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.     

Establishing word representations through reading and spelling: comparing degree of orthographic learning

Skilled reading involves rapid and automatic word recognition. Through a self‐teaching process, phonological decoding during reading is thought to establish the word‐specific representations in memory that support efficient word reading. Much is known about orthographic learning during reading; less is understood about this process during spelling. Here, we compared the degree of orthographic learning that occurs during reading and spelling. Forty‐eight children in Grade 2 practised reading or spelling nonwords within stories. Orthographic learning was measured using spelling recognition, spelling production and word naming tasks. Both readers and spellers showed evidence of orthographic learning; however, spellers outperformed readers on all tasks. Overall, results suggest that spelling sets up a higher quality representation in memory and highlight the importance of spelling in the development of word reading efficiency.     

The relationship between phonological awareness and word reading accuracy in Oriya and English: A study of Oriya‐speaking fifth‐graders

This study investigated the relationships between phonological awareness and reading in Oriya and English. Oriya is the official language of Orissa, an eastern state of India. The writing system is an alphasyllabary. Ninety‐nine fifth grade children (mean age 9 years 7 months) were assessed on measures of phonological awareness, word reading and pseudo‐word reading in both languages. Forty‐eight of the children attended Oriya‐medium schools where they received literacy instruction in Oriya from grade 1 and learned English from grade 2. Fifty‐one children attended English‐medium schools where they received literacy instruction in English from grade 1 and in Oriya from grade 2. The results showed that phonological awareness in Oriya contributed significantly to reading Oriya and English words and pseudo‐words for the children in the Oriya‐medium schools. However, it only contributed to Oriya pseudo‐word reading and English word reading for children in the English‐medium schools. Phonological awareness in English contributed to English word and pseudo‐word reading for both groups. Further analyses investigated the contribution of awareness of large phonological units (syllable, onsets and rimes) and small phonological units (phonemes) to reading in each language. The data suggest that cross‐language transfer and facilitation of phonological awareness to word reading is not symmetrical across languages and may depend both on the characteristics of the different orthographies of the languages being learned and whether the first literacy language is also the first spoken language.     

A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Foreign‐Language Vocabulary Learning Enhanced by Phonological Rehearsal: The Role of the Right Cerebellum and Left Fusiform Gyrus

Psychological research suggests that foreign‐language vocabulary acquisition recruits the phonological loop for verbal working memory. To depict the neural underpinnings and shed light on the process of foreign language learning, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging of Japanese participants without previous exposure to the Uzbek language using learning of novel Uzbek words. During encoding, spoken Uzbek words and corresponding visual objects were shown, and subjects either overtly repeated the words (phonological rehearsal) or overtly rehearsed numbers (phonological suppression). Phonological rehearsal improved the encoding performance. A learning‐related decrease in rehearsal‐specific activation was found in the left fusiform gyrus, right inferior temporal gyrus, and right cerebellum. Recollection of the phonologically rehearsed words activated the right cerebellum and left fusiform gyrus more prominently than recollection of the phonologically suppressed words in a performance‐dependent manner. The phonological loop might provide the temporal and fragile registration of the articulatory pattern that is converted into a more durable form in the right cerebellum, which is in turn integrated with the object information in the fusiform gyrus.     

The Effect of Articulatory Suppression on Greek Children's Reading of Greek

Abstract The objective of this study was to investigate the role of phonological recoding in young children's reading of Greek. For this, third‐grade Greek children were asked to read and comprehend text while they were concurrently suppressing subvocal articulation. Their performance (in terms of reading times and free recall) was compared to that of a control group of normal reading. The results showed a disturbing effect of articulatory suppression on the subjects’ reading latencies and retention of text. These findings were taken to imply that third‐grade children's reading of text was partly based upon pre‐lexical phonological representation and also that their retention of text partly depended upon a phonological memory code.     

Word stress production in three‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia

We investigated Dutch word stress acquisition in 3‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia (children with at least one parent or older sibling with reading difficulties) and normally developing children, in order to shed light on language acquisition delays in children at risk of dyslexia, as well as to investigate further phonological deficits in dyslexia. The children had to repeat non‐words with stress patterns varying in regularity. Both the at‐risk and control children performed better on imitation of regular stress targets and worse on irregular and prohibited stress patterns. However, the at‐risk children showed more difficulty imitating irregular and prohibited patterns, and had lower percentages phonemes correct than the control group. The results can be interpreted as a delay in word stress acquisition in the at‐risk group. The findings thus point towards a phonological deficit early in language development.     

Is a cerebellar deficit the underlying cause of reading disabilities?

This study investigated whether children with dyslexia differed in their performance on reading, phonological, rapid naming, motor, and cerebellar-related tasks and automaticity measures compared to reading age (RA)-matched and chronological age (CA)-matched control groups. Participants were 51 children attending mainstream English elementary schools in Quebec. All participants completed measures of IQ, word and nonword reading fluency, elision, nonword decoding, rapid naming, bead threading, peg moving, toe tapping, postural stability, and muscle tone. Results from both group contrasts and analyses at the individual case level did not provide support for claims of motor–cerebellar involvement in either typical or atypical reading acquisition. Results were more consistent with a phonological core process account of both typical reading and reading difficulty. Phonological deficits for children with dyslexia compared to RA-matched controls were, however, only evident in group contrasts. Findings thus also have important implications for identifying at-risk readers among their same-aged peers.     

Deaf children's use of phonological coding: evidence from reading, spelling, and working memory

Two groups of deaf children, aged 8 and 14 years, were presented with a number of tasks designed to assess their reliance on phonological coding. Their performance was compared with that of hearing children of the same chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA). Performance on the first task, short-term recall of pictures, showed that the deaf children's spans were comparable to those of RA controls but lower than CA controls. For the older deaf children, short-term memory span predicted reading ability. There was no clear evidence that the deaf children were using phonological coding in short-term memory when recall of dissimilar items was compared with recall of items with similarly sounding names. In the second task, which assessed orthographic awareness, performance of the deaf children was similar to that of RA controls although scores predicted reading level for the deaf children but not the hearing. The final task was a picture spelling test in which there were marked differences between the deaf and hearing children, most notably in the number of spelling refusals (which was higher for the deaf children in the older group than their RA controls) and the percentage of phonetic errors (which was considerably lower for both groups of deaf children than for any of the hearing controls). Overall these results provide support for the view that deaf children place little reliance on phonological coding.     

Sound-symbol learning in children with dyslexia

This study evaluated the effect of sound-symbol association training on visual and phonological memory in children with a history of dyslexia. Pretests of phonological and visual memory, a sound-symbol training procedure, and phonological and visual memory posttests were administered to children with dyslexia, to children whose dyslexia had been compensated through remedial training, and to age- and reading level-matched comparison groups. Deficits in visual and phonological memory and memory for sound-symbol associations were demonstrated in the dyslexia group. For children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been remediated, the sound-symbol training scores were significantly associated with word and pseudoword reading scores and were significantly lower than those of the comparison groups. Children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been compensated showed significantly less facilitation of phonological memory following the training than did typical readers. Skilled readers showed some reduction in accuracy of visual memory following the training, which may be the result of interference of verbalization with a predominantly visual task. A parallel decrease was not observed in the children with dyslexia, possibly because these children did not use the verbal cues. Children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been compensated seemed to have difficulty encoding the novel sounds in memory. As a result, they derived less phonological memory advantage and less visual memory interference from the training than did typical readers. Children in the compensated dyslexia group scored lower on sound-symbol training than their age peers. In other respects, the scores of these children were equivalent to those of the typically reading comparison groups. Children in the compensated dyslexia group exhibited higher phonological rehearsal, iconic memory, and associative memory scores than children in the dyslexia group. Implications for the remediation of dyslexia are discussed.     

The Use of Letter Position Cues in the Visual Processing of Words by Children with an Intellectual Disability and Nondisabled Children

TWO EXPERIMENTS were designed to investigate possible deficiencies in strategies used for decoding words by children with an intellectual disability. The experiments focused specifically on the use of letter position cues as aids to word identification. In Experiment 1,20 children with an intellectual disability (ID) aged 10 to 12 years were matched with two groups of nondisabled children, one for mental age (MA) and one for chronological age (CA), on a visual search task, with response times to array types (word, pseudoword, or nonword) and target position in positive arrays as the dependent variable. The ID group showed response time advantages only when the target letter was in the initial position of an array; however both nondisabled groups responded faster when the target letter was in either the initial or final position, compared to the medial position, and this pattern occurred for words (MA group) and words and pseudowords (CA group) but not for nonwords. Experiment 2 extended the investigation to the oral reading of isolated words. In substitution errors made by children with an intellectual disability, the incorrect word tended to resemble the test word only in the initial letter. In errors made by MA‐matched children, however, both the initial and final letters tended to be the same as those in the test word, suggesting that these are salient cues to word recognition. The findings are interpreted with reference to previous work on early reading acquisition and to research which suggests a more generalised deficiency in the acquisition and use of strategies by ID subjects in cognitive tasks.     

Verbal Short-Term Memory Span in Speech-Disordered Children: Implications for Articulatory Coding in Short-Term Memory

One influential explanation of the development of verbal short-term memory in children argues that short-term memory capacity is a direct function of speech rate. This theory predicts that children with pathologically slow speech will show reduced verbal short-term memory capacity and will show less evidence of speech-base coding on verbal memory tasks. To test this prediction, verbal short-term memory span was assessed using a task that did not require a verbal response in 37 speech-disordered children and 37 age- and sex-matched controls (age range 4-15 years). The speech-disordered group had a significantly lower short-term memory capacity, a smaller word length effect, and reduced speech-motor activity during rehearsal periods. Covariance analyses revealed that these differences were not a function of general intellectual or motor speed differences between the groups, and that speech rate as a covariate abolished group differences in short-term memory. These results suggest that speech rate may be a causal determinant of verbal short-term memory capacity.     

Reading comprehension skills of young adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia

This study explores the contribution of cognitive processes to comprehension skills in adults who suffered from childhood developmental dyslexia (CD). The performance of adults with CD (ages 17 to 23), chronological age-matched (CA) adults, and reading level-matched (RL) children was compared on measures of phonological processing, naming speed, working memory (WM), general knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension. The results showed that adults with CD scored lower on measures of phonological processing, naming speed, WM, general knowledge, and vocabulary when compared to CA readers but were comparable to RL children on the majority of process measures. Phonological processing, naming speed, vocabulary, general knowledge, and listening comprehension contributed independent variance to reading comprehension accuracy, whereas WM, intelligence, phonological processing, and listening comprehension contributed independent variance to comprehension fluency. Adults with CD scored lower than CA adults and higher than RL children on measures of lexical processing, WM, and listening comprehension when word recognition and intelligence were partialed from the analysis. In summary, constraints in phonological processing and naming speed mediate only some of the influence of high-order processes on reading comprehension. Furthermore, adults with CD experience difficulties in WM, listening comprehension, and vocabulary independently of their word recognition problems and intellectual ability.     

Comparing the contribution of two tests of working memory to reading in relation to phonological awareness and rapid naming speed

The purpose of this study was to compare the contribution of two different versions of working memory to word reading and reading comprehension in relation to phonological awareness and rapid naming speed. Fifty children were administered two measures of working memory, namely an adaptation of the Daneman and Carpenter sentence span task and Sentence Question, tests of phonological awareness, rapid naming speed, word reading and reading comprehension. The results indicated that Sentence Question accounted for unique variance over and beyond the effects of Daneman and Carpenter's sentence span task, whereas the latter did not when the effects of Sentence Question were partialled out. In addition, both phonological awareness and rapid naming were accounting for unique variance beyond the effects of working memory in predicting reading. The role of working memory on reading is discussed, and future directions for research are suggested.     

Effects of Phonological and Orthographic Shifts on Children’s Processing of Written Morphology: A Time-Course Study

We report two experiments that investigated whether phonological and/or orthographic shifts in a base word interfere with morphological processing by French 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and adults (as a control group) along the time course of visual word recognition. In both experiments, prime-target pairs shared four possible relationships: morphological without modification (nuageux-NUAGE), morphological with phonological modification (bergerie-BERGER), morphological with phonological and orthographic modifications (soigneux-SOIN), and orthographic control (fourmi-FOUR). In Experiment 1 (60-ms prime duration), priming effects were only significant in the morphological condition without modification in children but in the three morphological conditions in adults. In Experiment 2 (250-ms prime duration) priming effects were significant in all three morphological conditions in each group, independently of form shifts. These results indicate that allomorphic variation does allow for the lexical activation of base words only in the later stages of word recognition in children, whereas this activation is automatic in adults.     

The nature of the phonological processing in French dyslexic children: evidence for the phonological syllable and linguistic features' role in silent reading and speech discrimination

This study investigated the status of phonological representations in French dyslexic children (DY) compared with reading level- (RL) and chronological age-matched (CA) controls. We focused on the syllable’s role and on the impact of French linguistic features. In Experiment 1, we assessed oral discrimination abilities of pairs of syllables that varied as a function of voicing, mode or place of articulation, or syllable structure. Results suggest that DY children underperform controls with a ‘speed-accuracy’ deficit. However, DY children exhibit some similar processing than those highlighted in controls. As in CA and RL controls, DY children have difficulties in processing two sounds that only differ in voicing, and preferentially process obstruent rather than fricative sounds, and more efficiently process CV than CCV syllables. In Experiment 2, we used a modified version of the Colé, Magnan, and Grainger's (Applied Psycholinguistics 20:507–532, 1999) paradigm. Results show that DY children underperform CA controls but outperform RL controls. However, as in CA and RL controls, data reveal that DY children are able to use phonological procedures influenced by initial syllable frequency. Thus, DY children process syllabically high-frequency syllables but phonemically process low-frequency syllables. They also exhibit lexical and syllable frequency effects. Consequently, results provide evidence that DY children performances can be accounted for by laborious phonological syllable-based procedures and also degraded phonological representations.     

Cognitive processing skills and developmental dyslexia in Chinese

The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to examine the extent to which Chinese dyslexic children experience deficits in phonological and orthographic processing skills and (b) to examine if Chinese dyslexia is associated with deficits in Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) processing. A total of 27 Grade 4 children with dyslexia (DYS), 27 Grade 4 chronological age (CA) controls, and 27 Grade 2 reading age (RA) controls were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid naming, phonological memory, PASS, reading accuracy, and reading fluency. The results indicated that the DYS group performed significantly poorer than the CA and RA groups on both measures of phonological awareness and on a measure of orthographic processing but comparably to the RA group on a measure of rapid naming and both measures of phonological memory. In regard to the PASS processing skills, the DYS group performed worse than the CA controls on Successive and Simultaneous processing but comparably to the RA group on all PASS processing skills. Implications of these findings for early identification and intervention of reading difficulties are discussed.     

Working memory in Dutch children with reading- and arithmetic-related LD

The aim of the two studies presented in this article was to examine working memory performance in Dutch children with various subtypes of learning disabilities. The performance of children with reading disabilities (RD) was compared to that of children with arithmetic disabilities (AD), children with both reading and arithmetic disabilities (RAD), and chronological age-matched controls (CA). Measures covered the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive. In both studies, the children with RD showed no working memory deficits whatsoever. Children with AD showed a single impairment on the task tapping working memory for dynamic visual information. Children with RAD performed lower only on the digit span backward task. The failure to replicate the expected working memory deficits in children with reading-related disabilities is discussed.     

The importance of letter knowledge in the relationship between phonological awareness and reading

Previous correlational and experimental research has found a positive association between phonological awareness and reading skills. This paper provides an overview of studies in this area and shows that many studies have neglected to control for extraneous variables such as ability, phonological memory, pre‐existing reading skills and letter knowledge. The paper reports on the results of a longitudinal study that took account of these variables when examining the relationship between phonological awareness and reading for a group of children during their first two years at school. Children showed rhyme awareness before they began to read but were unable to perform a phoneme deletion task until after they had developed word‐reading skills. Concurrent and predictive correlations between phonological awareness scores and later reading were often significant and remained so after adjusting for verbal ability or phonological memory. Controlling for letter knowledge, however, reduced most correlations to nonsignificant levels.     

Language and literacy in nonvocal children with cerebral palsy

Metalinguistic and literacy abilities were studied in twenty-seven nonvocal cerebral palsied school children. The participants of the study were presented four tests of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, sound identification, phoneme synthesis and word length analysis. Their verbal comprehension was measured using a semantic and a syntactic task. Two tests of nonverbal memory: the visual sequential task from ITPA and Corsi blocks and the Digit Span task from WISC, were also included. These measures were related to their reading and spelling ability. The nonvocal children performed on a lower level on the reading and spelling tasks than did the children of two comparison groups, one matched for mental age and one for mental and chronological age. There were no differences in phonological awareness or in verbal memory. The disabled children performed worse on the verbal comprehension task than the children in the comparison groups. Although the reading and spelling results were low in the nonvocal group there were children showing some literacy skills. A within-group analysis performed in the nonvocal group showed that the reading children performed better on all memory tests, and on the sound identification and the word length analysis tasks than the nonreading ones. They also showed better results on verbal comprehension, the semantic task and used more symbols in their communication. Synthetic speech was more often used in reading and spelling education in the reading subgroup than in the nonreading. Metalinguistic abilities and possibility of acoustic rehearsal are discussed as important factors in reading and spelling acquisition in the nonvocal population.