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Aaron. - . Alarie. - . Alves. - . Anderson. - . Angell. - . Anthony. - . Aram. - . Arrow. - . Arteagoitia. - . Ayala. - . Babur. - . Baker. - . Balass. - . Barth. - . Bates. - . Beck. - . Bellitti. - . Berends. - . Bernstein. - . Betjemann. - . Biemiller. - . Bignell. - . Bishop. - . Blaiklock. - . Blanchard. - . Blomert. - . Bodé. - . Bogliotti. - . Bonnotte. - . Bosman. - . Both_de_Vries. - . Boulware-Gooden. - . Brenders. - . Breznitz. - . Bryant. - . Bucko. - . Burnham. - . Bus. - . Byrne. - . Cain. - . Cameron. - . Caravolas. - . Cardoso-Martins. - . Carlisle. - . Carroll. - . Carver. - . Casalis. - . Castles. - . Catts. - . Chase. - . Chen. - . Chow B. - . Chow E. - . Christensen. - . Christodoulou. - . Colé. - . Coleman. - . Colin. - . Collins. - . Compton. - . Connelly. - . Connor. - . Corbett. - . Core. - . Cormier. - . Cornelissen. - . Corriveau. - . Cromley. - . Cronin. - . Cruz. - . Cunningham. - . Curry. - . de_Jong. - . de_Luca. - . Deacon. - . deBree. - . Dirks. - . Dole. - . Ducharme. - . Duncan. - . Durand. - . Elbeheri. - . Elbro. - . Evans. - . Farrington-Flint. - . Figueredo. - . Filipppini. - . Foorman. - . Frost. - . Funnell. - . Garcia_Gomez. - . Genard. - . Georgiou. - . Gerber. - . Geudens. - . Giess. - . Gijsel. - . Godfrey. - . Godoy. - . Goetry. - . Goetz. - . Goldberg. - . González-Trujillo. - . Gottardo. - . Goulandris. - . Gregg. - . Griffin. - . Grigorenko. - . Gygax. - . Hagtvet. - . Hamilton. - . Hasselman. - . Hindman. - . Ho. - . Horner. - . Hosp. - . Hughes. - . Hulslander. - . Hutzler. - . Iyengar. - . Jacobs. - . Jared. - . Jenner. - . Jimenez. - . Jiménez. - . Johnson. - . Johnston. - . Joshi. - . Juhasz. - . Karni. - . Kemp. - . Kessler. - . King. - . Kirby. - . Klicpera. - . Kliegl. - . Klint_Petersen. - . Korat. - . Kuhn. - . Kwan. - . Kyle. - . Lafrance. - . Lambrecht_Smith. - . Lamm. - . Landerl. - . Lane. - . Largy. - . Larkin. - . League. - . Lecocq. - . Lee. - . Lehtonen. - . Leikin. - . Leong. - . Leppänen. - . Levin. - . Levorato. - . Levy. - . Leybaert. - . Lipka. - . Luan_Hui. - . Lyster. - . Lyytinen. - . Macaruso. - . Manis. - . Manolitsis. - . Mariol. - . Martens. - . Martin. - . Martin-Chang. - . Mason. - . Masterson. - . McBride-Chang. - . McCoubrey. - . McKenna. - . Messaoud-Galusi. - . Miller. - . Miller_Guron. - . Morgan. - . Morrison. - . Mostow. - . Muter. - . Nation. - . Nelson. - . Nicholson. - . Noble. - . Notenboom. - . Nunes. - . Nunes. - . O’Carroll. - . Oakhill. - . Olinghouse. - . Olson. - . Pacton. - . Palma. - . Perfetti. - . Petrella. - . Peyrard-Janvid. - . Pollo. - . Post. - . Puranik. - . Räsänen. - . Ravid. - . Reichle. - . Richards. - . Richardson. - . Roberts. - . Roberts. - . Rosa. - . Roth. - . Rudra. - . Saiegh-Haddad. - . Saint-Aubin. - . Sainz. - . Samuelsson. - . Sandak. - . Schabmann. - . Scheerer-Neumann. - . Schelstraete. - . Schmidt. - . Segers. - . Serniclaes. - . Serres. - . Shany. - . Share. - . Shaul. - . Sheehy. - . Siegel. - . Simpson. - . Smith. - . Snellings. - . Snowling. - . Sprenger-Charolles. - . Stainthorp. - . Steffler. - . Stein. - . Stringer. - . Stuart. - . Stuart. - . Sucena. - . Suchey. - . Szczerbinski. - . Talcott. - . Thaler. - . Thomson. - . Topping. - . Torppa. - . Trainin. - . Transler. - . Treiman. - . Uhry. - . van_Beijsterveldt. - . van_den_Bos. - . van_den_Broeck. - . van_den_Broek. - . van_der_Schoot. - . van_Gelderen. - . van_Heghe. - . van_Hell. - . van_Otterloo. - . Varnhagen. - . Vasbinder. - . Verhoeven. - . Wade-Woolley. - . Wang. - . Wauters. - . Weekes. - . Williams. - . Wise. - . Wolters. - . Wood. - . Worthington. - . Wu. - . Yuen. - . Yuill
P.G. Aaron (Indiana State University). - A metric to assess sight-word reading skill.
Two strategies are used for pronouncing written words, decoding and sight word reading. In contrast to decoding, sight word reading is quick and automatic. Since sight word reading is an indication of skilled reading, an index of sight word reading would serve as a useful tool. Speed of processing as an index of sight word reading can be problematic because an individual may be a good sight word reader, but slow. Having a common denominator of processing speed can avoid this confound. It was hypothesized that an individual may be considered to be a sight word reader if he can name a list of words as quickly as he can name the letters of the alphabet. When this criterion was applied to 167 elementary children and 75 college students, it was found that sight word reading skill emerges at about third grade. Children with reading disability are slow in developing sight word reading skill.
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Sara E. Alarie (Queen’s University), Marina Davydovskaia, Tanya Martin, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Is there a bilingual advantage for early French immersion students in reading and spelling English?
The present short-term longitudinal study compared French immersion children and English monolingual children. Students were tested in October of Grade 1 and matched on reading level in English with the monolingual English group. Age, cognitive ability and receptive vocabulary in English were controlled. In May of the same school year, tests of phonological awareness, nonword decoding, and spelling were administered. This design was aimed at investigating (1) the possible advantages of bilingualism on these linguistic measures and (2) the relative development of reading related skills and abilities in these groups over the first year of formal instruction.
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Rui Alexandre Alves (Universidade do Porto), Cecilia Aguiar, Sao Luis Castro, Joaquim Bairrio - Assessment of concepts about print using an ecologically valid task with Portuguese children.
Knowledge about writing conventions helps the beginning reader to progress through the printed text. The Concepts About Print task developed by Marie Clay allows to measure that knowledge in the context of a specially prepared picture/text story book, and thus is more ecologically valid than traditional itemized tests that have also been proposed for the same purpose. We prepared a Portuguese version of the task (Conceitos Sobre a Escrita, CSE), and presented it to 41 children aged 5 to 8 years. We found that CSE is reliable and sensitive to grade-related increases in literacy.
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Richard C. Anderson (University of Illinois). - Morphological instruction accelerates Chinese children’s literacy development.
A total of 146 Chinese children participated in a two-year study of morphological instruction. Every reading lesson in the first and second grade was augmented to better explain the structure of new characters and words. After controlling for IQ and performance on a battery of reading readiness tests administered early in the first grade, children who received morphological instruction performed substantially better than control children on reading and writing tests administered early in the third grade. The results suggest a causal connection between insight into character and word structure and growth in literacy.
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Philip Angell (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), Uta Frith - How to become an early reader.
Early reading acquisition was studied in two sisters who started to read very young: At 46 months, Beatrice showed orthographic reading and alphabetic spelling. She also gave more irregular pronunciations to irregular non-words than adults, suggesting the default mechanism was not based on GPC's. In contrast, at 37 months Jemima's reading style was purely logographic. By 43 months, her reading style was still logographic, but her repertoire and accuracy had increased, and this was joined by a nascent alphabetic spelling style. These two cases are used to illuminate reading acquisition in the context of self-initiated learning.
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Jason Anthony (University of Houston) Coleen Carlson - Phonological precision, awareness, memory, and access: The structure and roles of preschool phonological processing abilities in early literacy.
A fourth phonological processing ability (PPA) was recently introduced and asserted to play an important role in literacy acquisition. We examined phonological precision in relation to established PPA and emergent literacy skills. 232 3- to 5-year-old children completed measures of phonological awareness, RAN, phonological memory, phonological precision, letters names, letters sounds, and print discrimination. Confirmatory factor analysis evidenced distinguishability of Phonological Awareness and Phonological Access; however, Phonological Precision and Phonological Memory were correlated at .95. Structural equation modeling found Phonological Precision and Phonological Memory had equivalent correlations with other PPA and literacy skills. Results question the new construct and its roles in development of phonological awareness and word reading.
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Dorit Aram (Tel Aviv University), Sigalit Aviram - Parents’ choosing and reading books to their young children: How does it effect children's literacy and socio-emotional development?
A large though inconclusive body of research connects storybook reading to different aspects of early literacy. Yet little is known as to the relation between storybook reading and children's early socio-emotional development. Moreover, studies have focused on the quantity and quality of reading encounters, but not on how parents select books for their children. The present study investigates the relations between aspects of storybook reading (maternal book selection preferences, frequency of storybook reading, the nature of the reading interactions, and the literacy environment) and the kindergartners' early literacy as well as social emotional development. Forty middle-class mothers and their kindergartners participated in the study. We interviewed the mothers in their homes regarding the following issues: criteria used while selecting books for their children, quantity of storybook reading and other literacy activities, nature of storybook reading, and familiarity with children's literature. We tested children on early literacy measures (letter knowledge, phonological socio-emotional measures (empathy, coherence, and social cognition). Kindergarten teachers also provided information regarding the children's socio- emotional development. Findings will be discussed within the framework of shared reading as a vehicle for literacy and socio-emotional development.
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Alison Arrow (University of Auckland), Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn, Tom Nicholson - Instructional effects on the reading, spelling, and phonological awareness of beginning readers.
Methods of reading and spelling instruction were examined as to their effects on phonological awareness (PA), and on the transfer of skill between early reading and spelling. Sixty-two preschool children attending NZ kindergartens were taught to either read or spell 8 CVC regular words, in conjunction with either word-analysis or meaningful instruction, or they received math instruction. Word-analysis instruction showed the greatest advantage in learning the target words, and allowed early transfer of skill between both reading and spelling. Word-analysis reading instruction also had a task dependent effect on phoneme blending. Implications for models of reading and spelling are discussed.
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Igone Arteagoitia (Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington), Liz Howard - Investigating spelling/reading relationships in Spanish/English bilingual students.
The issue of spelling/reading relationships is a complex one, particularly for bilingual students who acquire knowledge about two different orthographies. In this study, English and Spanish reading, spelling, and oral proficiency data were collected from 171 native-Spanish-speaking and native-English-speaking third-graders in two-way immersion programs. Multiple regression was used to investigate the relationship between English reading and spelling ability for these bilingual students. In the final model, which accounted for 84% of the variance in English reading ability, two distinct English spelling measures were significantly and positively associated with English reading ability, controlling for oral English proficiency and Spanish reading ability.
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Mercedes Muñetón Ayala (Universidad de La Laguna). - Effects of computer assisted instruction on spelling errors.
Using a drills and practice computer program with corrective feedback Muñetón (2000) designed a study to determine which of the processes (i.e. memory, copy or reading) improve the spelling skills in children with learning disabilities in a consistent orthography. Results showed us that copy condition improved the spelling skill more than the other conditions. In the study 43 subjects participated aged between 8 and 10 years within the range of the third and four grade levels of primary education. Students’ spelling was two years below the expected level for their age. Students were randomized for each group. One training group wrote the word from memory and the other copied the word from the computer screen. Stimuli were selected using three psycholinguistic parameters: length (bisyllables and trisyllables), orthography consistency (consistent and non-consistent) and syllabic structure ( cv and ccv). In the present study we try to analyse the different types of errors (substitutions, omissions and spellings) across treatment sessions as a function of differences in copy and memory conditions.
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Nalan Babur (Bogazici University, Istanbul). - Relationships among RAN, linguistic, and cognitive abilities in early readers.
The relationships among Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), phonological awareness (PA), short-term memory (STM), processing speed (PS), letter knowledge (LK), and early reading skills (READ) were examined in a sample of first and second graders who have a variety of reading skills. Causal models of Reading were developed for each grade level and appropriateness of the path models was tested through path analyses. RAN digits/letters (RAN-DL), PA, and LK were independent predictors of READ at each grade level. RAN-DL had an increasingly predictive role in READ, whereas the importance of PA relatively diminished in the second grade. PS and STM had changing roles at each grade level.
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Scott K. Baker (University of Oregon), David Chard, Lana Edwards - Teaching First Grade students to listen attentively to narrative and expository text: Results of an experimental study.
Results of a study to test the efficacy of a first-grade intervention to improve listening comprehension among students at risk of reading difficulty will be presented. Twenty schools, (42 participating first grade teachers), were randomly assigned to an Innovative Story Read Aloud condition or a Standard Story Read Aloud condition. Five students in each classroom are being assessed to determine outcomes. Extensive teacher modeling and questioning, rich discussions, intentional redundancy, and frequent opportunities for student-to-student interactions are key components of the innovation. Treatment fidelity is being measured and instructional data gathered to explain variability in student learning. Data will be analyzed using ANOVA and structural modeling.
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Michal Balass (University of Pittsburgh), Jessica Nelson, Charles A. Perfetti - The effects of word knowledge on new word learning in adults: An ERP study.
How does specific word knowledge affect new word learning? Our goal wasto use ERP's to compare word processing and learning in different word training environments (orthographic, phonological, semantic). Native English speakers of high and low reading skill learned rare English words in one of three conditions: Orthography-Meaning; Orthography-Phonology; Phonology- Meaning. Following training, they made meaning judgments about the words while ERP's were recorded. ERP signals segmented after presentation of second word distinguished between meaning retrieval for unknown rare words and trained words at 400ms. Differences among early and late ERP components were observed as a function of orthographic, phonological, and semantic information that was provided during learning.The latency and amplitude of these components differed with comprehension skill.
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Amy E. Barth (University of Kansas), Daryl F. Mellard, Hugh W. Catts - Improving literacy instruction for adults.
The purpose of this study was to determine the literacy requirements of commonly used adult literacy outcome measures. Specifically, how is performance on recognized components of reading (e.g. word decoding or fluency) related to adult literacy outcome measures?
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Timothy Bates (Macquarie University, Sydney), Anne Castles, Max Coltheart, Nathan Gillespie, Margie Wright, Nick Martin - Molecular genetic analyses of reading & spelling: A component processes approach.
Genetic linkage analysis of reading and spelling traits are reported for the nonword and irregular word phenotypes of the Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading. Four reading and spelling phenotypes were assessed and a genome wide scan for linkage was conducted in a large adolescent DZ sib sample using the Merlin program for univariate analyses of the linkage data. Amongst other findings, support for the likelihood of genes for DRC components on chromosome 6 is presented, as well as a novel genetic linkage on chromosome 8. Implications of these data for theory and future research on reading are discussed.
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Joseph E. Beck (Carnegie Mellon University), June Sison, Jack Mostow - Using automated speech recognition to measuring scaffolding and learning effects of word identification interventions in a computer tutor that listens.
Does it help to provide brief word identification assistance to students? On words they encounter soon afterwards? Does brief assistance lead to long-term learning gains? Which types of assistance are best? We have explored these questions using automated experiments in a computer tutor for reading that listens. We examine data from 300 students, mostly in grades 1 through 3. The major results were a definite scaffolding effect in student performance on the same day as they were given assistance. However, although there was a slight improvement in longer-term performance, the difference was not statistically significant.
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Stephanie Bellitti (City University of New York), GenineMarie Coccoli, Mark Lauterbach - The role of spelling explorations on the spelling acquisition of special education and typically developing 2nd grade students.
This study investigates the effect that teaching spelling pattern strategies, in the context of word explorations, has on the spelling abilities of second grade general and special education students. In a quasi-experiment two groups (one special education and one typically developing) received the spelling patterns strategy treatment and one group (typically developing) received the mandated instruction for the school district. Preliminary results indicate that the greatest gains, as measured by a developmental spelling inventory, were made by the typically developing group who received the treatment, followed by the group of special education students.
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Inez Berends (PI Research - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Pieter Reitsma - The effects of orthographically and semantically oriented flashcard training.
The present experiment examined the effectiveness of repeated reading, either with or without limited exposure duration. Further, the influence of focussing either on the orthography or semantics of the presented word while training was also studied. A group of 148 reading delayed children participated in this experiment (94 Grade 1 students, 54 Grade 2 subjects). Ten experimental words were repeated 32 times either with or without LED. The subjects had to answer orthographic or semantic questions about the presented word. Grade 1 subjects improved more when receiving orthographic training, while grade 2 subjects showed a bigger improvement after semantic training.
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Jared Bernstein (Stanford University), Jared Bernstein, Sheida White, Brent Townshend, Isabella Barbier - Automatic analysis of oral reading fluency.
Some standard instruments report oral reading fluency in words-read-correctly in a fixed time window using human accuracy judgments. An alternative approach, implemented in the Fluency Addition to NAAL (National Assessment of Adult Literacy), uses special-purpose speech recognition technology to perform automatic analyses of oral renditions of word lists and text passages from 20,600 adult readers. The automatic methods applied in NAAL produce an estimate of words read correctly per time, along with ancillary metrics such as average number of words between pauses and articulation rate. The analysis methods are explained with examples, comparing the new metrics with traditional measures.
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Rebecca S. Betjemann (University of Denver), Janice M. Keenan - Priming in children with reading disabilities.
Priming is an important component of reading that can affect a child's ease of decoding and comprehension. We examined semantic, phonological/graphemic, and combinatorial priming (primes with both semantic and phonological/graphemic relation to the target, e.g., BOAT - FLOAT) in children with reading disabilities (RD). Both visual and auditory lexical decision tasks were used to assess priming. Surprisingly, results indicate that children with RD have similar patterns of phonological/graphemic and semantic priming compared to chronological-age controls. The main difference was in combinatorial priming, where there was a trend for more priming from combinatorial than single-dimension primes in controls than in RD children.
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Andrew Biemiller (University of Toronto), Catherine Boote - Identifying particularly useful word meanings for children ages four to eight.
Average children know about 6000 root word meanings by the end of grade two. Children in the lowest vocabulary quartile average about 4000 word meanings. If we knew which words were likely to be known by average children the end of grade two, and could further identify words likely to be known even by children with relatively small vocabularies, we could identify the 2000-3000 words most likely to be helpful for low vocabulary children. It would probably be possible to teach 1200 of these words successfully over a three-year period. Current research to identify these words is now underway, and we anticipate reporting on a thousand or so target words as well as words likely to be known by most children.
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Simon Bignell (University of Essex), Kate Cain - Inferencing skills in children with high levels of inattention and hyperactivity.
Word reading and story comprehension skills were assessed in 7-10 year olds with high hyperactivity and/or inattentiveness. Children with high hyperactivity or inattention had poor word reading skills relative to same-age controls. Inferential skills were assessed in three story presentation conditions: child reads aloud, reads silently, and listens. Children with high hyperactivity were impaired in all conditions, but those with high inattention were only impaired when reading silently. These data suggest that reading comprehension deficits in children with ADHD symptoms do not simply arise because of poor attention and/or poor word reading. The implications of these findings will be discussed.
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Anne Bishop (University of Florida), Mary T. Brownell - An examination of beginning teacher instruction in special education: Instructional reading practices that result in student engagement.
The instructional reading practices of beginning special education teachers were examined to determine what novice teachers do to promote student engagement in reading. Twenty reading lessons of eight teachers were analyzed to determine the conditions, interactions, and consequences that resulted in student engagement or non-engagement. Teacher behaviors linked to high student engagement reflect findings from the process-product and motivation and engagement literature in reading
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Ken Blaiklock (Institute of Technology, Auckland). - The importance of letter knowledge in the relationship between phonological awareness and reading.
Many studies of phonological awareness and reading have not controlled for extraneous variables such as ability, phonological memory, preexisting reading skills, and letter knowledge. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study that took account of these variables for a group of children during their first two years at school. Concurrent and predictive correlations between rhyme awareness and reading, and between phoneme awareness and 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.
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Jay Blanchard (Arizona State University), James Christie, Karen Burstein., Kim Atwill, Terry Moore - The effect of illustrations on assessment of phonemic awareness in young children: A preliminary study.
The present research examined the effect of illustrations on assessment of phonemic awareness using a norm-referenced standardized test (SESAT-1). The results indicate that assessment protocols using illustrations enhance performance as opposed to protocols that did not. The results suggested that assessment protocols using illustrations measure more than phonemic awareness
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Leo Blomert (Universiteit Maastricht), Nienke van Atteveldt, Elia Formisano, Rainer Goebel - A functional neuro-anatomical model for the integration of letters and speech sounds in the human brain.
Most people are surprisingly well capable of using literacy skills even though the human brain is not evolutionary adapted to this relatively new cultural phenomenon. Associations between letters and speech sounds form the basis of reading in alphabetic scripts. We investigated the functional neuroanatomy of associations between letters and speech sounds using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The most interesting finding is a modulation of the response to speech sounds in early auditory cortex by visual letters. Based on the analyses of single-subject data and group data aligned on the basis of individual cortical anatomy, we will present a model for the integration of graphemes and phonemes. Our data indicate that the efficient processing of culturally defined associations between letters and speech sounds may be based on a naturally evolved neural mechanism for integrating audiovisual speech.
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Sylvie Bodé (University of Luxemburg), Alain Conten - Phonological awareness training: A field study in a transparent orthographic system.
The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of phonological awareness activities when luxemburgish kindergarten teachers trained their own class with minimal external supervision. Twenty kindergarten classes (150 children) constituted the training group and 21 classes (157 children) formed the control group. At the end of kindergarten, clear training effects were observed for all the phonological awareness tasks, except the most difficult, phoneme omission. After six month of reading and writing instruction in German, only children with low levels of phonological awareness showed significant training effects in applying the alphabetic principle, as assessed by a pseudoword spelling test
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Caroline Bogliotti (Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII), Souhila Messaoud-Galusi, Willy Serniclaes - Relation between categorical perception of speech and reading acquisition.
Data before and after reading acquisition were collected in order to study the influence of linguistic experience and literacy on the emergence and consistency of categorical perception (CP). Children from a longitudinal study (6 to 8 y.o) identified and discriminated [do] and [to] syllables from a VOT continuum. The same paradigm was proposed to 10 y.o children. As subjects differed both in age and reading experience, these data bring out the question of the relation between linguistic maturation and literacy.
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Isabelle Bonnotte (Université Charles de Gaulle - Lille 3). - The role of semantic features in French adults' processing of verb meaning in semantic decision-priming tasks with short and long SOAs.
The purpose of the research was to examine the role of featural representations in the processing of verb meaning. An empirical study with French adults aimed at determining how people understand verbs and whether verb meaning is computed in the same way as noun meaning. Processing on two superordinate verb categories (the durative, non-resultative category, and the non-durative, resultative category) was analyzed with semantic decision-priming tasks using a 250-ms and 500-ms SOA. Different priming effects on durativity and resultativity were shown. Overall, the findings supported the idea that semantic featural representations play a central role in the dynamics of computing verb meaning.
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Anna M. T. Bosman (University of Nijmegen), Raquel Paffen - Developing a spelling consciousness .
In a recent study with students from Grade 3, we employed an experimental training to enhance students' spelling consciousness. Students with a spelling consciousness pay attention to their feelings about the rightness or wrongness of a just-written spelling, which enables them to regulate their own learning process. Students were taught to become aware of the knowledge they had and of the knowledge they did not have regarding the spelling of words presented to them. Compared to a control group, only five training sessions were sufficient to significantly increase students' spelling awareness.
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Anna C. Both de Vries (Leiden University), Adriana G. Bus - Development of writing before formal instruction.
Children (N=96) wrote and drew two sets of 8 words, one set with a particular purpose (making labels) and the other without (dictation). There were three age groups: 3½-4, 4-4½, 4½-5. The findings show that children as young as 4 years are able to produce graphic forms that include characteristics of writing. However children only understood written signs to be symbols from the age of 4½. From that age they used letters instead of drawing to denote a particular meaning. Using letters often coincided with a basic understanding of the alphabetic-phonetic principle but children’s knowledge of letter-sound rules rarely passed some incidental knowledge
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Regina Boulware-Gooden (Neuhaus Education Center) R. M. Joshi - Spelling: are linguistic processes the same across different orthographies?
The proposed presentation examines the role of phonology, orthography, and morphology and in English and Russian words in grades 4, 6, and 8. This study investigates (1) how the linguistic process may vary in their relationship to spelling as a result of the differences in orthographies and (2) how knowledge in phonology, orthography, and morphology develop as children are exposed to further educational instruction. A Commonality Regression Analysis for each grade and each country was conducted to see how each linguistic process uniquely and collectively predicts spelling. Further analysis was conducted to see whether there was a statistically significant change between countries and over time.
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Pascal E. A. Brenders (University of Nijmegen), T. Dijkstra, J. G. van Hell - Does sentence constraint influence visual word recognition in bilinguals? Evidence from event-related potentials and response times.
To examine the influence of sentence context constraint on visual word recognition by bilinguals, we performed an event-related potential (ERP) study and a reaction time study (lexical decision task). Proficient Dutch-English bilinguals (with Dutch as first language, L1, and English as second language, L2) read high and low constraint sentences, in Dutch (L1) or in English (L2), followed by English target words. Target words were orthogonally varied on cognate status and concreteness. The reaction times analysis and preliminary results of the ERP analyses show effects of context constraint, cognate status and concreteness in visual word recognition by bilinguals.
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Zvia Breznitz (University of Haifa). - 100 millisecond threshold: Overcoming the asynchrony between processing systems in the dyslexic brain.
An Asynchrony processing time gap between systems activated during reading was found to be an underlying factor in dyslexia (Breznitz et al., 2001; 2003). The present study investigated the possibility of overcoming this time gap among dyslexics by manipulating the presentation time of visual-orthographic and phonological stimuli. Results indicated that when the phonological stimulus follows the orthographic by an interval ranging between 100-120 ms, dyslexic subjects improve their performance accuracy. Below and above this range, performance accuracy decreases. In contrast, accuracy for regular readers begins between 60-80 ms and remains stable from this point onwards. Theoretical explanations will be discussed.
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Peter Bryant (University of Oxford), Terezinha Nunes, Ursula Pretzlik - Does it help to be explicit about morphology?
In many languages the spellings of particular sounds depend on the morphemes that these sounds represent. Yet children are given little instruction about these morphological spelling rules. For example, they are not taught that the endings of nouns like 'magician' and 'education' are spelled as 'ian' if the noun is a person and 'ion' in an abstract noun. Children probably eventually spell such difficult words either by rote learning, or by implicit learning of the rule. We asked whether explicit instruction is more effective. We compared the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on learning the ion/ian rule. Explicit instruction produced the greatest gains. Instruction effects lasted over a 2-month period during which the children were not taught about this spelling rule.
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Ashley Bucko (University of Michigan) Frederick Morrison, Carol Connor - Teaching preschoolers how to read: Maternal characteristics that increase the likelihood of direct literacy instruction in the home.
This study examines the relation between mothers' characteristics, how frequently they teach their preschoolers (n = 123) reading skills and how this affects children's language and reading. Direct Instruction (DI) of reading skills included encouraging their child to write, teaching their child the names and sounds of letters, and teaching their child how to read words. SEM revealed that DI positively and significantly predicted alphabet and letter-word recognition but not vocabulary. Mothers who worked and had fewer children tended to provide DI more frequently than did stay-at-home moms or mothers who had more children. Mothers' education and age did not predict DI. Implications will be discussed.
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Denis Burnham (University of Western Sydney), - Language specific speech perception, mode of speech processing, and the onset of reading.
Following initial language-general speech perception abilities, infants’ responses to non-native (NN) speech contrasts compared with native (N) speech contrasts are attenuated around 6 months due to ambient phonology input. Similar (N-NN) attenuation also occurs once reading instruction begins. This language specific speech perception is significantly related to reading ability, suggesting that phoneme to grapheme mapping in reading acquisition is facilitated by suppressing irrelevant phonetic variation. Thus successful reading acquisition is better served by language-specific (phonemic) than language-general (phonetic) speech processing. Phonologically-based models of reading and reading disability should include not just speech perception, but language specific speech perception.
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Adriana G. Bus (Leiden University), Maria T. de Jong, Marian Verhallen - Do stories on DVD or CD-rom support young children’s literacy?
From listening to stories children expand their comprehension of plot sequence, facts and details, and story language. These outcomes strongly recommend read alouds as components of literacy programs and support trends resulting in more teachers and parents reading aloud every day. Empirical evidence indicates, however, that the effectiveness of read alouds depends on children’s language development. Even the simplest picture- storybooks may include so many unknown words and sentence structures that children fail to understand text even after several readings. A prime aim of our studies is to test whether children with a language delay learn as much from picture-storybooks as children without language delay. Computers introduce new formats of picture-storybooks thus expanding the number of sources to support story and language understanding: different from the traditional format books on the computer include oral text, animated pictures, and sound effects. Our second aim is to test whether encounters with stories including filmic pictures and sound effects, provide unique opportunities to stimulate story and language comprehension. Subjects were 3- and 5-year-old children with and without a language delay from lower-class families. We will present outcomes of two randomized experiments.
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Brian Byrne (University of New England), Barbara Hindson, Ruth Fielding Barnsley, Donald Shankweiler, Cara DeLaland, Carol Mackay - Early intervention with preschool children bearing family risk for dyslexia.
Preschool children selected from families in which one or both parents had significant reading difficulties were assessed on a variety of cognitive and linguistic characteristics and given individual instruction in phonemic awareness and print conventions. After three years, at-risk children reached grade-appropriate levels on word reading and comprehension. The most salient predictor of reading growth was the number of instructional sessions required, not the final preschool outcome level attained. This aspect of the data suggests that some kind of learning rate parameter influences acquisition of foundation skills for reading and continues to exert an influence throughout subsequent reading development.
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Kate Cain (University of Essex), Jane Oakhill, Kate Lemmon - Vocabulary knowledge and inference from context.
Reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are highly correlated. We report research that investigates the proposal that the ability to infer from context mediates this relation and plays an important role in vocabulary acquisition. Cross-sectional work revealed that 9-10 year-olds with weak comprehension skills were specifically impaired when required to infer the meanings of novel words from context: their performance on a direct instruction task was good. Children with weak vocabulary skills were poor on both measures. Longitudinal data supported the role of inference: early reading experience and initial inferential skills explained growth in vocabulary between 7 and 14 years.
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Claire Cameron (University of Michigan), Frederick J. Morrison - A structural equation model of self-regulation and early literacy development in preschool children.
Research has demonstrated that some kindergarteners may be at risk for developing poor self-regulation (McClelland, Morrison & Holmes, 2000). This study sought to examine the interplay of self-regulation and early literacy in preschool children. Participants were 189 preschoolers (mean age=3 years, 11 months). Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the reciprocal predictability of self-regulation and early literacy over two time intervals during the preschool period. The model provided a good fit to the data, and explained 97% and 74% of the variance in spring early literacy and self-regulation, respectively. There was also a positive correlation between the errors of fall self-regulation and pre-literacy (r=.48). Although related, the development of self-regulation in the preschool children in this study appears to be driven by early literacy skills, while the reverse is not true
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Marketa Caravolas (University of Liverpool), Maggie Snowling, Charles Hulme, Brett Kessler - How orthographic consistency affects the development of spelling skills in English: Implications for theories of orthographic learning.
The effects of vowel grapheme consistency on the development of spelling skills in a cohort of 150 British children were examined. Children's spelling of 100 monosyllabic words was monitored at three time points over the first two years of schooling. All vowel spellings were scored for conventional accuracy. The unconditional and conditional consistencies (i.e. consistencies weighted by the adjacent graphemes) of all graphemes in the word set were computed. Within-subjects regression analyses showed that word frequency and unconditional grapheme consistency had a significant additive effect on vowel spelling by the end of the first year of schooling. The variance accounted for by these two variables increased in the second year of schooling. In addition, by the conditional consistency (i.e. the consistency of the vowel given the ensuing coda grapheme) accounted for unique variance in in vowel spelling by the middle of year 2. These findings suggest that children's orthographic representations are influenced from very early on by the statistical properties of the English orthography.
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Cláudia Cardoso-Martins (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Ricardo Fernandes Napoleão de Souza, Letícia Siqueira Lemos, Marcela Fulanete’Corrêa - What is the nature of young children´s syllabic spellings?
The study investigates the correlates of preschool children’s “syllabic” spellings, that is, spellings in which the number of letters corresponds to the number of syllables in the pronunciation of words. Participants were 227 Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children ranging in age from 4 to 6 years. Results question E. Ferreiro’s hypothesis that the syllabic spellings result from children’s search for a general criterion that enables them to regulate variations in the number of letters necessary to write different words Instead, our results suggest that the syllabic construction is an incidental result of young children’s tendency to write the letters whose names they can detect in the pronunciation of the words.
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Joanne F. Carlisle (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Lauren Katz - Ready access to morphemes as a factor in reading English words.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether ease of lexical access of morphologically complex words (as estimated by speed of naming) contributed to word reading and comprehension for 4th and 6th grade students in the US. Students were given sets of words that were morphologically simple and complex to read aloud. Among the morphologically complex words were some with low frequency surface forms but high frequency base words—words that were unlikely to be recognized without morphological decomposition. Results of regression analyses indicated that, when the effects of naming two-syllable morphologically simple words were controlled, both accuracy and speed of naming morphologically complex words contributed additionally to performance on a standardized word-reading test. Additionally, speed and accuracy of naming morphologically complex words contributed significantly to performance on a measure of reading comprehension. Results suggest support for models of morphologically processing that posit activation of words, morphemes within words, and sub-morphemic elements. They also suggest that facility in reading complex words is an educationally relevant skill for students in the upper elementary grades.
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Julia M. Carroll (University of Warwick), Margaret J. Snowling, Valerie Muter, Uta Frith - Language development in children at genetic risk of dyslexia: a follow-up at age 13.
A group of children with a family history of dyslexia were selected at 3 ½ years of age and tested at three further points in time: at the ages of 6, 8 and 13. Data is presented concerning the language development of these children. In the group as a whole, 11.8% children met criteria for SLI in the high-risk group, while only 4.8% of the controls did, suggesting shared genetic risk factors between language and literacy difficulties. The high risk children as a group showed similar verbal ability levels to controls at age 6, though they scored less well on nonword repetition and recalling sentences. By age 13, the high-risk group showed weaker performance on both of these tests and on vocabulary. A bi-directional relationship between language and literacy is proposed.
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M. Heather Carver (University of Missouri Columbia), Ronald P. Carver - Effect of computerized tutoring in spelling, vocabulary, and rate upon the reading achievement of poor readers: A treatment study, Testing a causal model.
It has been hypothesized that an instructional treatment which focuses upon increasing the number of basic words that students can read results in higher reading achievement, according to a causal model stimulated by rauding theory. 54 sixth graders in an urban school were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The mean gain for the experimental group was 1.7 GE units during the school year on a composite reading achievement measure, and this was 0.7 GE units more than the control group gained. The few students who worked on the computer tutor for 100 hours or more gained 2.1 GE units on the average.
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Séverine Casalis (Université Charles de Gaulle - Lille 3), Isabelle Bonnotte - Phonological and semantic processing in French children's word naming: Evidence from normal readers and poor comprehenders.
Phonological and semantic priming were assessed in two groups of French children: good and poor comprehenders matched on decoding skills. All children performed two word naming tasks using a long SOA (750 ms). In the phonological priming task, related primes and targets were homophones. In the semantic priming task, as in Nation and Snowling's study (1999), two relations between related primes and targets were examined: first, categorical versus functional relation, and second, high versus low association in context. Both groups of children showed priming effects in the two tasks. These priming effects were modulated by groups and priming conditions.
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Anne Castles (University of Melbourne), Timothy Bates, Max Coltheart, Nathan Gillespie, Margie Wright, Nick Martin - Behavior genetic analyses of reading & spelling: A component processes approach.
The behavior genetic bases of the Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading were examined in a large unselected adolescent twin sample. Data were in accord with the view that reading is a quantitative normal trait, with no categorical genetic or environmental events grading some readers as dyslexic. 70% of reading variance was found to be genetic, with little evidence for shared environmental effects. DRC predicts that there should be no genetic or environmental effects for regular word reading, over and above those of irregular and nonword performance. This prediction was tested using multivariate behavior genetic analyses. Possible evidence for sex-linkage is also discussed.
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Hugh W. Catts (University of Kansas), Suzanne M. Adlof - Language processing in children with specific comprehension deficits.
This study investigated the language and cognitive processing abilities of 8th grade children with specific comprehension deficits (n=57) and compared their performances to children with specific decoding deficits (N=27) and normal readers (n=98). Children with specific comprehension deficits performed significantly less well than the comparison groups on a range of language tests, but showed normal performance on measures of phonological processing. These differences were apparent in 8th grade as well as in earlier grades when comparable assessments were administered. Results are discussed in terms of the developmental relationship between language and reading disabilities.
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Chris C. Chase (Claremont McKenna College), Robert F. Dougherty, Nicola Ray, Susan Fowler & John Stein - Magnocellular cone signal strength in dyslexia.
One defining feature of the M pathway is a bias for M- and L-cone input and weak S-cone input relative to other pathways. We measured the relative strengths of the L-, M- and S-cone inputs to the M pathway in good and poor readers. Results suggest that dyslexic L/M and L/S signal strength ratios were much higher than controls. Dyslexic relative M-cone sensitivity was highly correlated with reading skills. We conclude that poor dyslexic magnocellular functioning is reflected by a higher than average L/M ratio due either to a stronger than normal L-cone signal or a relatively weak M-cone signal.
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Shih-wei Chen (University of Maryland), Min Wang - Pinyin or Zhu-yin-fu-hao: which better predicts phonological awareness at onset-rhyme and phonemic levels?
Phonological awareness developed in learning to read Chinese appears to be contingent upon the availability of phonetic script instructions. The two phonetic scripts presently taught in Taiwan and mainland China (respectively, Zhu-yin-fu-hao and Pinyin), however, differ greatly in how they represent speech sounds. As an attempt to evaluate the impact of such representational differences on Chinese-speaking students’ development of phonological awareness, the proposed study examines the performance in tasks tapping different levels of phonological awareness of students from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong for the ways each of the two phonetic scripts contributes to the building of phonological awareness.
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Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Catherine McBride-Chang, Pan-Chung Fung - The impact of dialogical reading on typically developing and hearing impaired Hong Kong young children.
Two studies investigated the effects of an interactive parent-child reading technique, dialogic reading, on 86 typically developing kindergarteners and 28 hearing-impaired kindergarten and early primary children in Hong Kong. Children in the two groups were pretested on Chinese literacy and language tasks, and assigned randomly to one of three conditions: dialogic reading, typical reading, and control. After an 8-week intervention, the children were posttested. Results indicated both typically developing and hearing-impaired children in the dialogic reading group benefited significantly from the intervention, in literacy and language skills.
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Eva Man Ching Chow (University of Hong Kong, Connie Suk-Han Ho - Motion perception in Chinese dyslexic children.
Given the substantial differences between the visual characteristics of written Chinese and alphabetic scripts, this study aimed at examining the magnocellular deficit hypothesis in Chinese dyslexic children. 23 Hong Kong Chinese dyslexic children and 23 chronological-age controls were tested on a global motion coherence task. The Chinese dyslexic children were found to perform significantly worse than the controls in this task, which supported the magnocellular pathway deficit hypothesis. In addition, the dyslexic group detected the stimuli in blue colour significantly better than in white. Educational implication of this finding will be discussed.
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Carol A. Christensen (University of Queensland). - Making a difference: Secondary school reform in literacy.
This paper compares two secondary schools (Grades 8-12) that implemented reform of literacy. Both schools were located in low socio-economic areas outside a major city in Queensland, Australia. Both had historically experienced many of the problems associated with areas with high levels of social and economic stress. Widespread low levels of literacy impacted across the curriculum. The paper will discuss factors that accounted for the outcomes of the programs including curriculum and teaching strategies, program organization, structure and management, school leadership and organization, social relationships developed by teachers and students in the school and the peer group culture in the schools.
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Joanna Christodoulou (Fulbright Fellow, Greece), Maya Alivisatos - The naming speed deficit: An analysis of Greek students.
The purpose of this study is to explore the prevalence and distribution of the naming speed deficit amongst reading-impaired students in Greece. Participants were over 200 students in primary and secondary schools in Greece, from both public and private institutions, and who were identified as having dyslexia. Students were identified as reading disabled by official assessments administered by school or government-affiliated organizations, and teacher feedback when appropriate. Translated versions of the Rapid Automatized Naming Tasks were administered to assess naming speed performance. Implications for assessment and diagnosis are discussed.
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Pascale Colé (Université de Savoie et C.N.R.S.), Liliane Sprenger-Charolles, Linda S. Siegel, Juan E. Jiménez González - Syllables in learning to read in English, French and Spanish.
Phonological mediation is traditionally thought to involve the phonological codes of words already established through contact with spoken language. However, there is still much debate on the precise nature of such codes in reading acquisition. In the present experiments, we examine the possible role of syllabic units in a silent reading task involving bisyllabic words, by comparing the performances of English, French and Spanish first graders. The results suggest that the use of syllabic units depends on the phonological structure of the language, and on the consistency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondance as well as on the reading level of the participants.
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Chris Coleman (Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders, Athens), Noel Gregg, J. Mark Davis - How effective are dyslexia and ADHD screeners in identifying college students with and without RD and ADHD?
The study will examine the effectiveness of two established self-report instruments, one a screener for RD (i.e., dyslexia) and the other a screener for ADHD, in four adult samples. University students with specific disabilities (RD = 75, ADHD = 50, RD1 = 50, No Diagnosis = 50) were administered (1) the Adult Reading History Questionnaire (LeFly and Pennington 2000) and (2) the Brown ADD Scales (Brown 1996). Analyses will be performed in order to determine the specificity and sensitivity of each instrument in identifying its target population.
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Stéphanie Colin (Université Lyon2) Annie Magnan, Jean Ecalle, Jacqueline Leybaert - Relation between early phonological skills and later reading performances in deaf children: effect of early exposure to Cued Speech.
Our study aimed to investigate whether early phonological skills predict later reading performances in deaf children exposed (early versus late) or not exposed to Cued Speech (“CS”, a manual system delivering phonetically augmented speechreading through visual modality). Different epi- and meta-phonological and written words recognition tasks were gradually administered from Kindergarten to first grade. Results showed that the early phonological skills at kindergarten predicts word recognition at first grade in the deaf as well as in the hearing groups. In addition, the performances of early Cued Speech users did not differ from those of hearing children and were higher than those of the others deaf children, especially in the first grade. Early exposure to Cued Speech may allow the development of accurate phonological representations and consequently, the use of accurate phonological decoding to recognise written words.
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W. Matthew Collins ( McMaster University), Martin Chodorow - The effects of priming on error detection in proofreading.
The present study was designed to examine the effects of priming on the speed and accuracy of error detection in text and to compare two theories of reading which make different hypotheses about proofreading performance on familiar text. Participants were presented with target sentences some of which were preceded by a prime sentence that had either the same syntactic structure or the same verb, or the same structure and verb as the target sentence. Detection of errors was more accurate in structurally primed target sentences, but there was no significant difference in response time as a function of structural priming.
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Donald L. Compton (Vanderbilt University), Amy Elleman, Natalie Olinghouse, Jan Vining - An evaluation of the effects of decoding, comprehension, and metacognitive instruction on reading comprehension gains in children who are poor readers.
The purpose of this study was to determine the value of decoding, comprehension, and metacognitive instruction on the reading comprehension growth of children grades 3 - 5 who are poor readers. Groups of teacher identified poor readers were randomly assigned to decoding instruction; decoding and reading comprehension instruction; and decoding, reading comprehension, and metacognitive instruction. The decoding group received 25 lessons of word identification strategy training (Lovett et al., 2000) and quick reads for fluency (Hiebert) with each lesson lasting 30 minutes. The two reading comprehension groups received 25 lessons lasting one-hour each with 30 minutes of word identification strategy training (Lovett et al., 2000) and quick reads for fluency (Hiebert) and 30 minutes of comprehension instruction comprised of expository text reading with summarizing, predicting, questioning, and clarifying instruction. The only difference between the two comprehension groups is that the metacognitive group was taught the reciprocal teaching dialog in addition to reading expository text reading with summarizing, predicting, questioning, and clarifying instruction. Group differences on reading comprehension growth were evaluated using a two-level growth model (HLM).
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Vincent Connelly (Oxford Brookes University), Morag Maclean, Sonya Campbell - The writing skills of university dyslexics compared to age and spelling age matched controls.
There has been little research on the writing skills of dyslexic students. One of the few studies on dyslexic writing (Sterling et al, 1997) claimed that dyslexic students writing difficulties were solely down to their low spelling age, compared to age controls. In this study we matched 24 dyslexic students with both chronological age and spelling age match groups. We also gave the students a more realistic academic essay task. Differences relating to essay structure and organisation, spelling errors and handwriting speed are discussed in relation to a developmental model of reading and writing. Reasons for the more complex differences found, as compared to Sterling et al (1997), are proposed.
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Carol McDonald Connor (University of Michigan), Frederick J. Morrison, Jocelyn N. Petrella - Effective reading comprehension instruction: Examining child by instruction interactions.
This study examined the effect of third-grade language arts instruction on growth in children’s reading comprehension skills, including child-instruction interactions. Classrooms were observed in the fall, winter, and spring. Dimensions of instruction were used to describe language arts activities – explicit versus implicit, teacher- versus child-managed, and word-level versus higher-order. The effect of instruction depended on students’ fall reading comprehension. Students with average to low fall scores achieved greater growth with more time in teacher-managed-explicit-higher-order instruction (teacher-led predicting, questioning). Children with higher fall scores demonstrated stronger growth with more child-managed-explicit-higher-order instruction (cooperative writing opportunities). Children with lower fall scores demonstrated less growth in these classrooms. Research and classroom instruction implications are discussed.
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Nancy L. Corbett (University of Florida). - A componential study of a summer reading comprehension program for middle school students.
Researcher conducted a 3-year directed research comprehension studyto determine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of variations of a summer intervention program for middle school students. Variations of the program including tutors/no tutors and length of daily program were examined.Changes in reading comprehension were measured with group and individual pre-, post- and 10, 20 week maintenance tests. Analyses were conducted to examine the effects of instructional conditions on dependent variables(i.e., comprehension, word identification, fluency, and academic self-efficacy). Results suggest the effectiveness of programmatic summer interventions for middle school students experiencing difficulty in reading comprehension.
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Cynthia Core (Florida Atlantic University), Alice T. Dyson, Linda J. Lombardino - Phonological awareness skills in kindergarten children with and without phonological impairment.
This study investigated the phonological awareness skills of 10 kindergarten children with expressive phonological impairment. Children had normal nonverbal ability, expressive and receptive language skills. They were matched by classroom teacher with 10 normally developing children with normal phonology, language and nonverbal ability. Children completed a battery of 10 phonological awareness tests that targeted syllable, onset-rhyme and phoneme level skills. Results from a paired samples t-test showed that children with phonological impairment had lower phonological awareness scores than their classroom-matched peers. Performance varied significantly by classroom for children in both groups.
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Pierre Cormier (Université de Moncton), Natalie Michaud, Gilles Raîche - The roles of syllabic and phonemic awareness in the growth of decoding in French-speaking grade-one children.
The role of syllabic and phonemic awareness in predicting growth in decoding in French was investigated with a two-level hierarchical model of decoding skills in 100 grade-one children. Two parameters, intercept and slope, characterized growth in decoding, estimated separately for words and pseudo-words. Other predictors of growth included measures of oral language (receptive vocabulary), letter knowledge (letter names and sounds) and phonological skills (verbal working memory and rapid lexical access). Phonemic elision was related to the intercept of growth in decoding. Syllabic elision was not related to any parameters of growth. These findings encourage further HLM studies of reading.
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Piers Cornelissen (Newcastle University), Kristen Pammer, Ruth Lavis, Peter Hansen - Dynamic visual processes in normal reading: Implications for developmental dyslexia?
Data from two studies relating visual task performance to contextual reading are presented. The first study investigated the relationship between contextual reading and relative spatial encoding for symbol arrays as well as sensitivity to the frequency doubling illusion, an index of retinal M-y ganglion cell function. The data suggest that successful reading requires not only information about letter identity, but also information related to spatial processing of words. Consistent with this speculation, a second study found that reading accuracy for dyslexic readers was most impaired when contextual material was presented in whole paragraphs, rather than line-at-a-time or word-at-a-time reading conditions.
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Kathleen H. Corriveau (University of Cambridge), Usha C. Goswami - Specific language impairment and P-centre processing: A causal connection?
Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) often show co-morbid problems in motor skills and in reading development. The underlying cause of this co-occurrence will be examined, with reference to an insensitivity in suprasegmental auditory processes, or P-centres. Thirty children with SLI, and 30 chronologically age and language-matched controls were tested on a variety of auditory and motor tasks, as well as phonological awareness tasks. Specific relationships between difficulties in phonological tasks and auditory and motor tasks will be presented. The data will be examined in light of the P-centre hypothesis, and proposals made for key future research questions.
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Jennifer G. Cromley (University of Maryland College Park), R. Azevedo, D. Moos, F. Fried - Developmental patterns in searching for information in hypermedia.
We developed a causal model of searching for information in text, and tested the fit of that model with data from 17 middle-school, 17 high-school, and 17 undergraduate students using an open-ended hypermedia environment. Students gave verbal answers to 10 researcher-developed questions of varying difficulty about the circulatory system, which they found by searching the environment. The model explained 64% of the variance in quality of students' answers, with prior knowledge, search time, and finding the relevant page making the biggest total contribution. Older students found significantly more relevant pages and gave significantly higher quality answers. More effective searchers were faster and used fewer search moves. Effective searches were not, however, associated with any particular search move, except for less use of searching for entire phrases in the encyclopedia.
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Virginia Cronin (George Washington University). - Early automatization in double deficit groups.
In a longitudinal study deficit groups were formed by preschool and kindergarten phonological awareness and RAN picture naming. There were 62 children in the no-deficit group, 20 in the single-deficit low phonology group, 20 in the single-deficit low rapid naming group, and 18 in the double-deficit group. They were given letter and number naming tasks in the spring of kindergarten, and the fall and spring of Grade 1. The single deficit low phonology group performed like the no deficit group and the single deficit low rapid naming group performed like the double-deficit group, supporting the two core deficit theory.
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Alicia Cruz (Universidad de Jaén), Sylvia Defior, Elvira Mendoza - Rhyme in Spanish deaf children.
The aim of this study was to explore whether deaf children have access to the rhyme level of phonological representation. Two groups of prelingually deaf children and two hearing control groups matched for general reading level participated. We used a judgement rhyming task. Different distracters (phonologic and ortographic distracters) were used in order to explore the strategies used by the deaf children. In general, the performance of both deaf groups was poorer than that of younger reading-matched hearing controls. For hearing readers, the data suggest an effect of phonological similarity. The deaf scores reflect the influence of orthographic knowledge.
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Anne E. Cunningham (University of California, Berkeley), Jennae Bulat, Colleen Ryan, Devon McCreachon, David Futterman, Keith E. Stanovich - Orthographic learning while reading: An examination of first grade readers.
The aim of this study was to provide a direct test of the self-teaching hypothesis (Jorm & Share, 1983; Share, 1995) by extending earlier research (Cunningham et al, 2002; Reitsma, 1989; Share, 1998). We examined younger children reading real words in the naturalistic context of connected text and independent reading. Additionally, we examined possible sources of variance in student's orthographic learning by including tasks that tapped general cognitive ability, RAN, and orthographic discrimination ability. Convergent with earlier studies, we observed robust orthographic learning in young children while reading. Further data patterns will be discussed.
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Jennifer Curry (University of Alberta), Rauno Parrila,& Kathy Stephenson, John R. Kirby, Joanna Catterson - The reliability and validity of self-reported home literacy activities and print exposure measures.
We examined the reliability and validity of a home literacy questionnaire and print exposure measures. Author Recognition Test (ART) and Children’s Books Title Recognition Test (CBTRT) were administered to parents and Book Exposure Recall Task (BERT) to grade 1 children. Preliteracy and reading measures were used as a criterion. Parent-child reading activity part of the questionnaire had a Cronbach alpha of .77, whereas the reliability of the print exposure measures varied from .91 (ART) to .66 (BERT). Parent-child reading activity and BERT correlated significantly with the criterion tasks, ART and CBTRT did not
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Peter F. de Jong (University of Amsterdam), Vera C. S. Messbauer - Exploring the consequences of impoverished phonological representations: The role of learning context.
We hypothesized that dyslexic children's presumed low quality phonological representations especially pose problems when learning to read words in a context of phonologically and orthographically similar words (for example KLAP, KRAP and KLAS). To test this 'distinctness' hypothesis, dyslexic children and groups of reading and age-matched normal readers repeatedly read series of target nonwords, presented in a distinct and an indistinct context. At posttest, one day and one week later, target nonwords and new nonwords meant to study transfer, were given. The results for reading speed at posttest, but not for accuracy, lend some support for the 'distinctness' hypothesis.
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Maria de Luca (IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia), Pierluigi Zoccolotti - Eye movements and developmental dyslexia in Italian readers.
Developmental dyslexia in a language with transparent orthography (Italian) was studied by means of eye movement recordings. Dyslexics read texts with a large number of small saccades indicating a fragmented word analysis; no deficit in oculo-motor functioning was detected. The high number of fixations depended on word length not word frequency. Examining this word-length effect in reading words and pseudo-words, fixations increased in dyslexics as a function of item length for both kinds of stimuli; in normal readers, this occurred only with pseudo-words. Evidence indicates that Italian dyslexics read by predominantly relying on a sub-lexical procedure.
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S. Hélène Deacon (Dalhousie University), Lesly Wade-Woolley, John Kirby - Yesterday: Morphological awareness and spelling of the past tense morpheme in French and English.
This presentation will report on a longitudinal study of spelling development of English-speaking children in French immersion. We examined morphological awareness and morphemic spellings of the past tense (e.g., -ed in English and -er in French) in both languages. Earlier results suggested connections between morphological awareness and spelling in each language. New data will test these relations by examining both real and pseudo-words, as well as longitudinal connections. Further, spellings will be examined for the use of phonological, orthographic and morphological information. Results will be discussed in relation to current models of spelling development.
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Elise deBree (Utrecht University), Petra van Alphen, Ellen Gerrits, Jan de Jong, Frank Wijnen, Carien Wilsenach - Early language development in children with a genetic risk for dyslexia: a longitudinal and prospective study .
The goal of the project at Utrecht University is to test the assumption that SLI and dyslexia are related language disorders and to search for linguistic precursors of dyslexia. We compare the language development of children genetically at risk for dyslexia with that of normally developing children and children with SLI. A broad range of language abilities are assessed between 18-60 months. The results from various perception and production tasks show that the at-risk children perform in-between normally developing children and children with SLI. A subset of the at-risk children displays language delays similar to those of children with SLI.
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Sylvia Defior (Universidad de Granada), Rosa Titos, Jesus Alegria, Francisco Martos - Is morphological information used in spelling by Spanish children?
This study aims to determine the extent to which the morphological information related to the plural nouns and verb is used by Spanish children from first, 2nd and 3rd grades of Primary Education, when writing words. A word dictation task was designed. The task included high and low frequency nouns and verbs ended in ´-s´. The nouns were singular (lexical ´-s´ condition), plural (morphological ´-s´ condition) and the verbs were in the second person singular (morphological ´-s´ condition). Results show that the writing of Spanish is influenced by phonology but morphological information is also used. These results are discussed in relation to current models of word spelling
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Evelien Dirks (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ginny Spyer, Ernest van Lieshout, Leo de Sonneville - Differences between children with specific reading and specific arithmetic difficulties.
The purpose of this study was to further our understanding of a possible link between reading and arithmetic difficulties. We compared the performance of 61 nine and ten year olds with specific reading difficulties (RD), specific arithmetic difficulties (AD), and children without reading or arithmetic difficulties (NA) on a visual-phonological reading task (VPT), and on three naming speed tasks (NST).The main findings were as follows: the RD groups’ performance was inferior to that of the AD and NA groups on both VPT and alphanumerical naming speed, and slower than the control group on object naming.
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Janice Dole (University of Utah), Michelle Hosp, John Hosp - Educators’ knowledge of SBRR .
It is widely believed that teacher knowledge of scientifically based reading research is a critical component of effective reading instruction as well as effective professional development. The purpose of this study was to examine initial teacher knowledge of SBRR. A teacher knowledge measure developed by Torgesen (personal communication, 2003) was used to measure K-3 classroom teachers, reading coaches, and reading experts. These data were collected as baseline data for Utah’s Reading First evaluation. Data analyses will compare the level of SBRR knowledge between teachers and reading coaches and between reading coaches and experts. Results will indicate various levels of educators’ knowledge about SBRR that are likely to affect their instruction and professional development in reading.
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Daphne A. Ducharme (University of Ottawa), Rachel I. Mayberry - Can reading be achieved without phonological decoding?
We studied word recognition in deaf adult readers of French, whose first language was Langue des signes québécoise to determine whether phonological decoding was an important strategy for deaf readers who were also signers. We tested 39 participants using a lexical decision task as well as a reading comprehension test and a vocabulary test. The results show that frequency significantly influences word recognition latency and error scores in deaf readers of French, just as it does in hearing readers. Our subjects were also sensitive to French graphemic-phonemic complexity and showed phonological decoding effects.
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Lynne G. Duncan (University of Dundee), Sheila Baillie - Regional differences between English dialects create variation in the acquisition of reading and spelling skills.
The effect of orthographic depth on literacy acquisition is related to regional differences between English dialects. Southern British English is a non-rhotic accent whereas Standard Scottish English (like General American English) is rhotic. Such phonological differences alter the depth of the mapping with the English orthography. The study compares English and Scottish children during the first year of literacy acquisition. Performance on tests of reading, spelling and phonological awareness is examined and related to letter knowledge. The findings highlight orthographic features which are complex for reading and spelling in non-rhotic accents but completely transparent in rhotic accents.
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Marianne Durand (University of York), Charles Hulme, Margaret J Snowling, Rebecca Larkin - Concurrent predictors of reading and arithmetic skills in 7- to 10-year-olds.
A range of possible concurrent predictors of reading accuracy and arithmetic were assessed in a large (N=162) sample of children (aged 7:5 to 10:4). A confirmatory factor analysis revealed a good fit to a model comprising 6 latent variables: Verbal Ability, Nonverbal Ability, Comparative Number Judgements, Search Speed, Phonological Memory, and Phoneme Deletion. Path analyses showed that Phoneme Deletion and Verbal Ability were unique predictors of reading, whereas Comparative Number Judgements and Verbal Ability predicted arithmetic. These results are related to current theories of the development of reading and arithmetic skills.
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Gad Elbeheri (University of Durham). - Can the phonological awareness deficit theory be considered the underlying cognitive deficit responsible for the incidence of dyslexia amongst monolingual Arabic speakers?
This paper investigates the importance and/or contribution of phonological awareness amongst monolingual Arabic speakers. The paper draws upon data collected from some 382 monolingual Arabic speaking participants (average age is 10 year) from three mainstream government primary schools in Alexandria, Egypt. Results in a number of various tasks such as Phoneme Deletion, Rhyme Detection, Non-word Reading as well as Spelling, Reading Accuracy and Reading Comprehension are investigated and statistically analysed which all conclude that there seems to be an underlying orthographic processing deficit amongst monolingual dyslexia Arabic speaker and that phonological processing difficulties do not seem to be the overriding cognitive deficit amongst monolingual Arabic speakers; a fact that can be partially attributed to the close and consistent relationship between Arabic phonology and orthography.
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Carsten Elbro (University of Copenhagen). - Predicting reading comprehension in grade 7 - from preschool abilities and parent's SES and abilities.
This study focussed on the development of reading comprehension in at-risk children of dyslexic parents. Eighty-two children were followed from the beginning of the kindergarten grade until the beginning of grade 7 when reading comprehension was assessed. Controlling for decoding ability in early grade 3 allowed us to focus on the specific, early predictors of reading comprehension. Significant predictors were found even among the children's preschool abilities. In addition, significant amount of residual variation was explained by parental reading habits and abilities suggesting that genetic and/or family environment still contribute to reading development between grade 3 and 7.
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Mary Ann Evans (University of Guelph), Jubilea Mansell, Laura Hamilton, Betty Ann Levy - Parental responses to child miscues during shared reading: stability and effects of parent style from Kindergarten through Grade 2 .
Shared reading is normally thought of as preschool activity. Our observations from kindergarten through grade 2, show that parents continue to read to their children but encourage them to take on the reader role and actively coach them in word recognition. The presentation will describe the stability of coaching styles across this period and the effect that different forms of miscue feedback have on reading skill in a sample of 50 normally developing children who were observed reading with their parents in each of these three grades. The extent to which parents supplied misread words, gave graphophonemic clues, or pointed out errors without further help correlated between .39 and .64 between the grades, showing the stability of parent style. ANOVA with reading skill as a covariate revealed that children whose parents rarely ignored miscues had higher word attack and reading comprehension scores in grades 1 and 2. After accounting for kindergarten skill, the type of feedback provided by parents from kindergarten through grade 1 predicted 11-15% of the variance in grade 1 word identification scores. However after accounting for grade 1 reading skill, the type of feedback observed from grade 1 to grade 2 did not predict grade 2 reading scores.
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Lee Farrington-Flint (Open University) Clare Wood, Katherine H. Canobi, Dorothy Faulkner - Strategic variability and the precise nature of analogy in children's early reading.
Individual differences in young children's analogy in the context of early reading were examined. Despite considerable interest in the role of analogy in children's early reading, there is a tendency for research to average data across samples without fully considering the potential scope for individual differences. The study was designed to develop a more detailed understanding of analogy in the context of children's reading by identifying profiles of individual differences in children's performance. Similarly, using measures of children's self-reports, the study intended to investigate patterns of individual differences in strategy choices.
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Lauren Figueredo (University of Alberta) Connie Varnhagen - Is it a typo or a spelling error? Use of the spell checker during the composing process.
We investigated the use of spell checkers during the composing process. Participants were asked to compose a short essay on a computer with the aid of the spell checker. Results showed that participants used both their own correction knowledge and the spell checker to correct different types of errors (i.e., typographical errors, spelling/unclear errors). Participants used the spell checker more often for spelling/unclear errors (errors that were either clearly spelling errors or possibly a combination of spelling and typographical errors) than for typographical errors. These results demonstrate that methods of correction may be differentially used depending on error type.
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Alexis Filipppini (University of California, Santa Barbara), Cara Richards, Mike Gerber - The spelling errors of English Learners: Analyses of pattern differences in English and Spanish instructed students.
A 15-item English dictation spelling measure was used to assess first grade English Learners (EL) in two different instructional programs: Spanish language arts and English language arts. Error patterns were analyzed for each item, first across the whole sample, then between instructional groups and finally by individual student. Initial quantitative analyses indicate a large amount of variability within each group. Further qualitative investigation of the specific errors and the relationships to the L1 and L2 phonological systems provide details about the nature of the intrusions that can be used to guide instruction and improve later reading and writing skills.
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Barbara R. Foorman (University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center), Sharolyn D. Pollard-Durodola - Supplementing implicit vocabulary learning through instruction: primary-grade curriculum.
Knowledge of the meanings of words forms the basis for reading comprehension. Decoding skills may be adequate, yet text comprehension suffers because students fail to grasp the meaning of individual words. Rather than teach definitions of specific words for specific text, teachers must help students develop generative knowledge about words so that vocabulary grows and transfers to comprehending new text. Three empirically-validated vocabulary curricula for primary grades will be presented. One of these was developed by the presenters, with an emphasis on literature depicting African American heroes and heroines. Details of word selection, instructional strategies, and assessment of student learning will be discussed.
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Jørgen Frost (Bredtvet kompetansesenter, Oslo), Sigrid Madsbjerg, Jan Niedersøe, Åke Olofsson, Peer M. Sørensen - Prediction of reading development: >From 3 to 16 years of age.
The present longitudinal study investigated the relationship between pre-school listening comprehension and expressive language skills and later word decoding and reading comprehension skills. More than 200 Danish children were followed from a speech-therapist screening at age 3 years, through word decoding tests in Grade 2 and sentence reading tests in Grade 3, 4 and 6, and to a text reading test in Grade 9 (age 16). The predictor variables consisted of both standardized test results and professional ratings. The results showed that both poor listening comprehension skills and poor expressive language skills predict poor word decoding and reading comprehension 13 years later. Further analysis also showed that children that were reported to have a low interest for books and story reading before age 5 scored lower on reading at age 15. The implications of these results for assessment and remediation of reading disabilities are discussed.
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Elaine Funnell (University of London), Morag Stuart - Regular, exception and nonword reading.
There is a long respectable history of using regular, exception and nonwords as stimuli for investigating reading difficulties. Children with phonological deficits show a pattern of poor nonword reading and no regular word advantage. Children with presenting with a more surface dyslexic profile are likely to show a regular word advantage and relatively good nonword reading. This paper reports on the development of a graded stimulus set for use with children between the ages of 4 and 11 years. The regular, exception words are controlled for concreteness and frequency using the CPWD.
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Isabel Garcia Gomez (University of Seville), Gary Morgan - Describing signing deaf children's reading of single words with different length, frequency, and lexical features.
Deaf readers have a different language experience compared to hearing readers, but features of the word in the reading task are similar. We described through a dual-route model how words (with lexical, length and frequency features controlled) were recognized by a sample of 32 signing deaf children (17 Spanish; 15 English). Results show how signing deaf children found the biggest difficulty with non-frequent words, but not with irregular or long words. This can give a new insight to the dual route model and can have further educative implications for signing deaf children.
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Nathalie Genard (Free University of Brussels), Jacqueline Leybaert, Philippe Mousty,Jesus Alegria - Impact of the teaching methods on metaphonological development and reading and spelling acquisition.
This study examines the impact of the methods for teaching to read (phonics versus whole-word) on the acquisition speed of cognitive processes involved in reading and spelling acquisition. A longitudinal study was carried out with French-speaking children all along the first school year. The use of the phonological procedure in reading and spelling as indexed by important effects of length, complexity and syllabic structure, was markedly more present in children learning to read with a phonic method than in children from the whole-word approach who displayed some difficulties to develop phonemic awareness. These differences will be discussed in the light of developmental models.
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George K. Georgiou (University of Alberta), Rauno Parrila - Rapid automatized naming components and reading acquisition in first grade.
This study examines (a) how Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) components: articulation time, pause time, and consistency - are related to preliteracy and reading measures, and (b) how RAN components develop from kindergarten to the end of first grade. Sixty children were administered RAN tasks in kindergarten and at the beginning and end of grade 1. Preliteracy skills (phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge) were assessed in kindergarten. Word reading and reading fluency were assessed at the end of grade 1. Results showed that pause time and the consistency of the pause time were significantly related to both preliteracy and reading skills. Pause and articulation times decreased significantly from kindergarten to the end of grade 1.
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Michael M. Gerber (University of California). - Experimental measures of comprehension by 3rd Grade English learners: Continued longitudinal research.
We report data from a fourth year of longitudinal research on a cohort of Spanish-speaking students who are acquiring reading skills. Our previous reporting has presented evidence of individual differences in phonological ability and cross-linguistic transfer of this ability to acquisition of important English pre-reading skills (e.g., rime and onset detection, phonemic segmentation and blending). In this presentation we present results from a study of experimental measures of English reading comprehension with a sample from the larger cohort, and relate results to previous phonological, vocabulary, fluency, word reading, and working memory performance.
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Astrid Geudens (University of Antwerp), Dominiek Sandra - Children´s performance in a similarity judgment and a serial recall task the distance between rhyming words and the onset/rime structure of the syllable.
We studied Dutch-speaking prereaders' sensitivity to the onset-rime structure in two tasks that do not require explicit phonological knowledge: similarity judgment and recall of syllable lists. In the similarity judgment task, prereaders judged pseudowords sharing a rime (/fo:s/ - /mo:s/) more similar than pseudowords sharing a CV (/fo:s/ - /fo:k/) or an onset-coda margin (/fo:s/-/fe:s/). However, in the recall task without rhyming words, no support for a fixed onset-rime structure of the syllable could be established. In the recall errors, retentions of the rime did not outnumber retentions of the CV and occurred less than retentions of the onset-coda margin.
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SallyAnn Giess (University of Florida), Wayne King, Linda Lombardino - Using the gap statistic to estimate clusters of individuals with reading disabilities.
Persons with reading disabilities exhibit considerable heterogeneity making it important to develop an accurate and reliable subtyping method. The Gap statistic overcomes previous issues with the optimal number of clusters; in the current proposal it will be applied to a clinical database of 100 individuals with a diagnosis of dyslexia. The characteristics of the resulting clusters will be thoroughly described. Clusters from an earlier study (King, Giess, & Lombardino, paper under review) that included individuals with spoken language deficits and dyslexia will be compared to the current cluster analysis of the dyslexic only population.
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Martine Gijsel (University of Nijmegen), A. Bosman, L. Verhoeven - Reading difficulties in Grade 1: A comparison of the effects on decoding skills of a semantically rich context and a semantically poor context intervention program.
In this study, the effect of two intervention programs on decoding skills was investigated. Participants were about 150 Dutch students of 25 regularly schools from primary Grade 1. All students exhibited reading problems eight weeks after formal reading instruction had started. Each school (the number of participants within a school ranged from 1 to 14) was randomly subjected to the control group (group without extensive training) or an experimental group (group exposed to a computer training program). Results and implications will be discussed.
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Rebecca Godfrey (University of Auckland), G. Brian Thompson - Ignoring what you've been taught? Phonics and the English orthography.
The extent to which beginning readers are disadvantaged by irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences is compared in 5 to 8 year old children who in the classroom received systematic explicit phonics instruction with other children who did not. This was examined in the reading of regular and irregular words and in non-words with regular and irregular rime components. Predictions were made and the results discussed in terms of whether children implicitly learnt to ignore aspects of their phonics instruction that were not consistent with some of their reading vocabulary.
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Dalva M. A. Godoy (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina). - Phonological development in two Brazilian Portugese classrooms with differenct methods of teaching reading.
This study is part of a wider longitudinal study. It intends to examine the evolution of the phonological abilities of two different groups of Brazilian children. They were at the initial stage of literacy acquisition, and following two different methods of teaching. Before the beginning of learning to reading a few children, in both groups, had phonological abilities at the phonemic level. After seven months of instruction, most of them present a good performance in some phonemic tests but with a significant difference between both groups.
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Vincent Goetry (Queen's University), - Reading development in a syllable-based vs. stress-based second language: Evidence from bilingual children schooled in French vs. Dutch .
This study examined the relationship of stress processing abilities (measured with a discrimination task on minimal stress pairs) to literacy-related measures in French-native first graders schooled in a stress-based language (Dutch) and Dutch-native children schooled in a syllable-based language (French). For the French-native children schooled in Dutch, significant relationships were observed between stress processing abilities and vocabulary as well as reading performances. Moreover, the bilinguals who showed poor stress processing abilities also showed significantly lower reading performances than the bilinguals who displayed good stress processing abilities, although the two subgroups did not differ significantly on phonological awareness (measured with syllable, onset-rime and phoneme deletion tasks). None of the relations described above were observed in the Dutch-native children learning to read in French. Taken together, results suggest that stress processing abilities make a unique contribution in reading development in stress-based languages.
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Kristina Goetz (University of York), Margaret J. Snowling - An investigation into verbal-verbal paired-associate learning ability of poor and typical readers.
Three experiments assess the relationship between phonological skills and verbal-verbal paired-associate (PA) learning. Groups of poor readers, chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA) controls were administered tests of word and nonword reading, phoneme deletion and three different verbal-verbal PA learning tasks, which required them to learn pairs of CVC nonwords. There were group differences on all of the reading and phonological tasks. However, group differences on the verbal-verbal PA learning task were only found when the response items of the learning task were phonetically similar to one another. The results are discussed reference to a developmental model of reading.
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Scott J. Goldberg (Yeshiva University NY), Bruce D. Home - The relationship between English (L1) and Hebrew (L2) reading comprehension and teacher reported behavior problems.
The relationship between reading difficulties and behavior problems has been established for children learning to read English. The current study investigated this relationship in schools where students learn to read in two languages to determine if reading problems in a particular language are associated with behavior problems in the setting in which that language is taught. The role of other factors associated with behavior problems for children was also examined. Results substantiated a relationship between reading and behavior for children in bilingual situations complicated by mechanisms of first and second language reading comprehension.
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M. Carmen González-Trujillo (University of Granada), Francisca Serrano, J. Márquez, Sylvia Defior - Initial phoneme awareness development: Spanish preschooler follow up.
The aim of this study is to follow the development of phonemic awareness skills and the way these skills are influenced by linguistic complexities of the items along preschool years. 105 preschool children (mean age = 4 years 5 months) were tested with a phonemic awareness task. Four test-points were carried out in the course of two academic years. Linguistic complexity of the initial phoneme was taken into account (articulation placement, articulation mode and voicing). Results showed that emergent phonemic awareness skills are present at early stages of development in Spanish children. As an additional result, linguistic complexity of the items might condition children performance. Discussion is provided in the framework of emergent literacy skills in preschoolers and the importance of the linguistic complexities in task performance.
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Alexandra Gottardo (Wilfrid Laurier University), Heidy Stanish - Longitudinal predictors of word reading and reading comprehension in Spanish-speaking children.
First grade predictors of second and third grade English word reading and reading comprehension were examined in Spanish-speaking children. Predictors of second grade reading include first (L1) and second language (L2) reading and phonological processing in grade 1. Predictors of third grade word reading include L1 phonological processing in grade 1. Predictors of third grade reading comprehension include L1 and L2 vocabulary knowledge in first grade. These results replicate results found in monolingual readers and show that L2 early reading comprehension is driven by decoding but later reading comprehension is driven by vocabulary knowledge in the child¹s L1 and L2.
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Nata Goulandris (University College London), Teresa To - The role of phonological awareness in bilinguals learning to read English and Mandarin.
The relative importance of phonological awareness and visual skills in bilingual children learning to read English and Mandarin simultaneously was investigated in 35 8-year-old bilingual English-Mandarin primary 2 children. In the first year of school these children had been taught an alphabetic script, Hanyu Pinyin, in order to facilitate the identification of Chinese characters. A battery of cognitive, visual, visual-orthographic, phonological and reading assessments was administered - generally in both languages. The results are discussed in relation to the hypotheses that learning Pinyin is beneficial for learning to read Chinese and that phonological awareness is of importance not only in the acquisition of alphabetic reading skills but also for learning to read logographic scripts.
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Noel Gregg (University of Georgia), Randy Floyd, Jennifer Hartwig - Reading comprehension: Cognitive and linguistic predictors across the lifespan.
The purpose of this presentation will be to present the findings from two large studies investigating the cognitive and linguistic abilities that effect reading comprehension. The first study presented used measures of seven CHC broad abilities as possible aptitudes for reading comprehension. Participants were drawn from the standardization sample of the Woodcock-Johnson III. The four subsamples used in this investigation included 1,1096 (ages 6-8); 2,241 9ages 9 thrrough 13); 1,642 9ages 14 through 19); and 1,423 (ages 20 through 39) participants. Amos 4.0 was used to analyze the specified SEM modes maximum likelihood estimation was used to estimate free parameters. The second study pertained to the college population with and without dyslexia (n=200). Specific cognitive and linguistic tasks were used as predictors of three different reading comprehension tasks (recall, read and answer questions, cloze).
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Adenike K. Griffin (University of Michigan), Fred Morrison - The black-white test score gap: Role of the home environment in predicting higher SES African American children’s reading skills development.
Traditionally, test-score gap research has compared school-age, at-risk African-American children to their European-American peers. This study explores whether proven positive predictors of the vocabulary and decoding skills of ’mainstream’ American children, prior to school entry, also positively predict the same skills in a sample of higher SES African-American children. This study uses data from a sample of sixty African American mother-child dyads involved in phases 1 & 2 of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. It employs theoretically driven hierarchical regression models to measure the extent to which gender, family income, the home literacy environment, mother sensitivity, responsivity and hostility, daycare hours and daycare quality at 36 months positively predict children’s vocabulary and decoding skills at 54 months of age. Results reveal that the 36-month total HOME score positively predicts vocabulary and decoding at 54-months and that home learning materials were the best positive predictor of these outcomes.
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Elena Grigorenko (Yale). - Introduction symposium: Genetic bases of reading and reading-related difficulties.
This symposium provides a brief overview of the frontiers of the investigation of genetic bases of reading and reading-related (e.g., speech and language) problems. The symposium will cover a range of methodologies employed by the field (behavior-genetic analyses, analyses of patterns of familial transition, and molecular genetic analyses) in a variety of populations (Australian, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, and USA), speaking a number of languages (English, Finnish, Norwegian, and Russian). The objective of this symposium is to present a snapshot of the field and to expose the audience to the field’s most recent accomplishments and inspirations. The symposium will start with a brief overview of the field (E. Grigorenko) that will contextualize the specific presentations from different research groups.
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Pascal Gygax (University of Fribourg), Julien-François Gerber - Inferring character¹s emotional status: Plausibility does not mean relevance.
This paper presents evidence to show that researchers studying emotion inferences in text comprehension have inaccurately interpreted their findings regarding the automatic elaboration of emotional inferences. Researchers often have tested the comprehension of "matching" vs "mismatching" emotions. This paper shows that what they have actually tested is "plausible" vs "implausible" emotions. However, "plausible" emotions are not likely included in readers¹ mental representation, as they are not "relevant" to the situation (i.e. they are only "plausible"). Therefore, in light of these present findings, the belief that emotional inferences are included in readers¹ mental representation during reading needs to be revisited.
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Bente E. Hagtvet (University of Oslo), Sol A. H. Lyster, Erna Horn - The relationship of phonemic awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading skills in normal and disordered developmente: A longitudinal study of children of dyslexic parents.
The present study focuses on the predictive power of PA and RAN to reading performance in a sub-study of a large-scale study of Norwegian children aged five to eight years. 70 children of dyslexic parents were followed longitudinally from preschool to school, and oral and written language skills were assessed yearly. Approximately 50% of these children had problems in learning to read. The results suggest that phonological processing and rapid naming both predict reading skills, but their relative impact varies with developmental level and reading tasks. The results are discussed with reference to developmental and linguistic theory.
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Ellen Hamilton (University of Michigan), Marilyn Shatz - The relation of two-year-olds' lexical knowledge to later performance on phonological working memory tasks.
Undifferentiated treatment of heterogeneous predictors of reading skill may obscure important developmental features in the language-literacy relationship. We related the lexical acquisition of 46 two-year-olds to their pre-reading skills at 5-6 years of age. We identified two aspects of early word-learning that are differentially related to later phonological working memory in theoretically meaningful and interpretable ways. Early productive vocabulary is significantly related to later nonsense word repetition whereas early performance in a letter-labeling task is significantly correlated with later digit and nonword repetition (controlling for early vocabulary). These findings suggest separable developmental subskills in specific reading predictors and may have implications for early identification of reading difficulty.
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Fred Hasselman (University of Nijmegen), Ludo Verhoeven, Saskia de Graaff - Early treatment of children with a genetic risk for dyslexia: Does slowing down the speech signal aid in phonics training?
This study is part of a larger effort to investigate the possibility of early diagnosis and treatment of kindergartners who are genetically at risk for dyslexia. We set out to investigate the results reported in literature of treatment aided by speech manipulation (see for instance Merzenich et al., 1996) and conducted an experiment in which kindergartners participated in a training program with the entire speech signal being slowed down. Results show positive effects of the training program as a whole, but additional effects of slowing down the speech signal were not found.
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Yeqin He (University of Illinois), Qiuying Wang, Richard C. Anderson - Chinese children's use of subcharacter information about pronunciation.
Two experiments involving Mandarin-speaking second graders and fourth graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound Chinese characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that phonological awareness generally facilitates learning. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children can utilize the information in bound-phonetic characters as well as, or even better than, the information in independent-phonetic characters. This implies that Chinese children can employ an analogy strategy for decoding semantic-phonetic compound characters. The analogy strategy has a substantially greater likelihood of success than the simple strategy of naming the phonetic.
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Annemarie Hindman (University of Michigan) Frederick J. Morrison - Tailoring best practices in book reading: An analysis of differential effects of immediate and non-immediate talk related to individual and contextual variation.
This study examined whether the "best practices" in reading books with young children, such as using non-immediate talk, vary with the child's level of language skill and engagement and between the contexts of the home and school. Language exchanges between adults and preschool children during home and school readings were coded and analyzed. Findings indicate systematic shifts in the optimal ratio of immediate to non-immediate talk; children with lower language skills show more vocabulary growth and attention in lower-level language exchanges, while the opposite is true for more skilled children. All children were engaged in more non-immediate talk at home than school. Implications for individualized and coordinated home-school book readings are discussed.
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Connie Suk-Han Ho (University of Hong Kong), David W. Chan, Suk-Man Tsang, Suk-Han Lee, Kevin K. H. Chung - Paired associate difficulty in verbal learning among Chinese dyslexic children.
Past studies in alphabetic languages have shown that dyslexic readers have difficulties in learning visual-verbal associations, and much overlearning is required for long-term retention. The present study examined the universality of this impairment in dyslexic readers by studying children reading a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. Three groups (dyslexic, CA control, and RL control) of Chinese primary school children were recruited. It was found that the Dyslexic group performed less well than both the CA and RL groups in writing familiar words (e.g., the childs own name). The Dyslexic group also performed less well than the RL group in learning vocabularies without phonological cues but not for words with phonological cues. These findings suggest that Chinese dyslexic children have particular difficulty learning arbitrary associations between written symbol and sound like their alphabetic counterparts.
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Sherri L. Horner (Bowling Green State University). - Young children's use of strategies during environmental print tasks.
This study investigated whether children use different types of strategies to read contextualized and decontextualized environmental print (EP) and words. In my previous study, results showed that the majority of children attempted to make meaning in the more contextualized measures but only those children who could read words could also read the decontextualized EP. I have re-analyzed this data by coding responses into context-based, alphabet-based, and "other" categories. I predict that most children will use a context-based strategy in the contextualized EP tasks while only those children who have a good alphabet knowledge base (as determined by the letter naming and word reading tasks) will be able to shift to alphabet-based strategies in the decontextualized EP tasks. Those children without this knowledge will use 'other' strategies for these tasks.
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John Hosp (University of Utah), Michelle Hosp, Janice A. Dole - Knowledge and attitudes toward Reading First.
It is often the case that knowledge and attitudes are highly related to one another. The purpose of this paper was to examine the relationship between educators’ knowledge of scientifically based reading research and their attitudes toward Reading First. The researchers hypothesized that teachers, principals, reading coaches and district coordinators who know more about SBRR will have more positive attitudes towards Reading First. Data were collected on all adult participants in Utah’s Reading First. Correlations will determine the extent to which more knowledge about SBRR relates to more positive attitudes about Reading First. Data will be discussed in terms of their implications for the successful implementation of Reading First.
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Diana Hughes (University of London), Elaine Funnell - Age of acquisition.
This paper presents object naming data (72 items, 4 categories) collected from children aged 2y1m - 14y 6m. Their knowledge of the same items (as shown by their response to probe questions) has also been assessed. This has enabled Objective Ages-of-Acquisition (Obj AoA) to be computed for both naming and knowing and thus comparisons to be made. Younger children were able to name some objects about which they had little knowledge and older children were able to demonstrate knowledge about some objects they were unable to name. Subjective AoA for naming and knowing have been collected for the same objects from a group of 60 adults, and compared with the Obj AoA.
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Jacqueline Hulslander (University of Colorado), Richard Olson - The influence of orthographic skills on phoneme awareness task performance.
The influence of orthographic skill on two phoneme awareness tasks wasinvestigated in 1286 children aged 8-18. In a reading-level match,younger, normal readers scored significantly higher than older, disabledreaders on both orthographically transparent and orthographic-foil wordsin a phoneme deletion task. The groups did not differ in the proportionof errors which revealed an overt orthographic strategy, and there was nointeraction of group by orthographic transparency. Transparent itemscores correlated more strongly than orthographic-foil scores with wordreading, phonological decoding, and orthographic coding, suggesting thatthe phoneme deletion task is influenced by, but not limited to, orthographic influences. Similar results were found for a Pig Latin task.
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Florian Hutzler (Freie Universität Berlin), Heinz Wimmer - Poor readers' eye movements: No deficits in oculomotoric control during a reading-like visual-search task.
In the present study, eye-movements of German poor reading boys and controls were recorded during pseudoword reading and during a reading-like visual-search task. For both tasks, items were presented listwise: During the first task, pseudowords had to be read, during the second task, consonant strings had to be searched through for targets with two adjacent identical letters. Whereas requirements on visual perception and oculomotoric control were kept constant for both tasks, reading processes were involved in the first but not in the second task. During pseudoword reading, poor readers exhibited the typical eye-movement pattern of more and prolonged fixations and a higher number of regressions. In contrast, no differences in eye movement patterns were observed during the visual-search task. This finding ruled out explanations of dyslexia in terms of eye-movement control deficits as proposed by Fischer (2001), in a revival of Pavlidis, (1981)
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Sudha Iyengar (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland), Catherine M. Stein, Barbara A. Lewis, James H. Schick, H. Gerry Taylor, Lawrence D. Shriberg, Christopher Millard, Amy Kundtz-Kluge, Karlie Reading, Nori Minich, Amy Hansen, Lisa A. Freebairn, Robert C. Elston - Pleiotropic effects of a chromosome 3 locus on speech-sound disorder and reading.
Recent genetic studies have identified several candidate regions for dyslexia, including one on chromosome 3 segregating in a large Finnish pedigree. To explore common genetic influences on SSD and reading, we examined linkage for several quantitative traits to markers in the pericentrometric region of chromosome 3 in 77 families ascertained through a child with SSD. The quantitative scores measured several processes underlying speech-sound production, including phonological memory, phonologic coding, articulation, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and reading decoding and comprehension skills. Model-free linkage analysis was followed by identification of linked sibpairs and construction of core shared haplotypes. In our multipoint analyses measures of phonological memory demonstrated the strongest linkage. Tests for single word decoding also demonstrated linkage. The minimum shared haplotype in sibpairs with similar trait values spans 4.9 cM and is bounded by markers D3S3049 and D3S3045. Our results suggest that domains common to SSD and dyslexia are pleiotropically influenced by a putative quantitative trait locus (QTL) on chromosome 3.
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Pamela R. Jacobs (Teachers College, Columbia University), Joanna P. Williams - Expository text comprehension instruction for at-risk first grade students.
An instructional program focusing on precursor skills for expository text comprehension was taught to randomly assigned small groups of first grade students in a high-poverty, low achieving school. Compared with a no-treatment control, the program improved performance on tasks of genre awareness (fiction vs. nonfiction); sign and logo identification (word recognition), meaning (definition), and appropriate response; and written direction- following. There was a trend in favor of improved understanding of basic print concepts as well. On sign and logo identification and response tasks, performance was superior on items with accompanying graphics when compared with performance on items without graphics.
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Debra Jared (University of Western Ontario), Pierre Cormier, Lesly Wade-Woolley, Betty Ann Levy - Pseudoword repetition in kindergarten predicts second language vocabulary acquisition.
We examined whether phonological loop capacity measured in kindergarten predicts French vocabulary acquisition in English-speaking students enrolled in French Immersion. French Immersion kindergarten students were given a pseudoword repetition test as well as vocabulary tests in English and French, a test of phonological awareness, and a nonverbal IQ test. French vocabulary was assessed again in Grade 1. Pseudoword repetition in kindergarten was a significant predictor of French vocabulary scores in Grade 1 even after removing the influence of the other kindergarten measures. The results suggest that the phonological loop plays a critical role in the acquisition of second-language vocabulary.
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Annette R. Jenner (College of the Holy Cross). - Structural alterations in the brains of dyslexics: Is there a link between alterations in the visual system and those seen in language cortices?
Over the last twenty years, a large body of evidence of cytoarchitectonic alterations in the brains of dyslexics has been found. The early studies in the field concentrated on neuronal migrational anomalies largely concentrated in the left hemisphere "language" cortices. However, more recent studies have revealed differences in the anatomical characteristics of neurons in the visual and auditory systems, both cortically and subcortically. This talk will examine this structural evidence of alterations of the sensory processing systems and explore possible links between structural and function differences seen in the language system.
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Terese Jimenez (University of California, Santa Barbara) Stacey Kyle - The lexical restructuring model: How the primary language impacts English reading development in English learners.
There is a clear understanding that phonemic awareness (PA) is necessary for children’s word reading development in monolingual learners. This research also shows positive results regarding the successful transfer of these skills between children’s primary and second languages. However, less is understood concerning precursors of phonemic awareness in children who are beginning to speak and read in a second language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the empirical relationship among measures of vocabulary knowledge, phonological representations, phonemic awareness and word reading with young English language learners. Approximately 75 bilingual kindergarten students were selected to participate in this study
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Juan E. Jiménez (Universidad de La Laguna), C. Rodríguez - Subtypes of reading disability: Evidence from processing time and accuracy scores.
This research is a replication of a study conducted by Jiménez and Ramírez (2002) about subtypes of reading disability in a consistent orthography. The reading-disabled group was made up of 37 fourth-grade children who achieved a performance below the grade 3 norms (i.e., 2 years) on standarized reading test. The first control group was made up 45 normal readers matched in age with the reading-disabled group. A second control group was made up of 37 younger children of the same reading level as the reading-disabled group. Using regression-based procedures we try to identify phonological dyslexics (PH-dys) and surface dyslexics (S-dys) from a sample of 37 dyslexic fourth-grade children by comparing them to chronological-age-matched controls on processing time and accuracy scores to high frequency word and pseudoword reading. Likewise, dyslexic subtypes will be defined by reference to reading level controls. We used the oscillogram and the spectogram to measure the processing time to read a word or a pseudoword, the latency time and the processing time by syllables. Also we look at whether the Ph-dys and S-dys profiles are associated with other specific cognitive deficits.
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Carol A. Johnson (University of Cambridge), Usha C. Goswami - Phonological skills, vocabulary development and reading development in deaf children with cochlear implant.
This longitudinal study examines the development of phonological awareness skills in deaf children who have received a cochlear implant (CI). In order to ivestigate whether access to a greater range of speech frequencies provided by cochlear implants might have a positive effect on phonological representations three broad aims were defined: (1) to examine phonological skills as these relate to reading abilities, vocabulary development and age at implantation, (2) to follow participating children longitudinally for a period of 36 months , (3) to assess changes in representational quality with development, in order to see how these relate to vocabulary development and literacy.
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Rhona S. Johnston (University of Hull), Joyce E Watson - Boys read words better than girls with synthetic phonics teaching.
A study was carried out of around 300 children just starting school at the age of 5. After the experimental synthetic phonics programme, children read and spelt 7 months above chronological age, whereas children taught by analytic phonics programmes read and spelt one to three months behind chronological age. By the end of the school year, all children had carried out the synthetic phonics programme. After three years at school, it was found that the boys' word reading was significantly better than the girls'. After 6 years at school, the boys read 2.65 years above chronological age, and the girls read 1.6 years ahead.
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R. Malatesha Joshi (Texas A & M University), P. Padakannaya, S. Surendranath, C.N. Karibasappa, J. Vaid - Dissociation between decoding and comprehension: Evidence from a biliterate dyslexic and a biliterate hyperlexic.
We present in this report two cases, MD & VJ who were 16 and 14 years of age, respectively. Both had reading disability in two languages, English and Kannada. The writing system of Kannada is alphasyllabic in nature and the orthography is transparent. MD showed good decoding ability in both languages but his listening and reading comprehension of both English and Kannada was poor. His performance was above average on phoneme awareness, spelling, and pseudoward reading but he performed poorly on both comprehension tasks. VJ, on the other hand, was below average on PA, spelling, and pseudoword reading tasks. His listening comprehension, however, was above average. His reading comprehension was below average, primarily because of his weak decoding skills. Educational and theoretical implications will be discussed.
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Barbara J. Juhasz (University of Massachusetts), Keith Rayner - Eye movements and the use of spatial information during English compound word recognition.
Several studies have demonstrated that interword spaces are important for the fluent reading of English text. However, English does contain cases where spaces are deleted between two words (e.g. softball). This lack of interword spacing is informative, as "softball" written without a space refers to a very specific type of ball, or the sports game that uses the ball. A "soft ball" written with a space refers any ball that happens to be soft. Results from eye tracking experiments will be reported, which investigated the function of interword spaces for the processing of familiar English compound words. Interword spaces were found to play an important role for compound processing during normal sentence reading. Implications for theories of compound word processing as well as models of eye movement control will be discussed.
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Avi Karni (University of Haifa), Anna Sterkin, Tamar Kushnir, Zvia Breznitz - Listening to words and reading: Behavioral and fMRI evidence for cross-modal effects in early stages of visual processing.
We report a new behavioral and fMRI paradigm, wherein the effects of prior experience in one sensory modality on subsequent processing in a different modality, could be directly measured in terms of repetition priming effects and their neural correlates. We show that: a) auditory experience - listening to words - abolished the behavioral and physiological (fMRI) manifestations of repetition priming, evoked by reading, in primary visual cortex; b) auditory cortex was activated and exhibited priming effects upon reading. The results indicate the existence of robust cross-modal connections whereby auditory experience can modulate the earliest stages of the visual processing of words in normal experienced adult readers
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Nenagh Kemp (University of British Columbia, Vancouver). - Children's use of morphology in spelling: the representation of base words in inflected/derived forms.
Two studies examined the possibility that even beginning spellers (aged 5 to 9 years) can use their knowledge of morphology to spell derived and inflected words from base forms. Children indeed chose the correct letter (s or z) more often to represent the medial /z/ sound of words derived from base words (e.g., noisy, from noise) than of one-morpheme control words (e.g., busy). A second experiment confirmed this finding with inflected and derived pseudowords. Children's consistency in spelling /z/ in pairs of related words (e.g., noise-noisy, cf. noise-noizy) was correlated with their scores on an oral task of explicit morphological awareness.
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Brett Kessler (Washington University in St Louis), Rebecca Treiman - Sensitivity to statistical contextual patterns when spelling consonants in English.
Several consonant phonemes in English can be spelled multiple ways, but often the correct spellings become more predictable when the vowel is taken into account. We measured 11 such patterns in the English lexicon, then tested the extent to which spellers make use of them. College students spelled pairs of monosyllabic nonwords with matching consonants but differing vowels. In all cases, spellers were sensitive to vowels when choosing consonant letters. The computational model of Houghton & Zorzi showed similar tendencies, but was not sensitive to all the patterns humans were sensitive to.
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Bernardine King (Open University), Clare Wood, Dorothy Faulkner - Does developmental dyslexia arise from a failure to temporally reorganise modalities during an early stage of reading development?
A comparative study between three groups: normal early readers, developmental children with dyslexia, and adults with acquired dyslexia. Comparisons between the characteristics of the adults with acquired phonological dyslexia and those of children in Ehri’s Partial Alphabetic Phase are being investigated, using computer tasks designed to demonstrate underlying cognitive similarities and contrasts. The data suggest that the Partial Alphabetic Phase may be a period of sensory reorganisation in normal reading development. Children with developmental dyslexia do not appear to have fully reorganised their temporal reactions to auditory and visual stimuli compared to CA controls, and show similar patterns in their reaction times to acquired dyslexics.
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John R. Kirby (Queen's University), Timothy Johnston, Rauno Parrila - Subtypes of adult dyslexia.
We investigated the prevalence of the Dual Route (DR) and Double Deficit (DD) subtypes in 25 dyslexic University students, compared to a group of 47 nondyslexic university students. Each approach classified approximately half of the dyslexics in the subtypes. Although the phonological coding (DR) and phonological awareness (DD) groups overlapped significantly, the orthographic (DR) and naming speed (DD) groups did not. Performance of all groups on a battery of phonological, orthographic, and reading measures was consistent with the characterization of each group. We discuss the possibility of a three dimensional classification (phonological, orthographic, and naming speed) for high-performing adult dyslexics.
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Christian Klicpera (Universität Wien), Sabine Dietrich,Barbara Gasteiger-Klicpera, Alfred Schabmann - Is there an interaction between a training programme of phonological awareness in kindergarten on reading and spelling skills in 1st Grade and the teaching method of phoneme-grapheme correspondence?
Of 475 children in their last year of kindergarten, 148 children with phonological awareness deficits were found, and 62 received a phonological awareness training. The further development of 25 children who received the training and 45 children who did not was examined in classes with a synthetic phonics teaching approach versus a holistic (whole word) approach. After 10 weeks marked differences between the children with and without training could be found, particularly in classes without a systematic introduction of phoneme-grapheme correspondence. This may be due to the fact that the children without former phonological training in kindergarten made only little progress in phonological awareness. In these classes, even at the end of the school year, the differences between the two groups with and without training remained. In contrast, no significant differences could be found between the two groups in classes with a systematic phoneme-grapheme teaching approach
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Reinhold Kliegl (University of Potsdam), Ralf Engbert, Antje Nuthmann - SWIFT: A computational model of eye-movement control during reading.
The SWIFT model assumes: (1) Words in the perceptual span are processed in parallel with eccentricity-dependent rates. (2) Saccade targets are selected from the active field of words according to an attentional gradient. (3) Autonomously generated saccade programs are delayed by lexical difficulty of currently processed words. (4) Saccade generation respects oculomotor constraints. (5) Misguided saccades immediately trigger a new saccade program. The model reproduces, e.g., empirical inspection probabilities (skips, regression, etc.), fixation durations dependent on word frequency and length and landing position distributions dependent on launch distance and word length. We discuss extensions to account for individual differences.
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Dorthe Klint Petersen (University of Copenhagen). - Distinctness training in kindergarten.
The aim of this study is to see whether distinctness training might help children with poor language abilities to profit from the phoneme awareness training in kindergarten. A total of 840 children were screened with group tests of letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and vocabulary to find the children for the study. A total of 85 children were selected for the study, and 41 of these children were given distinctness training in kindergarten. It is expected that results at the end of kindergarten will reveal whether the training has had a positive effect on the children’s phoneme awareness.
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Ofra Korat (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan), Pnina Klienn, Ora Segal-Drori - Patterns of mediation in book reading to young children as predictors of emergent reading: A comparison between two Israeli social groups.
This research had two aims: (1) to compare low and high SES maternal mediational styles when book reading with kindergarteners, and (2) to examine whether maternal reading style predicts children's emergent reading level. The study included 94 families equally divided to low SES (LSES) and high SES (HSES) groups. In the first stage, children's emergent literacy (e.g., letter names, word recognition, CAP and emergent book reading) was measured. In the second, parent-child interaction while book reading was videotaped and information about Home Literacy Environment (HLE) was gathered. Maternal mediation style, and HLE differed as a function of SES. Compared to the HSES mothers, LSES mothers addressed the relationship between the picture in the story and the text more often, and made fewer connections beyond the text. HLE of the HSES group was higher than the LSES. Across SES children's emergent reading was predicted by SES and HLE. While in the HSES group maternal mediating style and HLE predicted child's emergent reading, no such prediction appeared in the LSES group. Results are discussed in terms of children's socio-cultural background and their reading experience.
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Melanie R. Kuhn (Rutgers Graduate School of Education), Steven A. Stahl, Paula Schwanenfluegel, Deborah Woo - Teaching students to become fluent readers: A three year review.
This paper will review the first three years of an IERI study designed to assist learners in becoming fluent readers. The intervention occurred in 27 second-grade classrooms at three regionally diverse sites with two cohorts of students. Students were tested three times using a series of standardized measures. Further, the students were retested at the end of each subsequent school year using the same measures. We will report on the results of these measures and discuss how the findings contribute to our understanding of the ways in which students make the transition from a decoding focus to automatic, expressive reading.
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David Pun-lok Kwan (University of Hong Kong), Connie Suk-han Ho - Basic eye movement indices of Chinese dyslexic children and the relationship with various visual skills.
This study examined the online reading performance of Chinese dyslexic readers using the eye tracking technique. 15 dyslexic children were compared with 30 chronological age matched average readers on various basic eye movement indices. The performance of dyslexic children were found to resembled those of a less experienced reader: they had longer first fixation duration and gaze duration, and made more regression. This appeared to be related to their need to gain more information before successful word decoding, and is speculated to be contributed by difficulties in various visual skills. In contradiction to previous research findings, the skipping rate of the dyslexic group is higher. The skipped words appeared in aggregation on isolated quadrants of the text, regardless of the word frequency. It is speculated to be related to attention difficulties.
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Fiona Kyle (University of London), Margaret Harris - Longitudinal predictors of literacy development in deaf children.
Twenty-nine 7- and 8-year-old deaf children participated in a longitudinal study examining patterns of reading and spelling development. The children were given a battery of literacy and cognitive tests including reading, spelling, implicit phonological awareness, productive vocabulary, lip-reading, and short-term memory. They were seen twelve months later and assessed on the same tests again. There was enormous variability in reading and spelling within the group at both testing times. The results showed that their reading was generally not age appropriate with a mean lag of thirteen months at Time 1 and nineteen months at Time 2. Different patterns of relationships were exhibited between reading and spelling and the other variables. Productive vocabulary and lip-reading were significantly related to reading at both testing times and they also predicted reading development. This paper will outline the main findings and implications of the longitudinal data.
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Adele Lafrance (OISE-Toronto), Alexandra Gottardo - Development of phonological awareness in bilingual learners.
Forty children from French language schools (FL) and twenty-two children from French Immersion schools (FI) were administered measures of rhyme detection, phoneme detection, segmentation and pseudoword decoding in English and French. Language general trends were noted with French and English performance on both rhyme and phoneme detection being significantly better than performance on segmentation. FI children performed significantly better than did FL children on measures of English phoneme detection, segmentation and pseudoword decoding. FL children performed significantly better than FI children on the measure of French pseudoword decoding only. The influences of orthography and language exposure are discussed.
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Susan Lambrecht Smith (University of Maine), Jenny Roberts, John L. Locke, Paul Macaruso, Jim Hodgson - Precursors to dyslexia: Phonological and lexical markers .
This paper reports findings from a 13-year longitudinal study entitled Precursors to Dyslexia. Early lexical and phonological profiles were examined in children who were originally at risk based on parental reading status, and who later tested as dyslexic. Results of lexical growth curves prior to 30 months indicate increased risk for dyslexia based on genetic risk and late talking status. Phonological analyses of spontaneous language samples at 30 months highlight reduced lexical diversity and use of fewer complex phonological forms in children later identified as dyslexic.
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Oren Lamm (University of Haifa). - Surface dyslexia: Is it a visual-lexical deficit?
According to dual-route models, naming of non-voweled Hebrew words relies upon direct lexical activation. Thus naming accuracy and latency should be determined by word frequency. Pseudoword pronunciation, however, is unpredictable. The present paper examines word naming by Hebrew-speaking normal and dyslexic readers. The analysis of response patterns for test words did not support separate independent reading routes. The connectionist approach that offers emergent detection of local consistencies characterizing the relations between sub-lexical letter and sound assemblies was favored. Surface dyslexia, according to these results may be considered as a deficit that ‘intensifies’ the bias towards 'bold consistencies' while "under-weighting" certain considerations made by normal readers.
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Karin Landerl (University of Salzburg). - Arithmetic deficits with and without reading deficits.
It is sometimes assumed that dyslexia and dyscalculia might be caused by the same underlying cognitive deficit. If this is the case it would be expected that the arithmetic difficulties of children with dyslexia + dyscalculia should be different from those of children with dyscalculia but adequate reading skills. Groups of 9-year old children with dyslexia + dyscalculia and dyscalculia only will be compared to a control group on tasks assessing basic numeric and arithmetic competencies. In contrast to the common deficit view, it will be argued that dyscalculia is the result of specific disabilities in basic numerical processing, rather than the consequence of deficits in other cognitive abilities.
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Holly B. Lane (University of Florida), Paige C. Pullen - Patterns in the development of invented spelling abilities.
Invented spellings provide insight into children's phonological awareness development and understanding of the alphabetic principle, but there is limited information about how various scoring methods can be applied and interpreted in the classroom. To develop guidelines for the use of invented spelling for assessment, we conducted evaluations of invented spelling ability with over 2,000 children in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade using an adaptation of Mann, Tobin, and Wilson's (1987) method. Spellings were analyzed for phonological accuracy and error patterns. With a sub-sample of spellings, we compared scores obtained using other scoring methods and correlated with reading scores.
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Pierre Largy (Universite of Toulouse), M-P. Cousin, Michel Fayol - Memorizing instances or applying rules? On learning written morphology in spelling: The case of French.
How do children learn the (most often silent) morphology of nominal number (i.e., add -s for the plural) in written French? One extensively explored possibility is that they learn it as condition -> action rules (e.g., if plural, always add -s), which are taught in an explicit (i.e., declarative) fashion and are then drilled in the classroom. An alternative possibility is that before being taught such rules, they memorize instances of (inflected) words when they encounter them, mainly in reading. The following experiments report that children do learn some frequent inflected instances (e.g., parents). Moreover, these early encounters have an interfering effect on the learning and implementation of the nominal plural rule that is taught later to them. The production of the agreement is facilitated when the required inflection corresponds to the one associated with the noun during the (frequent) previous encounters (e.g. forming the plural of a noun frequently encountered in the plurally inflected form) but is impaired in cases where the stored instance does not end with the relevant inflection (e.g. forming the singular of a noun frequently encountered in the plurally inflected form). There is, however, an interesting asymmetry between the singular and the plural: most probably because the singular is the unmarked form, its memorization does not impede the addition of -s in the plural and the agreement rule can be applied to both familiar and new items. In contrast, an initial memorisation of the plural form of a noun tends to make this form appear as the basic form, and therefore makes it more difficult to remove the -s in order to pass from the plural to the singular form than is the case of new items.
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Rebecca Larkin (University of York), Margaret J. Snowling - Do young children use morphological spelling strategies?
Treiman and Cassar (1996) demonstrated that in their spelling children were less likely to omit the /n/ of a two morpheme word such as ''tuned'' than the /n/ of a one morpheme word such as ''brand''. The current study attempted to replicate Treiman and Cassar's findings, and provide support for the theory that young children can use morphological spelling strategies. 58 children aged between 7 and 10 years participated in the study. The children completed a single word spelling test consisting of 16 one-morpheme words (e.g. paste) and 16 two-morpheme words (e.g. raced), matched pair wise for their phonetic final consonant clusters. It was found that around 34% of the children benefited from a morphological spelling strategy. The data are discussed in relation to the development of children's reading ability and the phonetic characteristics of the consonant clusters.
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Martha League (University of Florida, Gainesville), Anne Bishop - Prediction of early reading achievement: A follow-up study examining theoretically coherent measures prior to reading acquisition .
Researchers conducted a follow-up study to determine whether the optimal combination of predictive measures that correlated to early reading achievement remained constant over a four-year period. Five predictive models including letter identification, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatic naming (RAN) were examined. The models were administered in fall and winter of kindergarten to determine if results varied across time. These models were correlated with four measures of reading: word reading skills, non-word reading skills, fluency, and comprehension. The unique predictive value of RAN was examined. Results are reported for reading achievement at the end of first and third grades.
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Katia Lecocq (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Philippe Mousty, Régine Kolinsky, Vincent Goetry, José Morais, Jesus Alegria - The concurrent development of reading in two alphabetic systems differing in orthographic consistency: Evidence from French-Dutch bilingual children.
Studies examining reading development in bilinguals' two languages have led to conflicting conclusions regarding the language in which reading development should first take place. The results of our longitudinal study comparing reading development in French-native children immersed in Dutch and starting to read either in Dutch (most consistent orthography) or in French (least consistent orthography but native language) suggest that beginning to read in the most consistent orthographic system is most beneficial because it positively affects phonological processes and enhances subsequent reading acquisition in both languages. Indeed, although all bilinguals showed similar reading abilities as monolinguals in French, the bilinguals instructed to read first in French lag behind the other Dutch-speaking groups in Dutch.
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Gabriel Lee (Tamagawa University). - Rauding in a second language.
Rauding theory states that two factors, accuracy and rate, explain nearly all the variance in the general reading ability of American schoolchildren (Carver, 2000). Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and regression, this paper investigated to what extent the rauding model could be applied to 92 Japanese university aged young adults studying English as a second language. Results indicated moderate support for the rauding model. In the SEM analysis, a non-significant chi-square and a CFI of .98 indicated good model fit. 62% of the individual differences in the TOEFL sub-tests (EL) could be explained by regarding AL and RL as correlated factors. The only aberration with Carver’s rauding model was that the correlation between PL and RL was non-significant at p < .05.
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Annukka Lehtonen (Washington University in St. Louis), Rebecca Treiman - Not as perfect as assumed: phonological effects in adults' phoneme awareness performance.
Although skilled adult readers are usually thought to possess perfect phoneme awareness, several recent studies have revealed surprisingly frequent use of units larger than single phonemes. We aimed to investigate whether phonological properties such as sonority, syllable structure and letter names affect adults' responses. Undergraduate participants performed a Spelling Segmentation task, indicating which letter(s) went together with sounds in words, and a Silent Letter Task, rating the salience of silent letters in words. The results confirmed that adults do not consistently produce phonemic responses, and that phoneme sonority, internal structure of syllables and letter names systematically affect adults' performance.
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Mark Leikin (University of Haifa), Zvia Breznitz - Processing words' grammatical functions in Hebrew-speaking children: An ERP study.
Dyslexics and normal readers (aged 10) were compared with adult readers on their ability to identify the grammatical function of a word in the course of sentence processing. The patterns of brain activation observed in children differed from those seen in the adult readers in terms of N100/P200 and P300 amplitudes and latencies and also in terms of strategies for identifying grammatical functions. Adult readers employed only a morphologically-based strategy, whereas a word-order strategy was partly evident among the children. A significant increase in latencies of ERP components was found in dyslexic children as compared to normal readers.
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Che Kan Leong (University of Saskatchewan), L.H. Tan, K.T.Hau & P.W. Cheng - Are orthographic information and phonological sensitivity 'separable but equal' in word reading and spelling? A two-wave structural equation analysis.
There is considerable debate on the separability of orthographic and phonological processing in word reading and spelling. We present linear structural equation (LISREL) analyses of 3 sets of data (Time1, Time2 and both Times) of a two-wave study in 108 eleven-year-old Chinese students to show the stronger effect of orthographic information than phonological sensitivity in reading and spelling English words. The orthographic construct was measured by orthographic choice, choice of heterographic homophonic words and word-specific tasks. The phonological construct was measured by phoneme deletion, Pig Latin and Spoonerism. The stable results show the two constructs are separable but integral to word reading and spelling.
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Paavo H.T. Leppänen (University of Jyväskylä), Minna Kaaranen, Tomi K. Guttorm, Anne Puolakanaho, Anna-Maija Poikkeus, Kenneth M. Eklund, Paula Lyytinen, Heikki Lyytinen - Infant brain responses for temporal cues are associated with early reading related skills at pre-school age in children with risk for familial dyslexia.
We earlier found differences between 6-month-old infants at risk for familial dyslexia (25) and controls (27) in event-related brain potential (ERPs) for pseudowords presented in an MMN-paradigm. The response latencies for the deviant /atta/ and the amplitude of the standard /ata/ response at 6 months were associated with reading and writing skills at 6.5 – 7 years, but only in at-risk children. The brain responses accurately identified 87 % of the poor and 80 % of the good readers just before school start. These results suggest causal role of differences in neural substrates sub-serving phonological and reading related skills.
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Iris Levin (Tel Aviv University). - Letter names and letter sounds as a foundation for word recognition.
This training study contributes to the debate about whether preschoolers should be taught letter sounds or letter names as an aid to word reading acquisition. In the pretest and posttest, the experimenter presented written words and asked the child to decide which of two spoken words was written in each. One group learned to name four letters, and the other group to provide four letters' sounds. Learning names or sounds appears productive both for word recognition and alphabetic explanation. But the sounds of letters are more productive for word recognition, while the names of letters are more productive for explanations.
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Maria Chiara Levorato (University of Padova), Barbara Nesi, Maja Roch - Text reading comprehension and the understanding of literal and ambiguous sentences: a follow-up study in primary school children.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the relations between text reading comprehension and literal and ambiguous sentences understanding (i.e., idioms) in children with poor comprehension abilities, by means of a follow-up study. The results showed that the understanding of both literal and ambiguous sentences is related to text comprehension; the comprehension of ambiguous sentences is related to the processing of literal sentences as well. After six months almost half of children improved in all their linguistic abilities, showing that the development of these skills proceed in parallel. However, the regression analysis showed that the understanding of ambiguous sentences is strongly related to the improvement of text reading comprehension rather than to the improvement of literal sentences understanding.
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Betty Ann Levy (McMaster University). - Rereading fluency gains: Modality of practice.
Story reading to preschoolers provides little direct benefit to the child's reading acquisition. However, oral reading practice facilitates reading acquisition for delayed readers in elementary school. We asked here whether any of this oral reading benefit was contributed by experience through the auditory modality. Poor readers in Grade 4 first received practice through oral reading, listening while viewing, or listening alone. Benefit of training was measured by the speed and accuracy of the child's later reading of a novel text that contained mainly trained words. As with preschoolers, hearing stories contributed little to the child's later reading fluency.
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Jacqueline Leybaert (Université libre de Bruxelles), Perrine Willems - Phonological working memory in deaf children fitted with a cochlear implant.
Phonological working memory of deaf children fitted with a C.I. before the age of 3 years was investigated using a word span task involving non-rhyming, rhyming and plurisyllabic words, presented in an audio-alone (A) and in an audio-visual (AV) modalities. Deaf participants’ word span was shorter than that of age-matched hearing controls, indicating that working memory capacity is related more to auditory experience than to chronological age. Rhyme and word length effects were also reduced in the deaf participants, but these differences vanished when they were matched with the hearing on their performance in the control condition, suggesting a similar functioning of the phonological working memory. Only the deaf participants showed better performances for the AV than for the A condition, indicating that visual speech information is processed in working memory by deaf children with CI.
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Orly Lipka (University of British Columbia) Nonie K. Lesaux, Linda S. Siegel, Dorothy C. Lam - A retrospective analysis of the reading development of a group of grade 4 poor readers: Risk status and profiles over 5 years.
The study examined retrospectively the trajectory of reading development within a group of poor readers in grade 4, who had been followed since kindergarten. The analyses were conducted to investigate the patterns of emergence of reading disability and the nature of the reading ability and risk status across the 5 years. Three profiles of reading ability were identified: children who began at-risk and remained at-risk, those whose risk status has fluctuated over the years, and those children who experienced a decline in age-appropriate reading skills only by the end of grade 4. The results demonstrate the heterogeneous nature of the trajectory of poor reading in school-aged children.
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Vivian Luan Hui (University of Hong Kong) Connie Ho Suk-Han - Morphological deficit in Chinese developmental dyslexia.
The present study was conducted to examine the role of morphological awareness in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Twenty-nine Chinese dyslexic children in Beijing were compared with 25 average readers of the same chronological age (CA controls) and 28 average readers of the same reading level (RL controls) on various reading, morphological, phonological, orthographic and visual skills. The results showed that the dyslexic children performed worse than the CA controls in nearly all the morphological tasks, but similarly with the RL controls in most of the morphological tasks. This finding suggested that Chinese dyslexic children are impaired in morphological awareness. It was also found that morphological deficit was dominant in Chinese dyslexia as compared with other cognitive deficits.
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Solveig-Alma H. Lyster (University of Oslo). - Orthographic skill and naming speeds as early predictors of reading comprehension and fluency – a nine year follow-up study.
This paper focuses the prediction of grade 9 reading from preschool and grade 1 measures. Regression analyses, including 244 children, showed that results from orthographic identification tasks at the end of grade 1 accounted for large contributions to the variance in grade 9 reading comprehension and fluency. Analyses of covariance showed that poor grade 9 readers did not differ from good readers on grade 1 phonological decoding tasks. There were clear differences between the groups, however, on orthographic tasks as well as on preschool naming speed. The results have to be interpreted on the basis of the Norwegian orthography.
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Heikki Lyytinen (University of Jyväskylä). - Early markers of dyslexia – highlights of an eight-year follow-up from birth of children at familial risk for dyslexia .
In the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD), the development of children at risk for dyslexia (children born to a family with dyslexia in first- and second-degree relatives) has now been compared to non-risk children from birth to school age. Roughly half of the at-risk children are late in their reading acquisition at first grade. The results of predictive analyses support the possibility of relatively early identification of the accumulation of risk. Predictive models of pre-reading variables explain a substantial portion of the variance of early reading acquisition whereby measures taken several years before reading age make a moderate contribution.
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Paul Macaruso (Community College of Rhode Island), Donald Shankweiler - Relationship between spelling success and reading exposure: Follow-up studies.
Community college students were asked to write 12 sentences to dictation on three occasions. Each sentence contained one difficult to spell, irregular word (e.g., sergeant). Students in Study 1 then read the sentences ten times, while students in Study 2 read and copied the sentences five times. Two minutes after the final reading and again one week later, students wrote the sentences to dictation. Significant gains in spelling target words were found in both studies, with greater gains made in the read and copy condition (Study 2) than the read only condition (Study 1). Implications of these results for models of reading and spelling are discussed.
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Frank Manis (University of Southern California), Anne Sperling, Zhong-Lin Lu - Visual processing deficits in dyslexia in high vs. low noise displays.
In this study, we evaluated whether deficits in excluding noise could account for dyslexics' poor performance on visual processing tasks. We compared the thresholds of both dyslexic and non-dyslexic children and adults using coherent motion displays that varied in noise level and signal salience. Dyslexics had higher motion thresholds than non-dyslexic children and adults when the task involved motion processing in high noise. Dyslexics performed as well as non-dyslexics, however, when the signal was clearly separated from the noise or noise was reduced. Thus, dyslexics appear to have normal motion perception, but have difficulty processing motion in high noise.
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George Manolitsis (University of Crete). - The relation between metalinguistic skills and reading acquisition in Greek-speaking children: The neglected role of preschoolers' syntactic awareness.
The purpose of this study was to examine whether there is an association between Greek-speaking preschool children's metaphonological and metasyntactic skills and their reading ability in Year 1, 2, 3, and 4. Metalinguistic skills of 159 preschoolers were assessed by six metaphonological and three metasyntactic tasks. Also preschoolers' non-verbal intelligence, verbal ability, letter knowledge and parents' education level were assessed. During the four years of schooling children's reading ability was assessed by a Greek standardized reading test. The results support the hypothesis that preschoolers' metaphonological skills predict early reading ability while their metasyntactic skills predict later reading ability.
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Marina Mariol (Université catholique de Louvain), Marie-Anne Schelstraete - Why feminine form is the first "default" form in written French?
This research aimed to explore sensitivity to regular written gender marks in French (ex. nouns ending in /*aj/ have a masculine regular ending in ‘’ail’’ whereas the feminine ending is "aille"). The results showed that pupils first spelled with several transcriptions and then use the most frequent one (i.e. "aille") without taking into account the morphological constraints (i.e. gender). Later, pupils appeared to be able to use gender information for pseudo-words and regular forms. However, irregular words seemed to be mastered quite late. This pattern is congruent with the hypothesis that a "rule" is discovered on the basis of frequency and enhanced. Once it is mastered irregularities can be deal with
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Vanessa E.G. Martens (University of Amsterdam), Peter F. de Jong - Explaining the RAN-reading relationship: The effect of case mixing on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge.
In this study, we tested Bower's (2001) claim that slow processing of individual letters within a word results in a slower rate of acquisition of orthographic knowledge. During training, beginning and advanced readers repeatedly read a set of one-syllable pseudowords, in either lower or MiXeD CaSe. Case mixing was assumed to slow down letter processing by changing the low level visual features. In a posttest, the presentation of the pseudowords was the same or different from the type of presentation (lower or mixed case) in the training. The results suggest that reading in mixed case format slows down the acquisition of orthographic knowledge.
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Tanya Martin (Queen’s University), Vincent Goetry, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Do French immersion students exploit different processing units when reading in English and in French?
Although inconsistent orthographic systems (i.e. inconsistent grapho-phonological mappings) induce greater reliance on large orthographic units (rimes), consistent orthographic systems induce greater reliance on small phonological reading units (Goswami, Gombert & de Barrera, 1998).In the present study first-, second- and fourth-grade French Immersion children were examined with tasks examining phonological and orthographic processing as well as reading and spelling in their two languages. The results replicate, within group, differences previously observed between groups of monolinguals. As such, they suggest that the transfer of reading and spelling skills across languages may be constrained by the similarities and differences between the two orthographic systems, even when these are both alphabetic.
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Sandra Lyn Martin-Chang (McMaster University), Betty Ann Levy - Transfer of fluency from two types of training: Words presented in context versus words presented in lists.
Three experiments examined the transfer of reading speed and accuracy following two training regimes. Context training embedded target words in children's stories, and Word training presented words in isolation. Experiments 1 and 2 tested transfer to reading novel passages. Results indicated that children of all ability levels showed speed benefits on transfer passages from both types of training compared to control, but that the benefits were larger following context, compared to word, training. Experiment 3 involved the same training regimes but transfer was to isolated word reading. Results showed greater increases in reading speed following word training compared to context training or to control.
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Linda H. Mason (University of Illinois), Johnell Bentz - Self-regulating and guiding reading comprehension for students who struggle with expository text.
The effects of two instructional methods on the expository reading comprehension performance of 64 fifth-grade students with and without disabilities who struggle with reading are compared in this quasi-experimental design study. The first approach, a multi-component reading comprehension strategy (TWA) will be taught using self-regulated strategy development instruction. The second approach, guided reading, will be taught using procedures described by Fountas and Pinnell (2001). Performance on 8 non-standardized and standardized reading comprehension measures will also be compared to performance of 22 non-experimental same ability peers. This project is under investigation; posttest data is currently being collected.
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Jackie Masterson (University of Essex), Morag Stuart - The children's printed word database (CPWD).
This paper presents an account of the development of the Children's Printed Word Database (CPWD). This is a computerised, web accessible database of words which appear in books for children in the first four years of primary schools (ages 5 to 10-years). The database enables stringent control to be exercised over variables such as word frequency, orthographic neighbourhood size and spelling-to-sound consistency at both grapheme-phoneme and rime levels.
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Catherine McBride-Chang (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Jeung-Ryul Cho, Richard K. Wagner, Hua Shu - Reading development across cultures: Universals and specifics of phonological and morphological awareness.
Current developmental textbooks assert that children's early reading success depends upon phonological awareness. Data on approximately 100 second graders each from Beijing, Hong Kong, South Korea, and America suggest an alternative cross-cultural approach to children's reading growth. Findings were that 1) across languages, both phonological and morphological awareness were similarly associated with vocabulary knowledge, but 2) phonological and morphological awareness had different associations with reading in different scripts. Specifically, phonological awareness was significantly associated with English and Korean reading and unassociated with Chinese reading. In contrast, morphological awareness significantly predicted reading in Chinese and Korean but not in English.
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Gail McCoubrey (McGill University), Ronald Stringer - Relationships between rapid naming and reading in English- and French-speaking children.
The relationship of rapid automatized naming (RAN) to word reading ability in children who read in English as their L1 and French as their L2 was investigated. Twenty-one students, aged 9 to 13 years, being educated in English, were administered measures of rapid naming and reading in L1 and L2. Results revealed that although RAN in L1 was not predictive of reading in L1 or L2, RAN in L2 predicted word reading in L2. These results are consistent with research that suggests that RAN predicts reading only in weaker reading groups, and that L2 reading ability is related to print experience in L2.
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Michael McKenna (Georgia Southern University), Sharon Walpole - An internet database of longitudinal case studies in reading.
This session will announce the launch of a new research tool for scientists interested in the long-term development of reading and its relationship to a constellation of factors. Our work with Reading First, a USDOE program targeting struggling schools serving grades K-3, will facilitate the creation of this database. As many as 100 students will be assessed at the beginning, middle, and end of each school year, beginning in kindergarten and continuing at least through grade 3. Each assessment will entail a variety of instruments complemented by background data and qualitative information volunteered by teachers and parents. Video clips of oral reading, scanned work samples, the nature of and fidelity to instructional methods, information about classroom and school contexts, and a combination of cognitive and affective indicators will ensure an extraordinarily rich data source for examining long-term trends
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Souhila Messaoud-Galusi (CNRS Villejuif), Liliane Sprenger-Charolles, Caroline Bogliotti, Willy Serniclaes - Perceptual weighting strategy: developmental trend and reading effect.
Transition and vocalic roundness is known to affect perception of the preceding fricative. The relevance of these factors were found to differ in adults and children, by Nittrouer et al [1]. We replicated part of this paradigm with French monolingual dyslexics, reading controls and adults, and noticed that (1) Children and Adults differed mainly in the weight they attributed to the fricative noise spectra, (2) The weighting strategies were identical for dyslexics and reading level controls
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Paul Miller (University of Haifa). - What do prelingually-deafened readers' word recognition skills tell us about their reading comprehension problems?
The objective of this study was to clarify the nature and efficiency of prelingually-deafened readers' word recognition skills and the way these skills relate to their reading comprehension. Data was gathered by means of a research paradigm demanding the same/different categorization of phonologically or formationally manipulated word pairs and by a sentence comprehension test. Participants were prelingually-deafened individuals and a task-matched hearing control group. Findings attained from analyzing quantitative and qualitative aspects of the participant groups' categorization of the word-pairs and the way it relates to their reading comprehension level will be discussed with reference to currently popular reading theories.
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Louise Miller Guron (University of Cambridge). - Rapid automatized naming and word recognition automaticity in multilingual students.
In a study comparing rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance in monolingual and multilingual Swedish students aged 15 years, RAN performance of multilinguals was assessed in three languages. Multilinguals and monolinguals were matched on non-verbal intelligence and participated in reading, phonological awareness and RAN tasks. The RAN tasks comprised three sets of stimuli: digits, colours and objects. No differences were found between language groups on reading comprehension, word reading or Swedish rapid naming. However, a trend was identified whereby predictors of RAN differed for the language groups. Results will be discussed with reference to effects of multilingualism on metalinguistic awareness.
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Paul L. Morgan (Pennsylvania State University), Doug Fuchs, Lynn Fuchs, Don Compton - Does early reading failure decrease young children’s reading motivation? An evaluation of the negative Matthew effects hypothesis.
Stanovich’s (1986) Matthew effects theory predicts that limited progress in acquiring reading skills decreases children¹s motivation. Empirical support for this prediction is mixed. This study evaluated (a) whether 75 first grade children displayed substantially different levels of motivation as a function of differences in their progress in reading, and (b) whether manipulating the amount of progress 15 struggling readers made in acquiring reading skills leads to gains in their motivation. Results suggested marked differences in motivation between skilled and struggling readers. However, providing struggling readers with tutoring in word-level strategies did not lead to changes in their motivation, despite indications of gains in their reading ability.
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Fred Morrison (University of Michigan), David Shilt, Annemarie Hindman - The contribution of preschoolers’ forms of emergent writings to development of their language and academic skills.
This study seeks to identify the forms of writing used by preschoolers, and to examine how these various forms relate to preschoolers’ language and academic skills. Findings are based on the writing samples of 110 preschoolers who were asked to write about a page spread in Frog, Where Are You, a picture book. Preliminary findings reveal systematic differences among children in the nature and sophistication of their writing from the use of scribbles to the use of invented spelling. More sophisticated forms of emergent writing predicted stronger phonological awareness, letter-word knowledge, and mathematically-related analytical skills.
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Jack Mostow (Carnegie Mellon University), Joseph Beck, Cecily Heiner - Which help helps? Effects of various types of help on word learning in an automated reading tutor that listens.
When a tutor gives help on a word during assisted oral reading, how does the type of help matter? We report an automated, within-subject, randomized-trial experiment embedded in Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor. Hundreds of children (mostly in grades 1-3) used the Reading Tutor in 2002-2003, reading millions of words and getting help on hundreds of thousands of them. The experimental variable was the type of help, selected randomly by the Reading Tutor whenever it gave help on a word. The outcome variable was student performance on the next encounter of the word. We compare effects of several types of help.
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Valerie Muter (University of York), Margaret Snowling, Julia Carroll, Yvonne Griffiths, Uta Frith - Children at family risk of dyslexia: A follow-up in adolescence.
This poster reports on the findings of a follow-up study of 51 adolescents who had been recruited to a dyslexia at-risk study at the age of 3 years. Their literacy outcome was conpared to that of controls, and related to their cognitive and language skills, both concurrently and at the earlier points in time (when they were 4, 6 and 8 years of age). At age 13, 33% of the at-risk sample showed significant literacy impairment compared to just 9% of the controls. These affected children performed less well on oral language tasks than at-risk unaffected children and controls. Early language and phonological skills proved to be good long-term predictors of literacy outcome in the at-risk adolescents
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Kate Nation (University of Oxford). - Hidden language impairments in children with poor reading comprehension.
Despite fluent and accurate reading, and normal nonverbal ability, poor comprehenders are poor at understanding what they have read. Tasks tapping three domains of oral language, namely phonology, semantics and morphosyntax, were administered, along with measures that reflect an interaction of language domains that we refer to as broader language skills. Relative to control children matched for age and decoding ability, poor comprehenders were impaired across all measures except those tapping phonological skills. In addition to low oral language ability characterizing the group as a whole, some individuals had marked language impairments; it is argued that a substantial minority can be classified as having a specific language impairment. However, none of the children had been previously recognized as having a language or reading impairment. These findings demonstrate that serious reading and language impairments are not always obvious in children who have good phonological ability and appear, superficially at least, to read well.
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Jessica Nelson (University of Pittsburgh), Erik Reichle - Components of word familiarity.
According to the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control during reading, word identification is completed in two stages: a rapid assessment of a word's familiarity, followed by the full identification of its orthographic, phonological, and/or semantic codes (Reichle et al., 2003). An eye-tracking experiment that attempts to specify the basis of word familiarity will be reported. Subjects received training on two of three properties of unknown words (e.g., orthography and meaning, but not phonology), and then read sentences containing these words. The results are suggestive of the type of lexical information that determine when to move the eyes during reading, and further constrain of models of eye-movement control.
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Tom Nicholson (University of Auckland), Sheryll McIntosh - The poor get richer: A case study analysis of an after school free tuition programme.
The University of Auckland offers free after-school reading tuition for children with reading problems at a local inner city school. More than 100 pupils have attended weekly, one-hour lessons since its inception in 2001. Monitoring of the tuition shows that pupils with reading difficulties make significant gains in reading. Tutors are either qualified teachers or in training and follow a teaching ideas manual. Strong emphasis is put on phonological strategies since many of the pupils have problems with decoding but the lessons also include reading in context and spelling. Tutors stay with the same pupil all year. The friendly, one-to-one tuition is important for self-esteem. The presentation will discuss the pre and post assessment results for the programme in terms of reading, spelling, and self-esteem.
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Kimberly G. Noble (University of Pennsylvania), Martha J. Farah, Bruce D. McCandliss - The additive and interacting effects of socioeconomic status and phonological awareness on reading development .
Phonological awareness (PA) and socioeconomic status (SES) are two primary factors in the development of reading proficiency (explaining 45% and 15-25% of the variance in reading, respectively). We investigated how the additive and interacting effects of these factors vary with the reading measure. In 150 first-graders, SES accounted for unique variance beyond that accounted for by PA for word reading and passage comprehension, but not for pseudoword reading. Word reading also demonstrated an SES x PA interaction, such that SES differences had a greater impact at low PA levels. Implications for multiple contributors to reading achievement are discussed.
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Annelise Notenboom (PI Research - VU Amsterdam), Pieter Reitsma - Learning the spelling of past tense verbs in Dutch.
The present study focuses on the learning of written past tense verbs in Dutch. A latent class analysis was performed on the responses on a test administered to 458 children, ranging from 8 to 14 years old. The results suggest that first, children apply an alphabetic strategy. Then, children acknowledge the occurrence of a marker of the past tense, but incorrectly apply it to other verb forms. The incorrect application vanishes gradually, although it is rather persistent in participles used as adjectives. For the spelling attempts of these forms, a U-shaped learning curve is found.
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Terezinha Nunes (Oxford Brookes University, Headington, Oxford), Ursula Pretzlik, Freyja Birgisdottir - Morphology in the classroom.
Laboratory studies demonstrate that children can be taught successfully about the connection between morphology and spelling. Can these techniques also succeed in the classroom? We will report two classroom intervention studies, in which children are taught by teachers in their classrooms about morphological structure and how to represent derivational and inflectional suffixes in spelling. Their performance in pre-and post-tests of their sensitivity to morphemes both in spoken and in written language are compared to that of other children not taught in this way.
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Simone Nunes (City University of New York), Linnea Ehri - Short vowel knowledge and word learning in beginning readers.
This study explored the influence of beginner’s knowledge of short vowels in their word learning abilities. Twenty-four five and six year old children were tested in various tasks of vowel sound-letter and letter-sound associations, reading and spelling. Performance on the vowel tasks was used to separate children into high and low vowel knowledge groups. All children learned to read two sets of simplified spelling words to criterion: one set with vowels, and the other set without. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of automatization of letter-sound knowledge in word recognition theories.
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Shelley O’Carroll (University of London), Jane Hurry - Understanding the symbolic nature of written language: how children from a disadvantaged community in South Africa develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle.
This poster describes a study of the early literacy development of children from a disadvantaged community in South Africa. The children will participate in learning experiences that facilitate understanding of the alphabetic principle, and their learning paths will be documented using microgenetic methods. Comparisons will be made between their progress and that of a matched control group using a pre- post test longitudinal design. Questions to be investigated include: Does learning show a steady development or are there spurts associated with grasping new concepts such as the alphabetic principle? What role does letter knowledge and phonological awareness play in children coming to understand that print represents spoken language ?
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Jane Oakhill (University of Sussex), Kate Cain - Prediction of reading and comprehension skill in Year 9 from Year 3 measures.
We present the results of a follow up of the children in our longitudinal study, six years after the initial test point (i.e. from school years 3 to 9). The results showed that Year 3 comprehension was related to both the measured components of comprehension in Year 9 (finding facts and passage comprehension). The early measures of comprehension sub-skills: inference making, comprehension monitoring and story structure understanding were also related to comprehension skill 6 years later. Initial word reading accuracy was weakly related to later ability on the fact finding component of the comprehension test, but not to passage comprehension. In addition, early phonological awareness was strongly linked to a test of pseudoword decoding 6 years later. A more surprising finding was that early (and concurrent) vocabulary skills were also related to the pseudoword decoding task. Regression analyses are reported in which the relative predictive power of early comprehension skill is assessed once initial vocabulary and verbal IQ have been taken into account.
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Natalie Olinghouse (Vanderbilt University), Warren Lambert, Donald Compton - Designing a word recognition task within a response to intervention framework.
A word recognition task was designed to monitor student response to intervention. Forty-four students with reading disabilities, in grades 3-5, completed 60 lessons of the Phonological and Strategy Training (PHAST) reading program. A 50-item word recognition task was presented to students in six waves throughout the intervention. The assessment was constructed to mirror an optimal learning curve for the PHAST reading program. Results indicated that the task correctly predicted when words would become decodable by assessment wave, however item response analysis determined that the task was not ordered by item difficulty. Additionally, growth in the assessment was correlated with growth on some standardized measures.
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Richard Olson (University of Colorado), Brian Byrne, Stefan Samuelsson, Robin Corley, John DeFries, Sally Wadsworth, Erik Willcutt, Peter Quain - Longitudinal phenotypic and genetic analyses of pre-reading and early reading skills from preschool through second grade.
Previous analyses of data from four-year-old preschool identical and fraternal same-sex twin pairs have revealed significant genetic influences on individual differences in some pre-reading skills, and significant shared environment influences on others (Byrne et al., 2002; Samuelsson et al., this symposium). In this presentation, we will report results from our first longitudinal phenotypic and developmental genetic analyses of reading-related individual differences in preschool through the end of first grade, and for a limited number of twins through the end of second grade. We will also compare developmental phenotypic and genetic results for twin samples from Australia, Norway, and the United States.
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Sébastien Pacton (Institut de Psychologie, Boulogne Billancourt). - Children's use of syntactic information in spelling.
French 8-12 year-old children’s use of the silent verbal and adjectival plural inflexions is explored with a spelling task of pseudo-adjectives and pseudo-verbs which were more or less similar to real words. The pseudo-adjectives occur either in post-nominal position, where both adjectives and verbs can occur in French or in post-verbal position, where adjectives can occur but verbs cannot. We explore whether and when children take into account the syntactic information provided by the sentences and, to what extent, the use of syntactic information reduces the effect of the similarity to real words observed in previous studies (Nunes, et al., 1997; Pacton, 2003).
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Nicolás Gutiérrez Palma (University of Jaen). - Prosodic cues to visual word recognition by Spanish children.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of lexical stress and syllabic structure in children visual word recognition. There is a strong relationship between these two factors in Spanish (for example, CV-CV words usually have pre-final stress, while CV-CVC words have final stress), so they may predict each other. It was investigated whether novice readers use this information in order to read. With this purpose, two experiments were conducted. In the first one, a masked priming procedure was used, and syllabic structure and lexical stress matching were manipulated. It was found an inhibitory effect when the prime and the target words shared their stress. In the second one, it was used the same procedure but participants were older (7.5 years old on average). Then, results showed an interaction between lexical stress and syllabic structure, what was interpreted as evidence of their functional relationship.
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Charles A. Perfetti (University of Pittsburgh), Edward Wlotko, Lesley Hart - Reading processes and reading skill are exposed through ERP .
The Lexical Quality Hypothesis claims that the quality of lexical representations affects reading processes and is responsible for variations in comprehension skill. Event Related Potentials (ERPs) can expose some of the word processing abilities that depend on Lexical Quality. We report two phenomena: (1) Within the first 200ms of word reading, ERPs predict whether a reader will be correct in a subsequent meaning decision. (2) ERPs detect when a reader is aware of a word processing error. Both phenomena depend on the skill of the reader. We conclude that ERPs not only index word reading events but can expose a reader’s lexical knowledge and associated word processing abilities.
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Jocelyn Petrella (University of Michigan), Claire Cameron, Frederick Morrison - How children spend their time: The effect of non-academic activities on children's literacy skills.
This study examined the effect of non-academic activities on children's reading skills. Participants were 114 preschoolers (mean age = 4.5 years). Non-academic activities included organized physical activities (e.g., sports), as well as watching TV and playing computer/video games. The structural equation model provided a good fit to the data, and explained 38% and 15% of the variance in the home learning environment and literacy skills, respectively. Organized physical activity operated through the home learning environment to positively influence literacy outcomes, whereas media usage operated through the home literacy environment with a negative influence on early literacy.
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Myriam Peyrard-Janvid (Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge, Sweden), Juha Kere, Katariina Hannula-Jouppi, Heidi Anthoni, Nina Kaminen, Isabel Tapia, Jaana Nopola-Hemmi, Heikki Lyytinen. - Identification of genes associated with dyslexia.
As clear as it is that dyslexia is highly hereditary, as clearly its genetics is complex. At least six different loci (positions on chromosomes) have been implicated in different family sets by genetic linkage studies. Some putative genes, such as DYX3 on chromosome 2 and DYX5 on chromosome 3 show simple dominant patterns of inheritance, implying that dyslexia in some families is caused by mutations in a single gene. In contrast, most other loci show nonmendelian inheritance, probably implying reduced penetrance of the susceptibility alleles. We have set to identify susceptibility genes for dyslexia by applying modern molecular genetics methods. We identified the first candidate gene for dyslexia susceptibility, DYX1C1 on chromosome 15, by studying a chromosome translocation cosegregating with dyslexia in one family, and verifying the results by detecting alleles of the same gene that was disrupted by the translocation to associate with dyslexia in other, unrelated families. In further studies, we have determined that DYX3 or a locus close to it appears to be important in Finnish dyslexia families, as revealed by a genome scan, and we aim at identifying the gene by linkage disequilibrium mapping. The identification of several genes specifically associated with dyslexia may allow the detailed understanding of biochemical processes involved in a human-specific brain functionality.
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Tatiana Cury Pollo (Washington University in St. Louis), Brett Kessler, Rebecca Treiman - Influence of writing systems on young children's spelling in English and Portuguese.
This study investigated differences in early spellings of Portuguese and English speakers. We performed a frequency analysis of letter names and types in the words of each language. These analyses revealed that Portuguese has more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than English. We examined the effects of these differences by asking preschoolers to spell words varying by number of vowel letter names. Children used more vowels when spelling words with more vowel letter names, and they spelled these words more reasonably than those that contained one letter name. Overall, Portuguese speakers used more vowels than English speakers.
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Yolanda V. Post (Post Testing and Education). - Mathematical and script literacy and their relation to speech.
In contrast to print literacy, where the relation with speech becomes more efficient over time but is never released, skilled mathematical literacy does not require mandatory presence of speech. Arabic numerals made the manipulation of numbers so much less cumbersome that the regulating presence of speech could be abandoned. Because math literacy initially draws on some of the same skills as print literacy, teachers might emphasize their similarities, while gradually making the properties in which they diverge, an integral part of their curriculum.
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Cynthia Puranik (University of Florida), Linda Lombardino - Written language differences between two groups: Developmental dyslexia and language learning disability.
Recent research on Developmental Dyslexia (DD) and Language Learning Disability (LD) is finding evidence that these two language disorders appear to result from different constellations of neurobiological weaknesses (Joanisse, Manis, Keating, and Seidenberg (2000) and Snowling, Bishop, and Stothard (2000) presenting with different profiles of reading or language impairment. While DD is considered to be the result of deficits in phonological processing with essentially intact listening comprehension skills, LD is considered to be the result of more persistent deficits in morphology and syntax.
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Pekka Räsänen (University of Jyväskylä). - A follow-up study on children with and without a genetic dyslexia risk: Number skills at the beginning of the school.
The sample of the study was the children from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. The cognitive development of about one hundred children born to families with at least one dyslexic parent and a family background of reading difficulties and a matched control group of similar size have been followed from birth. At the beginning of the school four measures of number skills were collected: verbal counting, comparison of auditorily presented numbers, matching spoken numbers to arabic numbers, and dot counting. The children’s performance in number skills contrasted to the risk vs non-risk classification and to the measures of the cognitive development.
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Dorit Ravid (Tel Aviv University), Rachel Schiff - Morphological analogies: The development of root and pattern awareness in Hebrew-speaking gradeschoolers.
Two central morphological entities in the Semitic lexicon are the interdigitated root and pattern. The current study examined the ability of Hebrew-speaking gradeschoolers to perform two analogy tasks on written real and nonce (invented) nouns, requiring noun analysis into root and pattern components. Results indicate an early and robust perception of the Semitic root, while nominal patterns take longer to establish. The study provides developmental support for the claim by Frost et al. (2000) that orthographic, phonological and semantic factors drive morphological perception in the Hebrew lexicon. But it also provides some evidence for the representation of nominal patterns in young Hebrew readers.
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Erik D. Reichle (University of Pittsburgh), Natasha Tokowicz, Charles A. Perfetti, - Using ERP to examine eye-movement control during reading.
In serial-attention shift models of eye-movement control (Reichle et al., 2003), the identification of one word signals the oculomotor system to program a saccade to the next. This assumption was tested in an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment in which participants executed saccades from one letter string to another and made lexical decisions about both stimuli. Saccade onsets, directions, and magnitudes were identified using electro-oculogram deflections, and ERP components were identified that: (1) varied as a function of word frequency; and (2) predicted saccade onsets. These results support the hypothesis that eye-movement control is linked to word identification during reading.
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Cara Richards (University of California, Santa Barbara), Michael Gerber, Emily Solari - Assessing the spelling ability of English learners: An analysis of two spelling measures and their relationship to phonological awareness measures.
This paper describes the spelling abilities of young English Learners (ELs). As part of a larger longitudinal study examining the development phonological awareness in English Learners (Gerber, et al., 2000), the development of spelling was investigated for students in both first and second grade. Two spelling measures were used to assess spelling ability: a visual recognition measure and a written production measure. The paper discusses the psychometric properties of the measures for a population of English Learners, as well as the longitudinal relationships of the spelling measures with measures of phonological awareness. Results indicate that the measures and scoring methods were useful for assessing spelling in this population of ELs. Results also indicate that both Spanish and English phonological awareness measures account for individual differences in the spelling ability of ELs.
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Ulla Richardson (University of Jyväskylä). - Early language development and dyslexia.
In search of early signs of dyslexia, we in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia have studied speech perception in dyslexia. We present evidence that the categorical perception of children from dyslexic families at the age of 6-months and 6,5 years differs significantly from that ofchildren with normal reading parents; the former group needed a significantly longer duration to categorise speech sounds as long. The same difference appeared in their dyslexic parents. We show that differences in categorising speech sounds according to duration are a factor associated with familial risk for dyslexia already at infancy, which persists until adulthood.
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Theresa A. Roberts (California State University). - Articulation accuracy and vocabulary size contributions to phonemic awareness and word reading in Kindergarten English learners.
A theoretical perspective linking theory and research focusing on the organization of the phonetic-phonologic system with theory and research highlighting the organization of the lexicon is presented. Based on this theoretical synthesis, English articulation and vocabulary were expected to influence kindergarten English learner children’s English phonemic awareness and word reading. Articulation influenced both phonemic awareness and word reading equal to or more than did letter sounds. Phonemic awareness predicted word reading as well. Articulation had a direct influence on two of three phonemic awareness measures and on reading of decodable words but not sight words. The influence of vocabulary on phonemic awareness was mediated by articulation. The results are discussed in relationship to the organization and development of both the phonetic/phonological and lexical representation systems.
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Jennifer Roberts (Temple University), Scott, K., Lambrecht-Smith, S., Macaruso, P., Hodgson, J., & Locke, J - Preliteracy skills of dyslexic children.
This study examined the preliteracy skills of children at genetic risk for dyslexia and their age- and gender-matched controls in the years prior to kindergarten and first grade. Subjects were followed prospectively until dyslexic status could be obtained. Preliteracy tasks included rhyme generation, phoneme manipulation, letter sound naming and letter recognition. Dyslexic children were more likely to score poorly on both metalinguistic tasks and tasks of alphabetic knowledge than children who were not dyslexic. Differences between groups were more pronounced in tasks administered prior to kindergarten than they were prior to first grade.
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Joao Rosa (Escola Superior, Lisbon). - Morphological awareness and spelling discrimination: the case of homophone suffixes in Portuguese.
We conducted a longitudinal study of the relation between morphological awareness and the development of discrimination in the spelling of two homophone suffixes, in Portuguese. The participants, 6- to 9-year-olds (N=184), were assessed three times, with measures of morphological awareness and spelling discrimination. Grade and IQ were used as control factors. Hierarchical multiple regressions showed that measures of morphological awareness taken in earlier sessions strongly predicted children’s progress in spelling discrimination 6 or 12 months later, after controlling for the effects of grade and IQ. It is concluded that morphological awareness is likely to play a unique role in explaining improvement in spelling discrimination.
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Laura S. Roth (University of Denver), Janice M. Keenan - A test for assessing comprehension monitoring in children.
We present a method for assessing comprehension monitoring that seems more appropriate for use with children having either reading disability or ADHD than existing methods. Our test uses a gardenpath paradigm. It assesses comprehension skill by determining whether the child pronounces the primed pronunciation of a target homograph. It assesses monitoring skill by determining if the child notices that the initial primed pronunciation is incorrect. The dependent measures are pronunciations, pauses, and corrections, and thus are suitable for young readers and those with reading problems.
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Aruna Rudra (University of Essex), Jackie Masterson, Yvonne Griffiths - Cognitive factors predicting lexical abilities in 9- to 11-year-old poor readers.
Research has suggested that the cause of the difficulty in developing the lexical procedure in poor readers is due to one of the following causes: a mild phonological problem accompanied by limited exposure to print, a semantic deficit, or a visual memory problem. This study examines these factors in fifty 9- to 11-year-old poor readers, classified into surface, phonological and mixed types using two subgrouping methods, one involving CA controls and the other RA controls. The results showed that though the three subgroups did not differ from each other in either the print exposure or semantic measures, the surface type poor readers performed significantly worse than the others in a visual sequential memory task, in both types of classification methods.
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Elinor Saiegh-Haddad (Bar-Ilan University) - Reading efficiency in Arabic: Diglossic and orthographic factors.
Forty-two first-grade Arabic native children were given five measures of basic reading processes: two cognitive (rapid automatized naming and short-term memory) and three cognitive-linguistic (phoneme discrimination, phoneme isolation, and letter recoding efficiency). The relevance of these skills to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) pseudo word reading fluency in a phonemically diglossic condition- when stimuli encoded both spoken Arabic vernacular (SAV) phonemes and MSA phonemes- was tested. Results showed that all predictor measures, except phoneme discrimination, correlated with pseudo word reading fluency (words correct per minute). Though diglossic features did not contribute to reading fluency directly, they were found to impact performance on three key underlying processes: phoneme discrimination, phoneme isolation, and letter recoding efficiency. Stepwise regression analysis showed that pseudo word reading fluency was best explained by letter recoding efficiency and memory. Results are discussed in light of Arabic diglossia and the shallow orthography of vowelized Arabic.
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Jean Saint-Aubin (University of Guelph), Mary Ann Evans - Preschool children's eye movements during shared book reading.
It has been claimed that shared reading with preschoolers fosters knowledge of print. This study was conducted to determine the extent to which children attend to print during shared reading. Parents were asked to read typical trade books to 5 children ages 4 years 1 months to 5 years 0 months from a computer screen. Children's eye movements were recorded via the EyeLink Data system (SR Research). Five books were used, varying in complexity of illustrations and spatial layout of text and illustration. Average amount of looking time per page differed between books, likely as a function of the complexity of the illustration and accompanying text. However regardless of the visual display, the amount of time per book that children looked at the text and the number of fixations on the text, as a proportion of total looking time and total fixations respectively, was uniformly low. These ranged from just 1% to 4.7 % across pages across children. Findings will be discussed within the context of the role of shared reading and parent reading styles.
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Javier S. Sainz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Carmen Villalba - Brain mapping of attention resources allocation in high-neighboorhood-density word reading.
Ordinary adult readers were first presented with a target-distracter two-word display, and then required to chose a postcued visual target among a set of four distracters while evoked-related brain responses were recorded, all stimulus displays varying according the way letters are arranged. Results show that spatial attention is involved in word recognition when its use is required; when subjects are required to process whole words, spatial attention does not become activated (a P170-P200 arises identifying categorizing operations). In contrast, in within-word move conditions, word recognition is affected by the distribution of spatial attention, P3a, b, components arise indicating conflict resolution.
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Stefan Samuelsson (Stavanger University College), Brian Byrne, Richard K. Olson - Genetic and environmental influences on reading related cognitive skills in preschool children: A comparison between three twin samples.
Whereas the past decades have seen an explosion of knowledge concerning the relation between cognitive skills in preschool children and later reading development, far less systematic research is available concerning phenotypic relations between these cognitive abilities. Even more rare are studies assessing genetic and environmental influences on preschool cognitive factors associated with early reading acquisition. The purposes of the current study, therefore, were to (a) explore phenotypic correlations between cognitive skills known to predict later reading acquisition, (b) to compare phenotypic correlations across three samples of preschool twins recruited from the U.S, Australia, and Scandinavia, and to (c) assess genetic and shared environmental influences on preschool cognitive abilities.
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Rebecca Sandak (Haskins Laboratories), W. Einar Mencl, Stephen J. Frost, Dina Moore, Stephanie A. Mason, Jay G. Reuckl, Leonard Katz, Kenneth R. Pugh - How learning conditions affect the way that the brain reads words.
In an earlier study we found that when participants acquired familiarity for novel words by attending to their phonological features, the subsequent (more efficient) naming of those items was associated with reduced activation in LH dorsal, anterior, and occipitotemporal regions; attention to semantic features during training increased activation in anterior ventral areas. We hypothesized that learning conditions requiring attention to both phonological and semantic attributes would optimize learning. A behavioral study confirmed this hypothesis. An fMRI experiment explicates the effects of this mixed-training on the cortical regions recruited for naming trained items. Implications for reading theory, instruction, and dyslexia are discussed.
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Alfred Schabmann (University of Vienna), Christian Klicpera, Barbara Gasteiger-Klicpera - Reading and spelling of words and nonwords of German speaking students some effects of different approaches to reading instruction.
The present study investigates the effects of whole-word (WW) and code-based (CB) methods of reading instruction on the achievement of word and nonword reading and spelling and phonological awareness of German speaking students. In a longitudinal study, N=515 students (WW = 126; CB = 389) were tested in kindergarten, grade 1,2 and 4. Results show that WW have deficits in reading and spelling nonwords compared to CB in grade 1. The gap between poor readers/spellers is larger for WW. Given low correlations in general, only marginal differences in predictability of reading and spelling by pre-school phonological awareness were found.
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Gerheid Scheerer-Neumann (Universität Potsdam), Carola D. Hofmann - Using reading strategies and gender specific materials to promote reading comprehension in German-speaking male 6th graders.
A programme was specially developed for male poor readers. Reading comprehension strategies were trained using texts with gender specific topics like sports, animals and geography. 17 poor readers from grade 6th were trained for 6 weeks (12 sessions). Reading strategies were taught and practised by trainer modeling and verbal self-instruction. The immediate post-test in reading comprehension showed a considerable and statistically significant improvement of the trained boys compared to a random sample; the superiority to an untrained control group of poor readers did not reach significance. Part of the improvement in the experimental group was lost in a second post-test two months after the training ended.
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Marie-Anne Schelstraete (Université catholique de Louvain), Pascal Zesiger - How specific is grammatical spelling in French?
The present study aims at testing whether French speaking, fifth-graders' performances in grammatical spelling can be predicted on the basis of different factors: Lexical spelling, morphological awareness, sensitivity to statistical regularities in the written code (implicit regularities), phonological short-term memory and non verbal intelligence. Several tasks tapping these factors were administered to 114 children (mean age = 11;1 years) together with a sentence dictation task. Results show that over 50% of the variance of grammatical spelling is explained by lexical spelling, morphological awareness (in particular inflexional morphology) and implicit regularities. These results suggest that, for French, grammatical spelling relies on separate but complementary mechanisms.
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Barbara T. Schmidt (Molloy College, New York), Loraine K. Obler, Martin Chodorow - Individual dissociations in reading subskills.
Skilled reading comprehension is dependent on numerous subskills, including phonological awareness, visual processing, rapid word retrieval, a broad knowledge of semantics and syntax, and adequate memory. The literature suggests that reading comprehension and fluency are linked and that rapid word retrieval and a strong cognitive base contribute to reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to identify individuals displaying dissociations among subskills. While overall reading comprehension correlated with reading fluency, cognitive factors, and word retrieval, 6 of the 41 participants displayed interesting dissociations between subskills. While only 2 individuals provide evidence of a dissociation between reading comprehension and reading fluency, individual differences in working memory, decoding and/or visual processing speed suggest various factors contribute to successful reading.
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Eliane Segers (University of Nijmegen), Ludo Verhoeven - The cognitive theory of multimedia learning in normal and poor reading children.
In two studies (study 1: 54 children with or without reading problems; study 2: 128 children) read one text on a computer screen and listened to another in a randomized design. In study 2, the two texts were also presented without figures. The texts were accompanied by explaining figures, but the texts in study 1 more closely followed Mayer's designs (see Mayer 2001) in which a technical process is explained. The relevance of the figures was judged by a group of teachers. The studies aimed to replicate and further study Mayer?s (2001) modality, multimedia and coherence learning effects with children from special groups.
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Willy Serniclaes (CNRS de Villejuif), Caroline Bogliotti, Souhila Messaoud-Galusi, Liliane Sprenger-Charolles - Allophonic perception in developmental dyslexia: origin, reliability and implications of the categorical perception deficit. .
Various studies show that dyslexic children have a deficit in the Categorical Perception (CP) of speech sounds. Recent data enable us to specify the origin, reliability and implications of this deficit for reading acquisition. The CP deficit is due to a higher sensitivity to allophonic distinctions, which arises from a delay in the adaptation of phonetic predispositions to the linguistic environment. Allophonic perception affects reading acquisition by hampering the development of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Being allophonic and transient in nature, the deficit is only evidenced with appropriate stimulus contrasts and chronological age controls. And is then quite reliable.
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Joyce Serres (University of Luxemburg), Line Laplante - How two dysorthografic French-speaking fifth graders without any apparent reading disorders read and spell: functionality of the alphabetic and orthographic strategies.
Word and non-word reading efficiency of two third grade dysorthographic children without apparent reading comprehension difficulties was analysed in comparison to the performance of normal readers and spellers of the same chronological age. The results of the reading and writing tasks showed that the dysorthographic children's performance differed clearly in spelling but moreover distinguished significantly in reading accuracy and speed from the performance of the normal spellers and readers. The outcome of these two cases of developmental dysorthographia supports the conclusion that the establishment of specific lexical spelling knowledge is affected by lack of efficient word identification strategies.
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Michal Shany (University of Haifa), Esther Geva - Mapping the development of cognitive, linguistic and early literacy abilities among senior-Kindergarten children of Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel.
The present research explored the cognitive, linguistic and early literacy abilities that hinder or enhance the development of literacy in senior-kindergarten children of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Thirty Ethiopian children and thirty non-Ethiopian children were administered a battery of tests, including verbal and nonverbal intelligence, general knowledge, volume of print exposure, linguistic and cognitive tasks and measures of early literacy. Demographic and contextual information was also collected. The analysis will focus on the similarities and differences between the Ethiopian-Israeli children and the children whose parents speak Hebrew as their L1, and on indices of at-risk status that are common or unique to each language group.
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David Share (University of Haifa). - Sources of individual differences in orthographic learning in shallow versus deep scripts.
This study sought to elucidate the sources of individual differences in orthographic learning in shallow compared to deep scripts (i.e., pointed (i.e., fully voweled) versus unpointed (only partly voweled) Hebrew). Eighty Grade 3 children read both pointed and pointed text containing embedded orthographic (pseudoword) targets, and were also administered a battery of cognitive measures. Although success rates for target decoding and for post-test orthographic learning were almost identical in the two scripts, the individual difference data revealed fundamental differences in the manner with which children processed the shallow as opposed to deeper script.
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Shelley Shaul (Haifa University), Zvia Breznitz - The asynchrony of brain activation in the left and right hemispheres during a lexical decision task: A comparison between dyslexic and normal readers.
"The Asynchrony Phenomenon", the processing time gap between the modalities activated during reading, was found to be an underlying factor of dyslexia (Breznitz et al., 2001; 2003). The present study focused on whether this phenomenon results from asynchrony in the speed at which information is transferred between the left and right hemispheres. Brain activity of 20 adult dyslexics and 20 age matched regular readers was measured during performance of lexical decision tasks. ERP and Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA) techniques were used to detect online the speed at which information is transferred within and between the two hemispheres, the level of activity in each hemisphere, and the source localization of hemispherical activity. Results indicated differential within and between hemispherical processing measures during word and pseudoword reading among dyslexic as compared to regular readers.
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Kieron Sheehy (Open University). - Teaching word recognition to children with severe learning difficulties: The potential of morphing.
The strategy of using logographic symbols to teach children with severe learning difficulties has become a recommended educational practice. However, this practice conflicts with a range of empirical studies that consistently reveal this to be a poor strategy, in comparison with the simple presentation of words alone. This paper describes an investigation of a new method, based on morphing technology, that appears to be more effective than a word alone approach.The data presented challenges assumptions that the use of symbols in this context is inherently detrimental to learning. Potential reasons for this effect are outlined.
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Linda S. Siegel (University of British Columbia), Orly Lipka - A longitudinal study of reading skills in children learning English as a second language.
The reading and spelling skills of children who were being educated in a second language were studied longitudinally from kindergarten until grade 5. Word recognition, phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading comprehension, spelling, working memory and syntactic skills were assessed toward the end of each school year. In spite of initial differences between the ESL and the English first language group, these differences disappeared by grade 1, even for reading comprehension. There were similar percentages of children who had significant reading difficulties in each group. On some tasks, particularly those involving phonological awareness, the ESL group had higher scores than the English L1 group. These results indicate that bilingualism does not inevitably result in problems with the acquisition of reading skills and that it may even be an advantage.
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Wong Wai Lap Simpson (University of Hong Kong), Connie Ho Suk Han - The persisting cognitive deficits of reading-compensated Chinese dyslexic adults: An exploratory study.
An exploratory study was conducted to examine the cognitive deficits that persisted in Chinese dyslexic adults. 8 Chinese dyslexic adults and 8 normal readers matched in age, educational level and occupation were tested. Firstly, a behavior checklist was used as the first-stage screening. Secondly, the participants were asked to complete several experimental tasks and a non-verbal IQ test. A semi-structured interview was also conducted to explore the dyslexic adults’ learning histories. The results showed that the dyslexic adults did not perform less well in reading or orthographic knowledge than the control group. However, they performed poorly in rapid naming, phonological memory retrieval and motor tasks. These findings seem to support the dyslexic automatization hypothesis.
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Veronica Smith (University of British Columbia), Linda Siegel - Preventing early reading failure: An examination of implementation.
This study examined the effectiveness of an early reading prevention program implemented in kindergarten as part of a school district wide literacy initiative. Factors that influenced the quality of implementation in 13 classroom settings and differences in implementation on a number of dimensions were summarized following multiple classroom observations. Using multilevel modelling techniques to account for the nested structure of the data, results indicated that those teachers who taught more of the phonological awareness and sound symbol mastery components of the instructional program demonstrated decreased percentages of children at risk for reading failure on many of the outcome measures. Additionally, other factors at the classroom level, school level, and community level contributed to the successful implementation of the literacy program.
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Patrick Snellings (University of Amsterdam), Aryan van der Leij, Henk Blok, Peter de Jong - Speech perception in poor readers: how does the perception of initial (stop)consonants and consonant clusters in Dutch differ from normal readers?
Fast and accurate perception of speech is a core problem in developmental dyslexia (e.g. Goswami et al., 2002; Joanisse & Manis, 2000). However, there has been debate whether problems are due to the fast transitions of the speech signal (e.g. Tallal & Newcombe, 1978) or the similarity between sounds (e.g. Studdert-Kennedy, 2002). Furthermore, in Dutch there is not just a problem with the perception of stop consonants but also in perceiving consonant clusters (e.g. Struiksma, 2003; Van der Leij & Van Daal, 1999). In contrast to many previous studies, the current study was designed to test whether problems arise in the case of natural speech. In addition, we moved beyond a selection of (stop)consonants and tested all initial consonants and consonant clusters in Dutch. This enables us to determine which natural speech contrasts are problematic for poor readers and whether these problems are due to fast transitions or to the similarity between sounds.
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Margaret J. Snowling (University of York), Liz Nathan, Joy Stackhouse,Nata Goulandris - Development of literacy skills among children with speech difficulties.
This paper presents a longitudinal study of the early literacy development of 47 children with speech difficulties from 4 to 7 years. Of these children, 19 with specific speech difficulties were compared with 19 who had speech and language difficulties and 19 normally developing controls. The risk of literacy difficulties was greater in the group with speech and language difficulties and these children displayed deficits in phoneme awareness at 6 years. In contrast, the literacy development of children with isolated speech problems was not significantly different from that of controls. A path analysis relating early speech, language and literacy skills indicated that pre-school language ability was a unique predictor of phoneme awareness at 5;08 years which, together with early reading skill, predicted literacy outcome at 6;09. Once the effects of phoneme awareness were controlled, neither speech perception nor speech production processes predicted variation in literacy skills.
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Liliane Sprenger-Charolles (Université René Descartes), Linda S. Siegel - Prevalence and stability of phonological, surface and mixed subtypes in developmental dyslexia: A longitudinal study.
The study investigated the prevalence and stability of subtypes in developmental dyslexia. Sixteen dyslexics and 21 average readers had been seen at the age of 10 and 17 years. They were administered regular word, irregular word and pseudoword reading tasks; accuracy and latencies were recorded. In addition, some skills related to reading acquisition were assessed (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, rapid naming) as well as control tasks that did not rely on language processing (visual memory, visual motor skills, visual attention). The results indicated that most of the dyslexics had a consistent and severe phonological deficit, but almost always associated with an orthographic deficit. These results are more consistent with the hypothesis that a phonological deficit is at the core of dyslexia than with the idea that a clear dissociation exists between phonological and surface subtypes
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Rhona Stainthorp (University of London), Jackie Masterson - Word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition effects on word reading.
The paper by Coltheart, Laxon and Keating (1988) investigating imageability, and age of acquisition effects whilst controlling for word frequency raised important issues about the variables that researchers need to consider when developing stimulus sets when investigating children's word reading skills. An examination of the stimulus sets used by Coltheart et al. indicates that the words were not well matched for frequency. This paper presents the results of a partial replication of the Coltheart et al. work using both their original stimulus set and a stimulus set drawn from the CPWD with controls for age of acquisition.
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Dorothy Steffler (Concordia University College of Alberta), Linda M. Phillips, Nabiha Rawdah - Predictors of spelling and writing skills for average and at-risk children in Grades 1 and 2.
Considerable research has highlighted the correlation between reading and spelling. Less attention has been given to the skills involved in learning to write, including the use of capital letters, punctuation, and sentence structure. We were interested in investigating whether the same factors were important predictors for spelling and writing for young children. Two hundred and thirty-nine children where assessed at the beginning and end of Grades 1 and 2, using a variety of measures that are important sub-skills in reading and spelling. Word meaning and comprehension skills were significant predictors of spelling and writing for average achievers. However, for at-risk children phoneme-grapheme correspondence skills and listening comprehension skills were also significant predictors of spelling and writing
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John Stein (Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford). - The role of the visual magnocellular system in reading and dyslexia.
Impaired development of the visual magnocellular system has been demonstrated in dyslexics using neuropathological, evoked potential, functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysical techniques. The sensitivity of the M-system has been shown to correlate with orthographic abilities, suggesting that it plays an important part in reading development. Interventions designed to improve M-system function, such as exercises or appropriately coloured filters, can lead to improvements in reading. Despite all this evidence, however, there is still great controversy about whether M-cell deficit really plays a significant part in dyslexia. I will attempt to give a balanced overview of the arguments and counterarguments.
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Ron Stringer (McGill University), Gail McCoubrey - Item-level analysis for the RAN.
Analysis of performance on the rapid automatised naming task has historically been constrained by the continuous nature of the verbal response. We have begun to analyse the responses of subjects during the RAN by using gaze fixation duration as a measure of processing time, allowing us a precise measure of item level processing. We present data on the equivalency of this method when compared to measures of overall time for task completion and digitized voice-stream analysis. As well, the combination of fixation duration and voice-stream analysis can give us access to new data.
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Morag Stuart (University of London). - Introduction on the symposium: Stimulus matters.
The symposium addresses methodological issues that arise when studying the development of reading: specifically the lack of up-to-date data stimulus sets that relate to children's vocabulary development and experience with print.
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Geoff W. Stuart (University of Melbourne), Anne Castles, Ken McAnally, Adam McKay, Michael Johnston - A test of the general temporal processing deficit theory of dyslexia in an adult sample.
In a sample of 14 adults with persistent reading difficulty and 18 controls, visual contrast thresholds were measured for an 8Hz flickering Gaussian blob as well as a slowly modulated 8c/deg Gaussian windowed grating. Auditory thresholds were measured for 1 sec bursts of white noise, amplitude modulated at 100Hz or 1Hz. The adult reading difficulty group exhibited normal thresholds to rapidly changing stimuli in both modalities, but a subgroup exhibited insensitivity to the 1Hz amplitude modulated auditory stimulus. A magnocellular deficit cannot explain this impaired sensitivity, which may be the result of a reduced auditory short-term memory span.
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Ana Sucena (Universidade do Porto), Nathalie Génard, São Luís Castro, Jacqueline Leybaert, Jésus Alegria, Phillippe Mousty - Effects of orthographic complexity in European Portuguese and French: A cross-sectional study between grade 1 and grade 4.
A cross-sectional study was conducted from 1rst to 4th grades with European Portuguese and French speakers in order to study the implications of the spell-to-read consistency on learning to read in these two orthographies. Children were tested on word and pseudo-word naming tasks, with four different types of orthographic complexity. Results indicate an advantage of French over Portuguese for words. For both languages, the major progression occurs from1rst to 2nd grade; the effect of orthographic complexity lasts longer for pseudo-words than for words, indicating a rapid development of the orthographic lexicon, and a more gradual development of the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences.
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Nicole Suchey (University of Utah), Michelle Hosp, Janice Dole, John Hosp - The relation between oral reading fluency and student motivation.
The purpose of this study is to examine the relation between oral reading fluency and readers’ attitudes toward reading. There is mixed evidence regarding a connection between early reading skill and motivation toward reading. This study will provide an analysis of data on attitude toward reading and its relation to oral reading fluency. The participants were students in grades 1 through 3 from urban and rural school districts. A measure of oral reading fluency and an attitude toward reading survey were administered to all participants. The data from these measures will be compared across grade, setting, gender, free/reduced lunch, and reading ability. Results will be discussed in terms of the relation between student motivation and oral reading fluency across these factors.
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Marcin Szczerbinski (University of Sheffield), Agnieszka Reid, Ewa Iskierka-Kasperek, Peter Hansen - A multiple case study of Polish developmental dyslexics: Implications for a theory of developmental dyslexia.
Following our case study on an adult developmental dyslexic - DOZ, we report a multiple case study of Polish dyslexic university students. A range of tests tapping into phonological, magnocellular and cerebellar processing was used to determine the profile of dyslexics and controls (matched on age, gender, handedness and education). The data are discussed in the light of the major current hypotheses of developmental dyslexia: phonological, magnocellular and cerebellar. Cross-linguistic issues of developmental dyslexia are presented in the context of Polish - a language with consistent grapheme-to-phoneme but not phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences. The implications for a theory of developmental dyslexia are discussed.
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Joel B. Talcott (Aston University, Birmingham). - Dynamic visual processing and reading: What is the nature of the relationship? .
Dynamic visual processing, such as that required for detecting visual motion stimuli, has been directly linked with reading component skills such as orthographic processing both in normal and in disabled readers. In this paper we examine the case for the association between a deficit in sensitivity to coherent visual motion and developmental dyslexia using meta-analytic techniques. We examine inter-study variability in detail, focusing primarily on the instrumentation used to measure visual motion processing and the characteristics of the participants with reading disabilities. We will discuss areas of consensus and disagreement in the context of these two factors.
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Verena Thaler (Universität Salzburg), Karin Landerl, Pieter Reitsma - Spelling pronunciations as a means of remediating spelling deficits.
We evaluated the efficiency of so-called spelling pronunciations in building up orthographic representations. Spelling pronunciations are hypercorrect pronunciations of words in which every letter of the word’s spelling is pronounced (e. g., /di-eb/ instead of /di:b/ for ‘’Dieb’’). The experimental as well as a trained control group showed a significant decrease of spelling errors over training, but there was no difference between groups. It is possible that in the rather transparent German orthography spelling pronunciations are too similar to the standard pronunciations to allow any profit. Thus, training of spelling pronunciations will be applied to foreign words with irregular GPCs.
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Jennifer Thomson (University College London), Torsten Baldeweg, Usha Goswami - Amplitude envelope onsets and dyslexia: a behavioural and electrophysiological study.
We report a longitudinal study of 24 dyslexic children assessing basic auditory processing skills, phonological awareness and other reading-related skills. Our prior work with this sample showed a significant deficit in amplitude envelope onset detection, which was highly predictive of literacy skills (Goswami et al., 2002). Here we provide further behavioural evidence for the persistence of this perceptual deficit. Amplitude envelope onset detection skills, reading and phonological skills all developed in the sample, but the dyslexics increasingly lagged behind even their RL controls. We also report initial findings from an event-related potential (ERP) study suggesting immature perceptual processing of envelope cues in dyslexia.
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Keith Topping (University of Dundee), S. J. Samuels, T. D. Paul, S. Tardrew - Computerised formative feedback in independent literature based reading.
Does immersion in literature alone enhance literacy skills? This study investigates the added value of computerised formative feedback in independent literature based reading, and the necessary conditions for effectiveness, using data on 51,000 students in grades 1-12 who read over three million books. Time spent reading and quality of engagement with reading (as measured by computer assessment and feedback) were weakly associated with student ability but strongly associated with teacher/class assignment. However, both high engaged time and high quality of engagement were necessary for high pre-post reading gains, especially for older and more able students.
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Minna Torppa (University of Jyväskylä), Anna-Maija Poikkeus, Marja-Leena Laakso, Esko Leskinen, Paavo H.T. Leppänen, Asko Tolvanen, Anne Puolakanaho, Heikki Lyytinen - Home literacy environment, child's interest in reading, and development of phonological awareness - a longitudinal study of children with and without familial risk of dyslexia.
The associations of home literacy environment, interest in reading, and phonological awareness were examined in this longitudinal study. Of the children, 97 had a familial risk of dyslexia, and 90 did not have the risk (control group). The at-risk group children manifested lower phonological awareness (at 4.5-6.5 years of age) than the control children, and their parents were less active readers. Group differences did not emerge in shared reading, access to print or interest in reading. Higher interest in reading and more frequent shared reading was associated with faster development in phonological awareness in the at-risk group.
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Guy Trainin (University of Nebraska Lincoln), Kathleen, M. Wilson, Robert, C. Calfee, Kimberly, A. Norman - The role of metacognition in reading and spelling acquisition.
This paper describes results from a six-week summer school for underachieving kindergarten students using the WordWork decoding-spelling program. The goal was to examine the connection between metacognition and literacy acquisition in an authentic learning environment. WordWork is an approach based on the metaphonics principle: learning to decode and spell by understanding articulation and orthography. Results suggest that young readers who are at risk for reading failure can be metacognitive about basic reading processes. The benefits extend beyond metacognition into decoding and spelling measures. Teacher Fidelity was an important indicator of decoding and spelling acquisition as was growth in metacognition.
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Catherine Transler (Rotterdam), Ruth Campbell, M. MacSweeney - Fingerspelling: a phonological-coding hypothesis at stake.
Thirty-six deaf children using British Sign Language in their everyday communication had to fingerspell frequent words. Their productions were videotaped and their lip-movements analysed. Sixty-seven percent of participants spontaneously produced lip-movements during their fingerspelling production, most of them corresponding to a whole word articulation rather than letter names. This result suggests that fingerspelling and speech are processed functionally by a same linguistic process. Significant regularity effects were observed on accuracy scores in fingerspelling. Positive correlations between fingerspelling accuracy and reading comprehension level were observed. Those results suggest that phonological coding processes could be activated during fingerspelling production.
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Rebecca Treiman (Washington University in St. Louis), Brett Kessler - The case of case: Children's knowledge and use of upper- and lower-case letters.
Research on children's spelling has focused on its phonological bases. In two studies, we examined a type of nonphonological knowledge that young children may possess -- knowledge about the distinction between upper- and lower-case letters. Kindergartners were more likely to capitalize word-initial letters than later letters in their spellings. When children inserted an upper-case letter in a non-initial position, it tended to be a letter whose upper-case form was especially familiar to the child, the child's initial. Study 2, which examined kindergartners' knowledge of the names of upper- and lower-case letters, found further evidence that children's names influence their knowledge about letters and that some of this knowledge is case-specific.
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Joanna K. Uhry (Fordham University). - Is teachers’ phonemic knowledge enhanced by practical experience?
Phonemic awareness (PA) supports beginning word reading, but research indicates that many teachers are weak in this area themselves. Studies indicate that professional development in combination with practical experience can increase teachers’ knowledge of PA (e.g., Spear-Swerling & Brucker, 2003; Uhry, 2003). The present yearlong study examines the development of PA and other linguistic knowledge in three groups of preservice teachers: (a) with direct instruction in PA and supervised tutoring; (b) with instruction alone; and (c) without this instruction. Pre- and post-test measures of linguistic knowledge (Moats, 1994; Scarborough et al., 1998) are used for group comparisons as well as for analysis of the word structure units (individual phonemes vs. larger "chunks" of sound) used by teachers at different levels of proficiency.
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Liesbeth van Beijsterveldt (University of Nijmegen), Janet van Hell - Temporal organization in written narratives of typically and atypically developing children.
An important organizational principle in narratives is the temporal sequence of the events in the story. We present a study on the spelling and discourse functions of temporal markers in narratives written by typically and atypically developing children, i.e., deaf children, dyslexic children, bilingual children, and children with SLI. In the analysis of the narratives, we examined the use and spelling of verbal tense, defined as the grammatical expression of location in time. We studied the use of tense in more detail by systematically analyzing the switching between tense and the discourse functions associated with tense shifting. Implications are discussed from cognitive linguistic point of view.
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Kees P. van den Bos (University of Groningen). - The development of the naming-reading link.
The main goals of this research are (1) replication of previous developmental studies, (2) to determine reading and naming speed norms (Wechsler scale standard scores) for children of 6 through 16 years of age, (3) to test hypotheses about the nature of the link, (4) to investigate and interpret ability level, gender, and IQ (level of education) effects on the link. Four serial-naming tasks (colors, numbers, pictures, and letters) of the Denckla & Rudel (1974) type, and two word-reading tasks were recently administered to large cross-sectional samples of Dutch random readers (total N = 2851). Results support a domain-specific theory about the naming-reading link.
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Wim van den Broeck (University of Leiden). - A lawful relationship between mean and variability of reading performance.
In this study a new prediction derived from Logan's instance theory of automatization was tested. From this theory, it was expected that there would be a strong linear relationship between mean word-reading latencies and the variability of these latencies, measured on several word-reading tasks. An almost perfect linear relationship was observed. The theoretical, methodological and practical implications of this lawful relationship are outlined.
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Paul van den Broek (University of Minnesota), Kendeou, M. White, J.Butler, J.Lynch, A.Murphy, K. Kremer - Precursors to reading comprehension: A longitudinal investigation of basic language skills and comprehension skills from Kindergarten to second grade.
In a longitudinal study we investigated (a) the relation between basic language and comprehension skills from kindergarten to elementary school, and (b) the degree to which basic language skills and comprehension skills in kindergarten and early elementary school predict reading comprehension. In kindergarten and early elementary school, basic language skills (e.g., phonological awareness, letter and word identification) were relatively independent of comprehension skills (e.g., aural and television comprehension). Vocabulary was related to both basic language and comprehension skills. Most importantly, comprehension skills in kindergarten and early elementary school predicted reading comprehension over and above basic language skills and vocabulary
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Menno van der Schoot (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Horsley, T.M., Vasbinder, A.L., Reitsma, P., Van Lieshout, E.C.D.M. - The role of reading strategies in reading comprehension: Evidence from eye fixations.
This study investigates the role of two cognitive reading strategies in reading comprehension in a group of 11-12 years old primary school children: (1) distinguishing between informative and noninformative text items, and (2) generating inferences. Strategy use is defined in terms of eye fixation patterns. Two specific hypotheses are tested. First, gaze durations on informative text items will be longer than on noninformative text items in good comprehenders but not in poor comprehenders. Second, when provided with a rich context, good comprehenders will infer a category member in response to a category label. Poor comprehenders will find more difficulty in drawing this kind of inferences during reading. Inferring a category member in response to a category label is evidenced by a shorter gaze duration on a subsequent anaphor (i.e. the category member) that references the category label.
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Amos van Gelderen (University of Amsterdam), Rob Schoonen, Reinoud Stoel - The development of L1 and L2 reading comprehension: A longitudinal autoregression analysis.
In a three year longitudinal study we investigated the development of L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) reading comprehension skills and a set of constituent skills, i.e. vocabulary knowledge and grammatical knowledge in L1 and EFL, speed of word recognition and sentence verification in L1 and L2 and metacognitive knowledge about reading and writing. Participants were 380 secondary school students. Their skills were assessed in three rounds of measurement (at 14-15-16 yr). The relative contributions of these constituent skills to the level and development of L1 and L2 reading proficiency are estimated using autoregressive modelling. The question raised in the present paper is whether the impact of speed- and knowledge-factors is different for the development of L2 reading comprehension compared to L1. More specifically, we will test the prediction, based on the limited cognitive capacity hypothesis, that speed is a more important determinant of L2 reading development than of - more advanced - L1 reading development.
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Sandra van Heghe (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Philippe Mousty, Jean-Jacques Detraux - Acquisition of phonological reading skills in an adult with intellectual disability:A case study.
This study reports the beneficial effects of a remediation program focused on the basic phonological reading skills, applied to a 24 year-old young woman (AD) with moderate mental retardation (IQ = 40). Before the intervention, AD had a basic sight word vocabulary and could not read most of the words, despite more than twelve years of schooling. Assessment revealed that AD had a very low digit memory span (2 digits) and was unable to use the grapheme-phoneme (G-P) conversion process. After the intervention, AD was able to read correctly words and pseudo-words containing the trained but also untrained G-P correspondences. The stages of the treatment and the method used to assess its efficacy will be described. Implications for teaching methods of reading more adapted to the learning rate and the cognitive potentialities of individuals presenting an intellectual disability will be discussed.
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Janet G. van Hell (University of Nijmegen). - Spelling awareness and transcription skills: A temporal analysis of text writing in typically and atypically developing children.
Spelling awareness during story writing was studied in children with a typical or an atypical language development, i.e., dyslexic children, children with SLI, and bilingual children. Using a real-time approach, pause duration before writing an incorrectly spelled word was compared with pause duration before writing a correctly spelled word. The main finding was that mean pause duration before incorrectly spelled words was not different from that of correctly spelled words, in all groups of children. However, all groups of children were actively engaged in higher-order translating processes. Implications for spelling awareness and the cognition of writing will be discussed.
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Sandra van Otterloo (University of Amsterdam), Anne Regtvoort, A. van der Leij - Does early intervention make a difference for Dutch children at risk: A comparison of two intervention programs.
The aim of the study is to examine the effects of two pre-reading intervention programs for Dutch children genetically at-risk for dyslexia. Both programs focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge. Subjects in Kindergarten 2 were trained at home by their parents during 14 weeks. Pre and posttest results show effects for letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and decoding, and no effects for rapid naming. On the whole, both intervention groups made more progress than the control group, and children in Intervention I more than children in Intervention II. Results of follow-up measurement in Grade 1 will be presented as well.
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Connie K. Varnhagen (University of Alberta), Erin Goldberg, Angela Chamberland, Lauren Figueredo - Childrens brain activation during spelling.
We examined brain regions involved in phonological, orthographic, and visual processes related to spelling using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Ten right-handed, monolingual English-speaking, average spelling 10 year old boys participated. Our experimental tasks were phonological choice (sheap-shead), orthographic choice (beff-ffeb), and visual choice (sleep-sleap) and our control task was letter choice (xlpft-#$?!). Each experimental task was presented in eight, 20 sec blocks alternating with the control task. We are just beginning to analyze the data. Areas and levels of activation will be presented and compared with areas and levels of activation reported at SSSR, 2003, with adult male participants.
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Alain L. Vasbinder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Menno van der Schoot, Tako Horsley, Pieter Reitsma, Ernest van Lieshout - Distinguishing between informative and noninformative text items during reading: An eye fixation study.
To examine whether good comprehenders and poor comprehenders differ in the extent to which they distinguish between informative and noninformative text items during reading, 11-12 years old primary school children were instructed to read stories from the perspective of either a "science journalist" or a "gossip journalist". Eye movements were monitored to obtain a measure of the time to read text items made (un)important by the assigned perspective. It is hypothesized that in good comprehenders gaze durations on informative text items will be longer than on noninformative text items. Poor comprehenders will engage in this comprehension strategy to a lesser degree.
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Ludo Verhoeven (University of Nijmegen), Robert Schreuder, Vera Haarman - Prefix identification in reading Dutch bisyllabic words.
Two experiments have been conducted in order to explore children’s units of analysis in reading Dutch bisyllabic words. Although Dutch orthography is highly regular, several deviations from one-to-one correspondence occur. A case in point is the grapheme E which in polysyllabic words may represent the vowels ? , e and ?. In Experiment 1, 33 children in grade 3 and grade 6 were given a list of randomly ordered bisyllabic words: words with two times the grapheme E, the first syllable being a prefix (1), a phonological prefix (2), a pseudo-prefix (3), a nonprefix (4), or a pseudoword with a pseudoprefix (5). It was found that the both the pronunciation and stress assignment of (pseudo)words was dependent on word type, showing that prefixes are being identified. In Experiment 2, a lexical decision task was administered with 35 children from grade 3, 33 children from grade 6 and 26 adults. In the lexical decision task, words with a phonological prefix and words with a pseudoprefix were randomly presented along with other word types. The data showed that both children and adults were more accurate and faster in the retrieval of words with phonological prefixes as compared to words with a pseudoprefix. The results will be discussed with reference to a parallel dual-route model of word decoding.
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Lesly Wade-Woolley (Queen's University), Philippe Mousty, Lesly Wade-Woolley, Regine Kolinsky - Stress processing and word reading in Spanish and Mandarin adult learners of English .
Importantly, prosodic information conveyed in speech is highly variable across languages. As in English, stress is linguistically contrastive and used for lexical identification in Spanish (Soto-Faraco et al., 2001), but not in French. In accordance with these differences, French adults have been shown to be "deaf" to stress, compared to Spanish adults (Dupoux et al., 1997, 2001). If stress is important for successful reading development in English, then the reading accuracy and fluency of several groups of L2 learners should be modulated by the typological distance between the stress properties of their native language and those of English. In the current study, we test this hypothesis with groups of adult Spanish native speakers and adult Mandarin native speakers learning English. One prediction following this hypothesis is that, at the group level, Spanish-native speakers may show more accurate reading in English as L2, compared to native speakers of languages in which stress has different prosodic manifestations (e.g., Mandarin, a tone-based language). Furthermore, within groups of L2 learners, individual differences in stress processing in English may be associated with individual differences in reading accuracy. It remains to be determined whether these individual differences mitigate the group differences in stress processing that have been observed in Dupoux et al. (1997, 2001).
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Min Wang (University of Maryland), Yoonjung Park, Kyoung Rang Lee - Korean-English biliteracy acquisition: Cross language and orthography transfer.
Recent research on biliteracy learning has yielded consistent results on the strong facilitation between first (L1) and second language (L2) reading skills. However, these studies only focused on children learning to read English from another Roman alphabetic system, such as Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Our study was intended to investigate such development of children learning to read English from a non-Roman alphabetic system - Korean Hangul. About 30 Korean(L1)-English(L2) bilingual children were tested for their L1 and L2 language and reading skills at grade 1. The key component skills that were examined included phonological processing, orthographic processing, and word recognition. Children's non-verbal cognitive skills were also tested. Relationships between L1 and L2 skills were analyzed. The specific skills that were transferred were identified based on the similarities and differences between L1 and L2. These findings provide insight into the interaction between universal and language-specific processes of biliteracy acquisition.
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Loes Wauters (University of Nijmegen), Wim van Bon, Agnes Tellings - The role of word identification and mode of acquisition in reading comprehension of deaf children.
This paper discusses reading comprehension in deaf children in the Netherlands. According to the simple view of reading, reading comprehension consists of decoding and linguistic comprehension. The first part of this study focused on reading comprehension, word identification, and the relationship between these two in deaf children. The second part of the study focused on the role of mode of acquisition of word meanings in reading comprehension of deaf and hearing children. The mode of acquisition of word meanings refers to the way in which children acquire the meaning of words: through perception, through linguistic information or through a combination of both.
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Brendan Weekes (University of Sussex), Robyn Holliday, Jane Oakhill, Robert Davies - False memory effects among children with reading difficulties.
Reading comprehension difficulties are related to problems drawing inferences from text and this may be due to problems with constructing a gist based memory trace according to Fuzzy Trace Theory. By contrast, dyslexia may be related to problems constructing a memory trace for the related sounds of words. We tested these hypothesis using the DRM paradigm adapted to elicit a gist based memory process for words associatively related in meaning (e.g. SLEEP-BED) or phonologically related by initial phoneme, head or rime (e.g., SLEEP-WEEP). Results will be discussed in terms of current accounts of children’s reading difficulties and memory processes.
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Joanna Williams (Teachers College,Columbia University), K. Brooke Stafford, Marianne Beerstecher, Abigail Nubla - Teaching reading comprehension in the context of content instruction.
We previously presented evidence that instruction in text structure improves second graders' comprehension of informational text. Now we examine the effects of a text structure program that also includes substantial content instruction. Compared to a more traditional program emphasing content only and also to no instruction, the text structure program led to better comprehension of compare/contrast texts on instructed and uninstructed topics. Both instructional programs led to the acquisition of comparable amounts of new content knowledge. These findings run counter to claims that young children make comprehension gains via immersion in language activities but not via explicit teaching.
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Barbara W. Wise (University of Colorado), Lynn Snyder, Scott Schwartz, Sarel Van Vuuren, Ron Cole - Interactive books and tutors that run "by themselves" in K-2 classrooms.
Can programs with cutting-edge speech and animation technology provide effective reading instruction for young children, with minimal teacher support? Over 400 kindergarten to second-grade children are participating in a study with Individualized Tutorial activities in phoneme awareness and phonics, carried into engaged reading for meaning in Interactive Books. Earlier work (Wise, Olson & Ring 2000) established that simpler talking-computer programs could support and practice these aspects of reading instruction in small groups of older children, with intensive support by a trainer. We will report mid-year evaluations of effectiveness and acceptance of the programs in regular and special education classrooms.
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Gwen E. Wolters (University Leiden), Wim van den Broeck - The influence of bigram frequency and consonantal sonority on first grade reading performance.
In previous experiments we examined whether bigram frequency (the frequency with which two adjacent letters co-occur) influenced reading performance in Dutch beginning readers. Results indicate that bigram frequency does influence reading performance. More specifically, data showed that this frequency effect tended to play another role at different reading levels. In the next phase, both bigram frequency and consonantal sonority were manipulated to test whether consonantal sonority had an additional effect on reading performance besides bigram frequency. A first experiment indicated an additional, facilitative effect of sonorant consonants (i.e. /l/, /m/) on first grade reading performance.
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Clare Wood (Open University). - Speech rhythm processing in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness .
This paper will report the results of an ongoing study investigating what aspects of stress processing English speaking children find the most challenging, and consider which of these elements are associated with their developing phonological awareness. Two groups of children will be considered: pre-school, pre-literate children (age 4 years) and five year old children attending their first year in school. The children will complete a task that is designed to compare the children's competence at coping with three types of speech rhythm related changes in spoken words: change in lexical stress, change of vowel phoneme, and change in the number of reduced vowels. The children's performance on this task will be compared to their developing phonological awareness to see whether the children who show the greatest ability to cope with stress related variations in spoken words who will also show the highest levels of phonological awareness. This will be considered across the two age groups to see whether there is evidence of any developmental change in rhythmic sensitivity, or in the relationship between this variable and phonological awareness.
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Paul Worthington (Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes). - A successful district model that leaves no child behind.
In 1998, Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes and Pueblo School District 60 (PSD 60) in Pueblo, Colorado began a longitudinal, scale-up comprehensive professional development literacy intervention research project. Thousands of at-risk Kindergarten through 12th grade students have made statistically significant progress on nationally normed assessments. Additionally, PSD 60, as largely a Title I district, has outperformed the state on the reading portion of the state mandated reading assessment and PSD 60’s Title I schools are outperforming similar Title I schools across the state.
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Yi-Chen Wu (University of Minnesota), S. Jay Samuels - Effects of repeated reading and text difficulty on text comprehension for college students.
This study used a 2 (one-reading vs. three-reading) x 2 (easy vs. hard) experimental design to estimate the effects of the text difficulty and repeated reading on college students' comprehension. Fifty-two college students were randomly assigned for each experimental condition. The dependent variables were total number of words recalled, comprehension score, and the number of idea units recalled on and off causal chain. The three-reading groups had significantly better recall for events on the causal chain than the one-reading group. However, the performance patterns on the easy and hard text were different.
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Yolanda W. S. Yuen (Queen’s University), Lesly Wade-Woolley - Phonological representation in Chinese ESL children.
The present study examines the unit size of the phonological representation in Chinese children with English as a second language. Previous research has demonstrated the importance of phonemic awareness in early reading, however, a number of studies have shown that Chinese-speaking children have poorer phonemic awareness compared to their English-speaking counterparts. Their poor performances in phonemic awareness may be attributed to a failure to store phonological information in the appropriate unit size (i.e., phoneme) that is required in reading English. Syllable and phoneme monitoring tasks are employed in the present study to compare the unit sizes of the phonological representation in Chinese ESL and monolingual English children.
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Nicola Yuill (University of Sussex), Adam Galpin, Rebecca Lloyd-Lyon, Karen Bain - The role of understanding ambiguity in children's reading comprehension.
Children with poor reading comprehension are poor at inference-making from text, even when text is available. One cause might be reluctance to reinterpret text. This is investigated in three studies. 1: 20 7- to 9-year-old poor comprehenders were poorer than good comprehenders on a standardised test of ambiguity understanding, independent of vocabulary skill and reading accuracy level. They also showed weak conceptual understanding that words can have two meanings. 2: A similar sample of 40 children was trained in reinterpreting text or in phonological skills. Poor comprehenders improved given ambiguity training, and analysis of conversations in training suggests that improvement was related to increases in comments showing awareness of multiple meanings in context.
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