An Analysis of the Word Naming Errors of Normal Readers and Reading Disabled Children in Spanish

In the current research the performance of children with and without reading disabilities was compared on a single word naming task. An analysis was carried out of the frequency and form of naming errors produced by the groups when naming real words and nonwords in a transparent orthography such as Spanish. A sample of 132 (45 normal readers, 87 reading disabled) Spanish children aged 9–10 years were selected, and an experiment was carried out to investigate if students with reading disabilities would have particular difficulties in naming words under conditions that require extensive phonological computation. While the children were performing the naming task, we recorded what they read to subsequently analyse the form, as well as the frequency, of naming errors as a function of lexicality, word frequency, word length and positional frequency of syllables. Disabled readers made more errors in nonwords, low frequency words and long nonwords. The findings support the hypothesis that poor phonological skills are a characteristic of reading disabled children.     

The Association of Rapid Temporal Perception With Orthographic and Phonological Processing in Children and Adults With Reading Impairment

Adults and children with reading impairment (N = 67) were administered a rapid auditory task, a rapid visual task, and a battery of orthographic and phonological tasks. Our results support a differential development model of reading disability that argues that deficits in rapid auditory ability in children are primarily associated with problems in phonological processing, whereas deficits in rapid visual ability in children are primarily associated with problems in orthographic processing (Farmer & Klein, 1995). In contrast to the children, the adults showed a strong relation between rapid auditory ability and both orthographic and phonological processing. These results suggest that continued deficits in auditory ability may have a pervasive and negative impact on word processing in general. In addition, adults did not exhibit a relation between rapid visual ability and orthographic-processing problems. Orthographic-processing deficits may result from a reading delay condition that can be overcome with increased reading exposure (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999).     

The relationship of phonological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal memory to severe reading and spelling disability.

The present study examined the relationship of phonological awareness, naming speed, and verbal memory to the scores obtained from five tests assessing word attack, word identification, reading comprehension, and spelling skills in 54 children with severe reading disabilities (48 boys and 6 girls; M age = 9 years, 7 months). Multiple regression analyses indicated that the best predictor of achievement across the five academic tests was the Verbal Comprehension factor from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Age, socioeconomic status (SES), and externalizing behavior problems were also significant predictors of achievement, depending on the academic measure. After controlling for age, SES, behavior problems, and intelligence, the phonological awareness task added significantly to the prediction of word attack, spelling, and reading comprehension scores; rapid letter naming added significantly to the prediction of word identification and prose passage speed and accuracy scores; and a word-list memory task added significantly to the prediction of word recognition scores. These results suggest that several independent processes interact to determine the extent and severity of reading problems.     

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.     

Development of and Relationship Between Phonological and Motivational Processes and Naming Speed in Predicting Word Recognition in Grade 1

In this 2-year longitudinal study the developmental relationships among letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and task orientation were examined, and linguistic-motivational pathways of word reading acquisition were traced from kindergarten to Grade 1 by means of structural equation modeling. The participants were 100 Finnish-speaking nonreaders. Results showed that kindergarten (5–6 years) letter knowledge predicted subsequent preschool (6–7 years) phonological awareness and task orientation. RAN was a unique longitudinal and concurrent predictor of word recognition, suggesting that rapid naming provides a reliable prediction of prospective word reading ability at least in a transparent language. Controlling for phonological awareness and rapid naming, task orientation contributed uniquely to the prediction of word reading competence, suggesting that motivational and linguistic factors are both at work as children face the gradually growing demands of learning to read and write in Grade 1.     

How socioeconomic status,executive functioning and verbal interactions contribute to early academic achievement in Chinese children

The present study investigated the relative importance of executive functioning, parent–child verbal interactions, phonological awareness and visual skills on reading and mathematics for Chinese children from low-versus middle-socio economic status (SES) backgrounds. A total of 199 kindergarten children were assessed on executive functioning, verbal interactions, phonological awareness, visual skills, mathematics and word reading in Chinese and English. Results revealed that low-SES children exhibited lower levels of cognitive-linguistic skills, verbal interactions, reading and mathematics achievement than their middle-SES counterparts. Path analyses also indicated that executive functioning and verbal interactions made significant and direct contributions to mathematics, and indirect contributions to reading through phonological awareness. These results suggest that executive functioning and verbal interactions provide the foundation for phonological awareness and visual skills, which in turn affect reading and mathematics achievement. Overall, findings underscore the potential importance of SES inequalities, cognitive-linguistic skills and parental verbal input to their children for early reading and mathematics achievement.     

Cognitive and language correlates of hyperlexia: evidence from children with autism spectrum disorders

Two studies were conducted to investigate the correlates of hyperlexia in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Study 1 involved 3 groups of school age children individually matched for word reading ability: 6 ASD hyperlexic children, 6 ASD non-hyperlexic children, and 6 typically developing children. Study 2 involved 2 ASD preschool hyperlexic boys, and a group of 21 typical children of similar word reading ability. In both studies, participants were administered several reading measures as well as measures of cognitive and linguistic abilities that have been associated with variations in typical and dyslexic reading, namely, vocabulary, phonological processes, and rapid naming. Results suggest that ASD hyperlexic reading differs from both typical and ASD non-hyperlexic reading. In particular, they suggest that hyperlexics learn to compute letter-sound relations implicitly, on the basis of statistical learning. Although the hyperlexic children could read nonwords as well as the typical and the ASD non-hyperlexic children, they performed significantly worse than these groups of children on a letter-sound knowledge task. They also performed relatively poorly on a phonological awareness task. It is suggested that hyperlexics’ indifference to language as a meaningful, communicative device may be the key to their exceptionally good and precocious development of word reading ability.     

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.     

Lexical and sub-lexical effects on accuracy, reaction time and response duration: impaired and typical word and pseudoword reading in a transparent orthography

In an opaque orthography like English, phonological coding errors are a prominent feature of dyslexia. In a transparent orthography like Spanish, reading difficulties are characterized by slower reading speed rather than reduced accuracy. In previous research, the reading speed deficit was revealed by asking children to read lists of words. However, speed in list reading sums the time required to prepare an utterance, reaction time (RT), with the time required to say it, response duration (RD). Thus, the dyslexic speed deficit in transparent orthographies could be driven by slow RTs, by slow RDs, or both. The distinction is especially important if developmental readers rely on phonological coding to achieve lexical access because the whole word would have to be encoded before it could be identified. However, while the factors that affect reading RT have been extensively investigated, no attention has been paid to RD. We studied the performance of typically developing and dyslexic Spanish children in an oral reading task. We analysed the impact of word frequency and length on reading accuracy, RT, and RD. We found that accuracy, RT, and RD were affected by word frequency and length for both control and dyslexic readers. We also observed interactions between effects of reader group—dyslexic, typically developing (TD) younger or TD older readers—and effects of lexicality, frequency, and word length. Our results show that children are capable of reading aloud using lexical and sub-lexical coding processes in a transparent orthography.     

Reading difficulties in Albanian

Albanian is an Indo-European language with a shallow orthography, in which there is an absolute correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. We aimed to know reading strategies used by Albanian disabled children during word and pseudoword reading. A pool of 114 Kosovar reading disabled children matched with 150 normal readers aged 6 to 11?years old were tested. They had to read 120 stimuli varied in lexicality, frequency, and length. The results in terms of reading accuracy as well as in reading times show that both groups were affected by lexicality and length effects. In both groups, length and lexicality effects were significantly modulated by school year being greater in early grades and later diminish in length and just the opposite in lexicality. However, the reading difficulties group was less accurate and slower than the control group across all school grades. Analyses of the error patterns showed that phonological errors, when the letter replacement leading to new nonwords, are the most common error type in both groups, although as grade rises, visual errors and lexicalizations increased more in the control group than the reading difficulties group. These findings suggest that Albanian normal children use both routes (lexical and sublexical) from the beginning of reading despite of the complete regularity of Albanian, while children with reading difficulties start using sublexical reading and the lexical reading takes more time to acquire, but finally both routes are functional.     

Developmental dyslexia: exploring how much phonological and visual attention span disorders are linked to simultaneous auditory processing deficits

The simultaneous auditory processing skills of 17 dyslexic children and 17 skilled readers were measured using a dichotic listening task. Results showed that the dyslexic children exhibited difficulties reporting syllabic material when presented simultaneously. As a measure of simultaneous visual processing, visual attention span skills were assessed in the dyslexic children. We presented the dyslexic children with a phonological short-term memory task and a phonemic awareness task to quantify their phonological skills. Visual attention spans correlated positively with individual scores obtained on the dichotic listening task while phonological skills did not correlate with either dichotic scores or visual attention span measures. Moreover, all the dyslexic children with a dichotic listening deficit showed a simultaneous visual processing deficit, and a substantial number of dyslexic children exhibited phonological processing deficits whether or not they exhibited low dichotic listening scores. These findings suggest that processing simultaneous auditory stimuli may be impaired in dyslexic children regardless of phonological processing difficulties and be linked to similar problems in the visual modality.     

The building blocks of writing: Learning to write letters and spell words

This study examined the development of beginning writing skills in kindergarten and the relationship between early writing skills and early reading skills. Sixty children were assessed on beginning writing skills (including letter writing, individual sound spelling, and real and nonsense word spelling) and beginning reading skills (including letter name and letter sound knowledge, global early reading ability, phonological awareness, and word reading). Children’s beginning writing abilities are described, and they exhibited a range of proficiency in their ability to write letters, spell sounds, and spell real and nonsense words. Global early reading proficiency, phonological awareness, and/or letter sound fluency predicted letter writing, sound spelling, and spelling of real and nonsense words. Appreciation is expressed to the participating students and teachers at Dwight D. Eisenhower School and to Margaret Boudreau and Joan Foley for assistance in scoring students’ responses.     

Literacy ability and phonological processing skills amongst dyslexic and non-dyslexic speakers of Arabic

This paper investigates the relationship between phonological processing and reading ability amongst grade 4 and grade 5 Arabic speaking children in Egypt. In addition to measuring reading level, the study assessed the children’s ability to identify rhymes, delete individual phonemes from words, retain and manipulate sequences of digit names and rapidly access verbal labels. Further literacy and literacy-related tasks required children to decode novel letter strings, to distinguish similar words, to identify words within letter chains and to correctly spell dictated text. A non-verbal ability measure was also included to allow comparisons to be made between a group of poor readers with good non-verbal skills (dyslexics) with a control group of chronological-age-matched normal readers with equivalent average scores on the non-verbal task. Results indicated relationships between literacy ability, decoding and phonological processing within this cohort, as well as identifying differences between dyslexic and control groups that suggest Arabic dyslexics show signs of poor phonological skills. The study supports the view that Arabic dyslexic children have impairments in the phonological processing domain.     

Understanding the relations between RAN letter subtest components and word reading in first-grade students

First-grade students (N = 221) were individually tested on a battery of cognitive and achievement measures of verbal fluency, visual attention, phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and objects, and reading. All tests were subjected to postacquisition scoring, and all RAN measures were segregated into measures of articulation time, pause time, and consistency of the pause time. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that word reading was directly and significantly predicted by RAN letter naming and general RAN cognitive processing time of objects. Moreover, RAN letter reading constructs were significantly and directly predicted by the latent variables of phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, and general RAN object articulation and cognitive processing times. RAN letter naming constructs were also significantly and indirectly predicted by visual attention. The reading model was found to be consistent with a total mediation of the relation of phonological awareness and reading through RAN letter naming and supported the validity of the RAN letter naming subtest as a basic letter reading test. These findings supported the double-deficit hypothesis for letter reading. We suggest that phonological memory is a basic factor underlying general RAN cognitive processing time of objects and domain-specific information associated with phonemes and their graphic representations.     

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.     

Phonological and lexical reading in Italian children with dyslexia

In this study we explore the development of phonological and lexical reading in dyslexic children. We tested a group of 14 Italian children who have been diagnosed with dyslexia and whose reading age is end of grade 1. We compared this group with a group of 70 typically developing children who have been tested for reading at the end of grade 1. For each dyslexic child we also selected a participant who was attending the same grade, was close in age, and showed typical reading development when tested with a narrative passage reading task (Cornoldi, Colpo, & Gruppo MT, 1981) for correctness and reading speed. Children in this group are “same grade controls.” We used a reading task consisting of 40 three syllables words. A qualitative and quantitative method of coding children’s naming allowed us to distinguish several components of their reading performance: the grapheme and word recognition, the size of orthographic units involved in the aloud orthography–phonology conversion, the reading process used to recognize words. The comparison of the dyslexic group with the reading age and the same grade control groups reveals different trends of delayed reading processes. Considering dyslexic children’s chronological age, lexical reading is greatly delayed. Considering dyslexic children’s reading age, the type of reading process that is more deeply delayed is phonological reading. The rate of fragmented phonological reading (i.e., a type of syllabized phonological reading) is much higher in dyslexic children compared to the reading age group, suggesting that some factors undermine the possibility of internalizing the orthography–phonology conversion and the blending processes.     

Visual search deficits are independent of magnocellular deficits in dyslexia

The aim of this study was to investigate the theory that visual magnocellular deficits seen in groups with dyslexia are linked to reading via the mechanisms of visual attention. Visual attention was measured with a serial search task and magnocellular function with a coherent motion task. A large group of children with dyslexia (n = 70) had slower serial search times than a control group of typical readers. However, the effect size was small (η _p² = 0.05) indicating considerable overlap between the groups. When the dyslexia sample was split into those with or without a magnocellular deficit, there was no difference in visual search reaction time between either group and controls. The data suggest that magnocellular sensitivity and visual spatial attention weaknesses are independent of one another. They also provide more evidence of heterogeneity in response to psychophysical tasks in groups with dyslexia. Alternative explanations for poor performance on visual attention tasks are proposed along with avenues for future research.     

Fostering alphabet knowledge development: a comparison of two instructional approaches

Preschool-aged children (n = 58) were randomly assigned to receive small group instruction in letter names and/or sounds or numbers (treated control). Alphabet instruction followed one of two approaches currently utilized in early childhood classrooms: combined letter name and sound instruction or letter sound only instruction. Thirty-four 15 minute lessons were provided, with children pre- and post-tested on alphabet, phonological awareness, letter–word identification, emergent reading, and developmental spelling measures. Results suggest benefits of combined letter name and sound instruction in promoting children’s letter sound acquisition. Benefits did not generalize to other emergent literacy skills.     

Early literacy interventions: The relative roles of storybook reading, alphabetic activities, and their combination

The study examined the differential contributions on vocabulary and alphabetic skills of three literacy programs: (a) storybook reading program; (b) alphabetic skills program; and (c) a combined program. It was expected that storybook reading would enhance primarily vocabulary while alphabetic skills training would promote primarily alphabetic skills. Program by age interactions were examined in two age groups (3–4 and 4–5 years old) to test whether the storybook reading program may be more productive for the younger children whereas alphabetic skills program more productive for the older children. Twelve low-SES preschools participated in the study, three in each program and three as a comparison group. Results indicated that the children in the three intervention programs progressed significantly more than the comparison group on name writing, letter knowledge and phonological awareness. Further, the alphabetic skills program outperformed the other groups on word writing, letter knowledge and initial letter retrieval, whereas the storybook reading program outperformed only the comparison group. Results on the combined program were mixed – enhancing more initial letter retrieval and book vocabulary than storybook reading program. In general, no differences emerged in the progress of younger versus older children except on receptive vocabulary – the younger surpassing the older in all programs.     

Spongelike acquisition of sight vocabulary in beginning readers?

We report two training studies designed to investigate the relation between phonological awareness, sound‐to‐letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five‐year‐old readers. Effects of visual memory and of teaching methods are also explored. In our first study, novice five‐year‐old readers able to segment initial phonemes and with good knowledge of mappings between sounds and letters learned words more easily from repeated exposure to texts. Results suggested that visual memory influenced word learning in non‐segmenting but not in segmenting children. Spelling regularity did not affect ease of learning. Nouns were easier to learn than function words. In the second study, although phonological awareness and sound‐to‐letter mapping knowledge still exerted a significant influence, all novice five‐year‐olds were able to learn words more easily if these were taught out‐of‐context singly on flashcards. Results support the view that mental representations of printed words are more easily formed by beginners who are able to match at least some of the phonological segments detected in the spoken word to letters in the printed word.