideredcritical in explaining developmental readingdisability. Reading disabled children were comparedwith two matched reading-level normal control groupson indicators of phonological processing. The readingdisabled children had lower nonword readingperformance than the phonics taught controls. However, performance was equivalent to that of thecontrols without phonics teaching. Therefore anonword reading deficit was not in itself diagnosticof developmental reading disability. The readingdisabled children and the non-phonics control groupwho exhibited lower nonword reading did not differfrom the phonics taught control group in phonemeawareness, nor in magnitude of the word regularityeffect. Nevertheless, within all groups thosechildren with higher phonemic awareness skills showedlarger word regularity effects and better nonwordreading. Processes involving two sources of knowledgefor phonological recoding are discussed asexplanations of these and many previous results onphonological deficits and of the phonological effectsof phonics instruction.     

Examining the effects of PASS cognitive processes on Chinese reading accuracy and fluency

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive) processes to Chinese reading accuracy and fluency. One-hundred-forty Grade 3 to 5 Mandarin-speaking children were assessed on measures of PASS processes, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. A year later they were assessed on reading accuracy and fluency. The results indicated that successive processing predicted reading through the effects of phonological awareness and simultaneous processing predicted reading through the effects of orthographic knowledge. The results were similar for reading accuracy and fluency. Implications for the PASS theory are discussed.     

Patterns of word and nonword processing in skilled and less-skilled readers

Sixty-eight third graders who were less-skilled readers performed more poorly than younger reading-level control children on tests of pseudoword reading and phonological sensitivity. These findings add to the growing consensus that the proximal cause of reading difficulties are spelling-sound coding problems that result from deficient underlying phonological processes and structures. Analyses of their word and pseudoword reading performance provided some suggestive evidence that less-skilled readers are less sensitive than their younger reading-level matched counterparts to all subword-size orthographic units, perhaps especially to grapheme-sized units.     

Effects of three interventions on the reading skills of children with reading disabilities in grade 2

In a longitudinal intervention study, the effects of three intervention strategies on the reading skills of children with reading disabilities in Grade 2 were analyzed. The interventions consisted of computerized training programs: One bottom-up intervention aimed at improving word decoding skills and phonological abilities, the second intervention focused on top-down processing on the word and sentence levels, and the third was a combination of these two training programs (n = 25 in each group). In addition, there were two comparison groups, 25 children with reading disabilities who received ordinary special instruction and 30 age-matched typical readers. All reading disabled participants completed 25 training sessions with special education teachers. All groups improved their reading skills. The group who received combined training showed higher improvements than the ordinary special instruction group and the typical readers. Different cognitive variables were related to treatment gains for different groups. Thus, a treatment combining bottom-up and top-down aspects of reading was the most effective in general, but individual differences among children need to be considered.     

Orthographic and Phonological Processes in Reading

Investigations of reading have focussed largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalise orthographic processing measure the same construct, (2) the extent to which tasks from a range of phonological processing domains measure the same construct, and (3) the degree to which orthographic processing tasks reflect orthographic processes independent of extraneous phonological operations, and conversely, phonological processing tasks measure phonological processes independent of orthographic processes. To address these questions, a variety of tasks used to evaluate orthographic processing (orthographic verification, homophone verification, nonlexical choice, irregular word reading, irregular word spelling), phonological processing (phoneme deletion, phonological choice, nonword reading, nonword spelling) and related domains (e.g., word identification, IQ) were administered to 177 children from Grades 3, 4 and 5. Factor analysis conducted using accuracy data revealed that orthographic processing tasks congregate along a single factor, while phonological processing tasks congregate along another, separate factor, viewed as evidence for the construct validity of orthographic processing and phonological processing, respectively. When response-time data were analysed, these same tasks did not differentiate on the basis of their orthographic and phonological demands, but rather in terms of their more general task demands. Additionally, results reveal that some phonological processing and orthographic processing tasks measure their respective construct with a greater degree of purity than do others. It is recommended that these tasks be used in future research.     

Reading and Spelling Chinese Among Beginning Readers: What Skills Make a Difference?

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed.     

Naming speed, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge in second graders

Concurrent relationships among measures of naming speed, phonological awareness, orthographic skill, and other reading subskills were explored in a representative sample of second graders. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that naming speed, as measured by the the rapid automatized naming (RAN) task, accounted for a sizable amount of unique variance in reading with vocabulary and phonemic awareness partialled out. The unique contribution of naming speed to reading was relatively stronger for orthographic skills, whereas the contribution of phonemic skills was stronger for nonword decoding. In further analyses, marked difficulties on a range of reading tasks, including orthographic processing, were seen in a subgroup with a double deficit (slow naming speed and low phonemic awareness) but not in groups with only a single deficit. These findings are broadly consistent with Bowers and Wolf's (1993a, 1993b; Wolf & Bowers, 1999) double-deficit hypothesis of reading disability.     

Cross-language transfer of phonological and orthographic processing skills from Spanish L1 to English L2

Previous cross-language research has focused on L1 phonological processing and its relation to L2 reading. Less extensive is the research on the effect that L1 orthographic processing skill has on L2 reading and spelling. This study was designed to investigate how reading and spelling acquisition in English (L2) is influenced by phonological and orthographic processing skills in Spanish (L1) in 89 Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2 and 3. Comparable measures in English and Spanish tapping phonological and orthographic processing were administered to the bilingual children. We found that cross-language phonological and orthographic transfer occurs from Spanish to English. Specifically, the Spanish phoneme deletion task contributed a significant amount of unique variance to English word reading and spelling, for both real words and pseudowords. The Spanish homophone choice task predicted English reading, but not spelling. Taken together, these results suggest that there are shared phonological and orthographic processes in bilingual reading; however, orthographic patterns may be language specific, thereby not likely to transfer to spelling performance.     

RAN Components and Reading Development From Grade 3 to Grade 5: What Underlies Their Relationship?

We examined (a) how rapid automatized naming (RAN) components—articulation time and pause time—predict reading accuracy and reading fluency in Grades 4 and 5, and (b) what cognitive-processing skills (phonological processing, orthographic processing, or speed of processing) mediate the RAN–reading relationship. Sixty children were followed from Grade 3 to Grade 5 and were administered RAN (Letters and Digits), phonological processing, lexical and sublexical orthographic processing, speed of processing, reading accuracy, and fluency tasks. Pause time was highly correlated with reading fluency and shared more of its predictive variance with lexical orthographic processing and speed of processing than with phonological processing. Articulation time also predicted reading fluency, and its contribution was mostly independent from other cognitive-processing skills. Implications for the relationship between RAN and reading are discussed.     

Developmental changes in the allocation of semantic feedback during visual word recognition

The present study used a mediated priming paradigm to examine whether developmental differences exist in the integration of semantic information with orthographic and phonological information during visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, we found that the integration of semantics with phonology and orthography differed among third‐grade, sixth‐grade and college students: orthographically based mediated inhibition effects were found in third‐grade children, whereas phonologically based mediated inhibition effects were found in sixth‐grade children and college students. A second experiment was performed with adults to test the hypothesis that the orthographically based mediated inhibition effect observed with young children was due to deficits in orthographic processing. When stimulus quality was manipulated within the mediated priming paradigm, orthographically based mediated inhibition effects were found when targets were dim, whereas phonologically based mediated inhibition effects were found when targets were bright. Taken together, these results suggest that the allocation of activation during reading may depend on the processing demands of the word recognition system.     

The anatomy of the RAN-reading relationship

The purpose of this study was to contrast three models of the RAN-reading relationship derived from the most prominent theoretical accounts of how RAN is related to reading: the phonological processing, the orthographic processing and the speed of processing accounts. Grade 4 Greek-speaking children (n = 208; 114 girls, 94 boys; mean age = 117.29 months) were administered measures of general cognitive ability, RAN, phonological processing, orthographic processing, speed of processing, and reading fluency. Phonological processing and orthographic processing were assessed with both accuracy and speeded measures. Structural equation modeling showed that the most parsimonious model was one in which RAN predicted reading fluency directly and through orthographic processing. Phonological processing did not predict reading fluency and speed of processing was more important for the RAN-orthographic/phonological processing relationships than for the RAN-reading relationship. Taken together, these findings suggest that what is unique to RAN is more important for the prediction of reading fluency than what it shares with either speed of processing, phonological processing, or orthographic processing.     

Leisure time reading and orthographic processes in word recognition among Norwegian third- and fourth-grade students

Third- and fourth-grade Norwegian children completed a battery of tasks that measured indicators of orthographic and phonological processing skill, leisure time reading, home literacy environment, and nonverbal intelligence. Using latent variable structural equation modeling, it was found that home literacy environment influenced leisure time reading, and that leisure time reading contributed to orthographic processing skill beyond the prediction provided by phonological processing skill. Home literacy environment influenced orthographic processing skill indirectly by its influence on leisure time reading. In addition, some children with poor phonological skill and good orthographic skill were found to score high on a leisure time reading measure. Even though Norwegian has much more regular orthography than English, these results are consistent with previous findings in the United States linking variance in orthographic processing skill to differences in leisure time reading. Thus, this study showed the robustness of orthographic skill independent of phonological processing even within the context of an orthographically regular language.     

Phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers. An intermodal priming study in Grades 3 and 5

This study investigated the phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers as a function of general reading expertise (third and fifth grades) and specific word exposure (frequent and less‐frequent words). An intermodal priming in lexical decision task was performed. Auditory primes (identical and unrelated) were used in order to directly activate phonological codes independently of orthographic processing. Overall, the results revealed a widespread phonological priming effect in both grades. There was a significant interaction between grade, priming condition and frequency, revealing that the impact of frequency on identity priming differed between grades. In third grade, the results indicated that the priming effect was greater for less‐frequent than for frequent words. In fifth grade, priming effects were similar for both frequent and less‐frequent words. These findings indicate that print and speech processing systems are interconnected in young readers. Moreover, phonological codes play an important role in word recognition throughout reading development.     

Evidence for a preserved sensitivity to orthographic redundancy and an impaired access to phonological syllables in French developmental dyslexics

To evaluate the orthographic and phonological processing skills of developmental dyslexics, we (a) examined their abilities to exploit properties of orthographic redundancy and (b) tested whether their phonological deficit extends to spelling-to-sound connections for large-grain size units such as syllables. To assess the processing skills in dyslexics, we utilized the illusory conjunction paradigm to investigate the nature of reading units in French dyslexic and control children matched in reading age. In control children, reading units were defined by both orthographic redundancy and phonological syllable information. In dyslexics, however, reading units were defined only by orthographic redundancy. Therefore, despite their impairment in reading acquisition, developmental dyslexics have the ability to encode and exploit letter frequency co-occurrences. In contrast, their access to phonological syllables from letters was impaired, suggesting that their phonological deficit extends to large grain-size phonological units.     

Explaining Individual Differences in Reading: on the orthographic component of word recognition

This article first presents a conception of word recognition involving both phonological and orthographic processes. Three different explanations about the origin of orthographic processes in word recognition are then discussed. These explanations are: (1) differences in orthographic memory, (2) differences in phonological processes and (3) differences in leisure time reading. In accord with the third explanation, it is argued that automatic orthographic word recognition is directly dependent on children's amount of reading practice in an out‐of‐school setting. Educational implications of this emphasis on leisure time reading effects are also discussed.