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.     

A cross‐sectional study of prosodic sensitivity and reading difficulties

In this cross‐sectional study, we explore the relationship between prosodic sensitivity (suprasegmental phonology) and phonological awareness (segmental phonology) and investigate whether a group of poor readers display significant suprasegmental phonological deficits in comparison to chronological age‐matched controls and younger, reading age‐matched controls. Phonological awareness assessments were administered along with a battery of prosodic sensitivity assessments drawn from recent literature. The results showed that poor readers were outperformed by their chronological age‐matched counterparts on all measures of prosodic sensitivity. A significant main effect of group was found on the revised stress mispronunciations task and the stress assignment task from the prosodic assessment battery, the former of which remained even after controlling for individual differences in receptive vocabulary and measures of phonological awareness. Significant relationships were also found between measures of prosodic sensitivity and phonological awareness (especially phoneme awareness). These findings emphasise the importance of both segmental and suprasegmental phonological skills in children's reading development.     

Phonological processes as predictors of specific reading skills in children at risk for reading failure

Children at risk for reading disability were evaluated as kindergartners and again as first graders to determine (1) intercorrelations among phonological processing tasks and (2) the relationship of such tasks to word identification and word attack. With IQ controlled, there were no intercorrelations among measures of phonological awareness, phonetic recoding in working memory, and phonological recoding in lexical access. Thus, these results failed to substantiate the concept of a general phonological processing ability. Partial correlations controlling for IQ revealed no relationship between reading and phonological awareness or phonetic recoding in working memory. In contrast, lexical access measures were significantly, albeit moderately, correlated with word identification but not word attack. Word attack and word identification were predicted by different combinations of variables. These results suggest that lexical access ability is an important factor in reading acquisition and that different combinations of phonological processes may be related to different aspects of reading.This research was supported by PHS grant HD 21887 to Bowman Gray School of Medicine and by PHS Grant NS 19413 to UNC-Greensboro Subcontract to Bowman Gray School of Medicine.     

Effect of phonological and morphological awareness on reading comprehension in Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities

This research explored phonological and morphological awareness among Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities (RD) and its effect on reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities. Participants included 39 seventh graders with RD and two matched control groups of normal readers: 40 seventh graders matched for chronological age (CA) and 38 third graders matched for reading age (RA). We assessed phonological awareness, word reading, morphological awareness, and reading comprehension. Findings indicated that the RD group performed similarly to the RA group on phonological awareness but lower on phonological decoding. On the decontextualized morphological task, RD functioned on par with RA, whereas in a contextualized task RD performed above RA but lower than CA. In reading comprehension, RD performed as well as RA. Finally, results indicated that for normal readers contextual morphological awareness uniquely contributed to reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities, whereas no such unique contribution emerged for the RD group. The absence of an effect of morphological awareness in predicting reading comprehension was suggested to be related to a different recognition process employed by RD readers which hinder the ability of these readers to use morphosemantic structures. The lexical quality hypothesis was proposed as further support to the findings, suggesting that a low quality of lexical representation in RD students leads to ineffective reading skills and comprehension. Lexical representation is thus critical for both lexical as well as comprehension abilities.     

Phonological task comparability in Arabic and relation to reading: a longitudinal assessment in kindergarten and first grade

The universal role of phonological processing skills for reading acquisition has been established in many different languages including Arabic. However, in Arabic little knowledge exists about the development of wide-range of phonological tasks and about the correlations between them. We longitudinally studied the developmental trends and correlations between different phonological tasks in kindergarten and first grade and tested their relation to reading accuracy and fluency. Thirty-two children individually completed the same ten phonological processing tasks in kindergarten and first grade. In first grade, reading measures and letter naming were also assessed. Developmental effects of phonological skills showed significant improvement of performance between the two phases in the majority of tasks. Task comparability has raised interesting issues related to the developmental hierarchy of phonological awareness tasks. Moreover, phonological awareness tasks were more inter-correlated in first grade compared to kindergarten, and their correlations to reading were also more established when phonological measures were collected in first grade. The developmental hierarchy of phonological tasks seems to depend on the linguistic and cognitive complexity (unit position, maintenance of the coherent unit and word length) of the items, beyond the size of the phonological unit which was manipulated. The observations reported here have practical implications for planning graded phonological instruction and intervention strategies.

     

初一英语语音意识、句法意识、工作记忆与英语阅读的关系

通过使用音素定位、句法更正、句子尾词记忆.单词阅读、句子理解和短文理解任务探查了初一学生英语语音意识,句法意识和工作记忆与单词阅读、句子阅读和短文阅读等不同层次阅读的关系,以及阅读水平高低不同学生在元语言意识的差异.结果发现,英语阅读水平高低两组学生在英语语音意识、句法意识和工作记忆方面有显著差异.回归分析发现,英语句法意识对不同层次阅读都具有最显著的预测作用,但英语语音意识只对短文阅读理解有显著预测作用,工作记忆对不同层次阅读的预测都不显著,表明英语句法意识是初一学生英语阅读的重要预测变量.     

Auditory perceptual processing in reading disabled children

One hundred and three children attending Learning Assistance Centres due to reading difficulties and one hundred and three matched, average readers were administered a battery of auditory perceptual processing tasks. The battery was composed of auditory analysis and synthesis, auditory sequential memory, auditory discrimination, and phonemic segmentation tasks. A principal components analysis yielded four factors. These were determined to be advanced phonological awareness, sequential memory, discrimination, and simple phonological awareness. Discriminant analyses, using the factor scores, indicated that three of the four factors were able to discriminate between the able and disabled readers. Most notable among these was advanced phonological awareness. Auditory discrimination could not discriminate between the groups. The results suggest that there may not be one underlying phonological ability implicated in successful reading acquisition. Furthermore, it is clear that two levels of phonological awareness exist and that screening and diagnostic instruments should address both in order to have predictive validity.     

The role of morphological awareness in reading achievement among young Chinese-speaking English language learners: a longitudinal study

The present study examined the development of morphological awareness and its contribution to vocabulary and reading comprehension among young Chinese-speaking English language learners (ELLs). We focused on two aspects of morphological awareness: derivational awareness and compound awareness. Participants included 46 kindergarteners (younger cohort) and 34 first graders (older cohort) of Chinese descent in Canada at the beginning of the study. Children were administered a battery of English measures including derivational awareness, compound awareness, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and reading comprehension at two time points spaced 1?year apart. Results demonstrated a steady growth in Chinese-speaking ELL children??s derivational and compound awareness from kindergarten to Grade 2. Importantly, for the first graders, morphological awareness accounted for unique variance in vocabulary concurrently, and unique variance in both vocabulary and reading comprehension a year later. Generally speaking, the variance explained by morphological awareness increased with grade level, and derivational awareness accounted for more variance in vocabulary and reading comprehension than did compound awareness. These results underscore the emerging importance of morphological awareness, especially derivational awareness, in young Chinese-speaking ELL children??s English reading development.     

The literacy profile of Greek precocious readers: a follow‐up study

The aim of this follow‐up study was to examine the progress made by 13 Greek‐speaking precocious readers in phonological awareness, reading and spelling from the fourth to sixth grades of primary education, and to compare their progress with that of 11 nonprecocious reader classmates. It was hypothesised that because of the linguistic characteristics of Greek orthography, precocious readers would not have an advantage in phonological awareness, spelling and reading comprehension tasks, but would have an advantage in reading speed. The data analyses showed that by the end of primary education, precocious readers had significantly better performance than their nonprecocious reader classmates in phonological awareness and reading speed tasks, but there was no significant difference between the groups in spelling and reading comprehension tasks. However, phonological awareness differences between the groups did not maintain when spelling achievement was taken into account.     

Explaining phonology and reading in adult learners: Introducing prosodic awareness and executive functions to reading ability

Background

This study was designed to extend our understanding of phonology and reading to include suprasegmental awareness using measures of prosodic awareness, which are complex tasks that tap into the rhythmic aspects of phonology. By requiring participants to access, reflect on and manipulate word stress, the prosodic awareness measures used here necessarily impose demands on the executive system. Prosodic awareness was evaluated as a phonological predictor of reading in older readers while controlling for executive functions (EF) in order to ascertain whether observed predictive relationships could be confidently attributed to suprasegmental awareness.

Methods

103 adults between 18 and 55 years of age completed tasks on prosodic awareness, EF, vocabulary, nonverbal abilities, naming speed and short‐term memory.

Results

Independent contributions of prosodic awareness added to models of word reading, whereas EF processes did not uniquely contribute to adult reading outcomes.

Conclusions

Suprasegmental phonology explains individual differences in word reading among experienced readers. Theoretical implications of findings are discussed.

Implications for Practice

What is already known about this topic

• Phonological awareness (PA) becomes less predictive of reading in older readers. PA is typically assessed at the level of the segment (e.g., phonemes, syllables and onset‐rimes), with less focus on suprasegmental processes (e.g., rhythm, stress and intonation).
• Suprasegmental phonological processing includes measures of prosodic ability (e.g., awareness and manipulation of suprasegmental features of oral language). Studies on prosodic awareness and reading have independent contributions beyond segmental PA in early readers. Less work has been investigated among adult readers.
• Executive functions (EF) including inhibitory control, working memory, switching and updating and monitoring of goal directed behaviour, predict overall academic achievement. Limited studies have controlled for EF demands in phonological tasks.

What this paper adds

• Tasks of prosodic awareness necessarily impose demands on the executive system when manipulating components of oral language. After controlling for EF and controls, prosodic awareness explained individual differences in adult word reading.
• Tasks of suprasegmental phonological processes explain the association between phonology and reading in older and more experienced readers. Researchers who explore phonology and reading development should begin to include tasks of prosodic awareness to examine the dual role of segmental and suprasegmental PA as it is implicated across development.

Implications for theory, policy or practice

• Theoretical models of phonology and reading can be extended to include suprasegmental processes.
• For educational practitioners involved in reading assessment of older readers, tasks of prosodic awareness are a more age‐appropriate measure of phonology.
• Tasks of phonology and reading with increasing complexity impose greater demands on the executive system. The relationship between cognitive flexibility and reading needs to be considered in theoretical models of reading.

     

Evidence for phonological processing deficits in less-skilled readers

Although weaknesses in metaphonological skills are well-documented in poor readers, prior studies have yielded inconsistent findings as to whether less-skilled readers also have deficits in the more primary phonological processes entailed in verbal working memory and speech production tasks. The present study was designed to examine this issue by comparing less-skilled third-graders readers (n=30) with younger children at the same reading level (n=30) and with more-skilled agemates (n=30) on a variety of tasks that require phonological processing (i.e., three “verbal memory” tasks [word span, span with concurrent processing, pseudoword imitation] and three “speech production” tasks [word-pair repetition, tongue twisters, rapid naming]). The results were striking: the less-skilled third-grade readers had significantly lower accuracy scores than both their agemates and the younger normal readers on the word span, pseudoword imitation, word-pair repetition, and tongue twister tasks. Measures of accuracy were more related to reading ability than were measures of speed. Performance on a pseudoword imitation task was the variable most strongly linked to reading achievement.     

Literacy Growth in the Academic Year Versus Summer From Preschool Through Second Grade: Differential Effects of Schooling Across Four Skills

Differences in literacy growth over the summer versus the school year were examined to isolate how schooling affects children's literacy development from preschool through second grade across four literacy skills. Children (n = 383) were tested individually twice each year for up to 4 years on measures of phonological awareness, decoding, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Growth curve analyses indicated that schooling effects were greatest for decoding skills and reading comprehension, were medium in size for phonological awareness, and were less evident for vocabulary. Except for vocabulary, relatively small amounts of growth were observed for preschoolers, followed by a period of rapid growth for kindergarteners and first graders, which slowed again for second graders. Findings demonstrate the differential effect of schooling on four separate literacy skills during the crucial school transition period.     

Relationships of naming skills to reading,memory, and receptive vocabulary: Evidence for imprecise phonological representations of words by poor readers

The main hypotheses addressed in the research were (1) whether imprecision in the phonological representations of lexical items underlies the impaired expressive naming abilities of disabled readers, and (2) whether weak verbal memory might mediate the relationship between naming and reading skills. From samples of 93 first graders and 67 fourth graders, extreme groups of good and poor readers were identified and compared on measures of receptive vocabulary, expressive naming, acceptability judgments for variants of object names, imitation and correction of naming errors by another speaker, pseudoword repetition, and long-term memory. Performance was generally better by older than younger students and by good than poor readers at each age, with little interaction between grade and reader group. The results indicated that for both good and poor readers, imprecise phonological knowledge, especially about long words, contributed to children’s difficulties on all naming tasks. Memory differences, however, appeared to play only a minor role in explaining the strong association between naming and reading.     

Predicting reading progress in children receiving special help

The main aim of the study was to determine whether performance on reading-related cognitive processing tasks would help predict reading progress in children receiving special help. The 86 subjects were initially aged six to eight years and most were followed up after two years. When variance due to IQ and age was accounted for, an orthographic processing task, phonological awareness (phoneme deletion), and digit- naming speed were significant predictors of later reading skills. A strength in phonological awareness differentiated initial poor readers who later made excellent gains in reading from poor readers who did not improve. Children whose reading deteriorated had serious weaknesses on tasks of naming speed and confrontation naming. Their poor lexical retrieval skills had a more deleterious effect on later reading than on initial. Indications were that for children diagnosed as poor readers at age six or seven years, prognosis is better for boys, and for garden- variety poor readers, than for dyslexics. Caution was urged in applying the term dyslexic to children in the first two school grades because many of them will be slow starters who do not have a persistent reading problem.     

Metaphonological Abilities of Phonologically Disordered Children

There is currently a great deal of interest in the underlying metaphonological abilities of children with phonological output impairment and their possible relationship with both the continuing speech problem and later literacy development. We present data from 61 children with phonological output problems and 59 normal speakers on a range of metaphonological, speech output, language and cognitive assessments. While supporting an overall group difference in metaphonological ability, the range of individual variation is highlighted. Some weak relationships were found between metaphonological skills and other language and cognitive performance, but not between metaphonological ability and severity of speech performance. The accepted developmental order of phonological awareness tasks was not entirely supported; rather, subgroups of children were found who were showing quite different orders of difficulty. A distinction between segmentation and rhyming skills was confirmed.     

Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.     

A reading-level match study of phonemic processes underlying reading disabilities in a transparent orthography

The current study examined the relationship in Spanish (i.e., a transparent orthography) between different levels of phonological awareness and reading disabilities. In addition, the strategies used by the children when they resolved phoneme segmentation and reversal tasks were analyzed. A sample of 133 subjects were selected and organized in three different groups: (1) A group of 45 reading-disabled children, (2) A comparison group of 44 normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled, and (3) A reading level match group of 44 younger normal readers at the same reading level as the reading disabled. Three phonological awareness tasks were used to measure levels of intrasyllabic and phonemic awareness. The reading disabled group was equivalent to the younger reading level-matched control group in the odd-word-out task. However, there were differences in the phonemic tasks (e.g., phoneme segmentation and reversal) because the reading disabled group performed more poorly than the younger children. Overall, the children matched in age with the reading disabled group were superior in all phonological awareness tasks. There were differences between the groups when the strategies used by the children were analyzed.     

Weak and strong novice readers of english as a foreign language: Effects of first language and socioeconomic status

This study examined individual differences among beginning readers of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study concentrated on the effects of underlying first language (L1) knowledge as well as EFL letter and vocabulary knowledge. Phonological and morphological awareness, spelling, vocabulary knowledge, and word reading in Hebrew L1, in addition to knowledge of EFL letters and EFL vocabulary, were measured. The study also investigated the effect of socioeconomic background (SES) on beginning EFL readers. Participants included 145 fourth graders from three schools representing two socioeconomic backgrounds in the north of Israel. The results indicate that knowledge of English letters played a more prominent role than knowledge of Hebrew L1 components in differentiating between strong and weak EFL readers. The Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis was supported by L1 phonological awareness, word reading, and vocabulary knowledge appearing as part of discriminating functions. The presence of English vocabulary knowledge as part of the discriminant functions provides support for English word reading being more than just a decoding task for EFL beginner readers. Socioeconomic status differentiated the groups for EFL word recognition but not for EFL reading comprehension.     

Grammaticality judgments and reading skill in grade 2

Do the language problems associated with reading disability extend to sentence-level knowledge? If so, how should these problems be characterized? In this study, second graders were presented with two different oral syntactic tasks, equivalent in grammatical complexity, but varying in the actual task demands placed upon the reader. In theJudgment task, subjects were asked to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences; in theCorrection task, subjects were asked to remedy violations of grammaticality. Performance on these sentence-level tasks was, in turn, examined in relation to reading scores, memory span, and metaphonological skill. The Judgment task revealed a wide range of ability among second-graders, and scores were systematically affected by the syntactic nature of the violation. However, performance on Judgment was not associated with reading ability or metaphonological skill, and scores were minimally affected by short-term memory factors. Mean scores on the Correction task were comparable to those achieved in the Judgment task and were also systematically affected by syntactic factors. However, performance on Correction was strongly associated with reading ability and metaphonological skill, and was greatly affected by short-term memory factors. These results suggest that reading disability does not reflect problems in basic syntactic knowledge. Instead, sentence-level problems that have been observed in less-skilled readers may be caused by the nonlinguistic processing demands of the syntactic measures typically employed.     

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.