SSSR 2012 Conference Abstracts
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Suzanne Adlof (University of South Carolina); Marc Fey; Hugh Catts - Oral and written narratives in poor decoders and poor comprehenders: an examination of length, grammaticality, and quality
Although most poor readers display problems with both word reading and comprehension, some show specific delays in one skill but strength in the other. Comparing and contrasting the language and cognitive profiles of these specific deficit subgroups is useful for testing theories of reading development and for identifying skills that might be useful as markers for early identification or as targets for intervention. This study examined oral and written narratives generated by children who were typical readers, poor comprehenders (PC; good word reading but poor comprehension), and poor decoders (PD; good comprehension, but poor word reading). Participants were a subset of 570 children who participated in a longitudinal study of language and reading development. Children were classified as PC, PD, or typical readers based on their composite word reading and reading comprehension scores in fourth grade. Picture stimuli were used to elicit spoken and written narratives from children in second grade (prior to classification) and fourth grade (concurrent with classification). Compared to typical readers, PCs produced shorter, less grammatical, and lower quality spoken and written narratives in both grades. Poor decoders' oral narratives were not significantly different from typical readers' in either grade, but their written narratives were shorter and lower quality in both grades, and less grammatical in fourth grade. Additional analyses are ongoing, but preliminary results suggest that oral narrative production tasks might be useful for identifying children at risk for reading comprehension problems, and that children with decoding deficits may need intervention to bring their written language performance up to par with oral language abilities.
Yusra Ahmed ()Rick Wagner - Modeling writing as a composite of transcription, language comprehension and working memory: a causal indicator model
Purpose - Traditional models of writing have included three basic cognitive functions: planning, translating and reviewing. More recently, writing models have been expanded to reflect that writing involves additional cognitive and language processing such as working memory and oral language comprehension. However, current models of writing have used conventional representations of covariance structure models. In conventional structural equation models, indicators are defined as linear functions of latent variables. In an alternative representation, constructs can be defined as linear functions of their indicators, called causal indicators. Such constructs are not latent variables but composite variables. The present study seeks to test a causal indicator model of writing, whereby writing is defined as a linear combination of handwriting fluency, listening comprehension and working memory. Method - Participants included 316 boys and girls who were assessed annually in grades 1 through 4. Writing was assessed through a timed writing composition task. Measures of language comprehension included sentence level oral comprehension and two experimental measures of text level listening comprehension. Measures of working memory included two sentence level memory span tasks. Results - The proposed model of writing fit the data well across grade levels. No differences were found between genders. Discussion - Results suggest that writing is an extraordinarily complex strategic activity that operates under constraints of language comprehension and working memory. In addition, writing is dependent on basic transcription level skills.
Yusra Ahmed (Florida State University and Florida Center for Reading Research)Richard Wagner - Component skills of writing
Dr. Wagner is a discussant. He will integrate the four papers and discuss their findings in light of expanding our knowledge about component skills of written composition in various langguage.
Stephanie Al Otaiba (Southern Methodist University)Young-Suk Kim; Jessica Folsom ;Cynthia Puranik - Growth trajectories of writing for typical children and children with language impairment
Purpose Growth trajectories of writing on a story prompt were examined for typically developing children and children with language impairment in English-speaking first grade. We also examined the relation of children's oral language and reading skills in fall to growth trajectories of writing across the year. Method A total of 304 first grade students participated in the study. Students wrote on a researcher created prompt in fall, winter, and spring. Students were assessed on vocabulary (WJ-III Picture Vocabulary), word reading (WJ-III Word Identification), and reading comprehension (WJ-III Passage Comprehension), and handwriting fluency in fall. Results Children with language impairment has significantly fewer number of total word written and number of ideas in fall and lower rate of change across time than typically developing children. On average, children with language impairment wrote approximately 15 words representing 3 ideas in fall and 23 words representing 4.5 ideas in spring. Typically developing children wrote, on average, 22 words representing 4 ideas in fall and 34 words and 6 ideas in spring. Children's reading comprehension in the fall was related to their growth trajectories in writing. Conclusions Children with language impairment were not only able to write fewer words in the beginning of the year, but also their growth rate in the number of words in written composition is slower. These results, in conjunction with a unique contribution of reading comprehension, suggests the importance of paying attention to language and reading skills in order to facilitate development of writing skills for first grade students.
Elizabeth Albro (US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences) - Discussant
Alida Anderson (American University, Washington DC, USA); Candise Lin; Min Wang - Prosodic sensitivity in native and non-native English-speaking children with and without dyslexia
Purpose. This study investigated children's detection of stress patterns across native (English) and novel (Mandarin, Dutch) languages. Participants included monolingual English speakers in grades 2-3 with dyslexia (RD=30) and normal reading development (NRD = 30). Previous research (Authors, in review) has shown children with NRD to be more sensitive to dominant stress patterns in English and Mandarin than children with RD; thus the current study examined whether children with RD and NRD: 1) differ in sensitivity to novel language stress patterns; and 2) use English stress cues to process novel language stress patterns. Method. Stress processing tasks were developed using disyllabic English nonwords, and Mandarin and Dutch real words with initial- vs. final-stressed syllable patterns. Children learned to associate word-level stress patterns with shapes to 'feed' an animated puppy on a computer screen (Thomson & Goswami, 2010). In the familiarization phase, the examiner demonstrated how the puppy ate English nonwords with dominant stress patterns. Practice and testing phases followed with 20 randomized English nonwords. The final generalization phase involved novel stress processing of 40 Mandarin and Dutch words in random order. Anticipated Results. The RD group was hypothesized to differ from NRD in being less sensitive to Mandarin and Dutch stress patterns. We also hypothesized that children with RD were significantly weaker than NRD in their generalization of English stress cues to their processing of Mandarin and Dutch stress patterns. Conclusions. These findings contribute to understanding of the role of prosodic sensitivity in reading disabilities, having implications for assessment and intervention. References Authors (in review). Sensitivity to native and novel language prosody in English-speaking children with and without dyslexia. Thomson, J., & Goswami, U. (2010). Learning novel phonological representations in developmental dyslexia: Associations with basic auditory processing of rise time and phonological awareness. Reading and Writing, 23, 453-473.
Kenn Apel (Dept. of Comm. Sci. & Disorders, University of South Carolina)Young-Suk Kim;Stephanie Al Otaiba;Danielle Brimo - The Influence of Linguistic Awareness Skills on Early Literacy Abilities of At-Risk Students
* Purpose - We examined how phonemic awareness (PA), orthographic pattern awareness (OPA), and morphological awareness (MA) abilities contribute to the reading and spelling skills of kindergarten, first, and second grade children at-risk for literacy. We also investigated differences in PA, OPA, and MA skills by grade. * Method - We assessed the PA, OPA, and MA abilities of 107 kindergarten (N = 31), first (N = 42), and second grade students (N = 34) who were enrolled in a low SES school and primarily African American. We also evaluated their word-level reading, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling skills. Measures used were both norm-referenced (e.g., CTOPP, TOWRE), and experimenter-developed tasks. * Results - Our findings suggest that different linguistic awareness skills influence different literacy skills at different ages. Kindergarten: PA and MA influenced spelling (reading tasks not administered); First Grade: PA, OPA, and MA influenced all reading abilities; PA and MA influenced spelling; Second Grade: MA influenced word-level reading; MA and OPA influenced reading fluency; OPA influenced reading comprehension and spelling. Overall, morphological awareness ability influenced all literacy skills across the three grades and the greatest amount of variance explained by the three linguistic awareness skills occurred for spelling. * Conclusions - Young children in the early stages of literacy development have and use different linguistic awareness skills and that these skills differentially influence various literacy abilities. Scores on the three linguistic awareness measures also revealed that children continue to develop these skills over time and that our measures were able to capture this development.
Dorit Aram (Department of Human Development and Education, Tel Aviv University, Israel); Shimrit Abiri; Lili Elad - How does parental writing mediation, and children's alphabetic knowledge, self-regulation and private speech while writing, predict kindergartners' early writing?
Purpose: The study further explored the significance of previously identified parameters predictive of child's early writing: parental writing mediation, child's alphabetic knowledge, and self-regulation. In addition, it examined a parameter that has not yet been studied in relation to early writing -- child's private speech while writing. The study assessed the contribution of parental writing mediation to predicting child's writing beyond child characteristics (alphabetic knowledge, self regulation and private speech). Method: 49 children (M = 68.66 months) were videotaped while writing words with their parents and then writing words on their own. Measures of letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and self-regulation were individually administered to the children. Video analyses yielded parents' writing mediation styles and children's private speech levels. Results: Results showed that each of the child characteristics -- alphabetic knowledge, self-regulation and private speech, uniquely predicted children's writing. Beyond the variance that was explained by these characteristics, a further 8% of the variance in writing level was explained solely by parent's mediation. Together, the variables explained 75% of the variance in children's writing levels. Conclusions: Results demonstrate the importance of both practicing alphabetic skills and attaining high levels of self-regulation in the development of early writing skills. Furthermore, they show that private speech, which until now had not been explored in this context, has a significant role in children's writing development and should be encouraged at home and in educational settings. Lastly, the study emphasizes the significance of parents' mediation on young children's early writing, and parents should be guided and encouraged in this area.
Luisa Araujo (Instituto Superior de Educação e Ciências)Luisa Araujo; Patricia Costa - What factors explain reading achievement in the Program for International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS, 2006) in 20 EU countries?
The purpose of this study is to identify the factors associated with reading achievement. We measure the effects of variables identified in previous investigations using PIRLS data and variables identified in psycholinguistic research as predictors of reading attainment. Mullins et al. (2006) claim that "PIRLS will provide a wealth of information that can be used not only to improve the reading curriculum and instruction for younger students, but also help in interpreting the results for 15-year-olds in PISA" (p. 102). However, no evidence exists that students´ performance in PIRLS, in fourth grade, is related to literacy instruction (Shiel & Eivers, 2009) and although the relationship between students´ scores and some background variables at the student, household, school and class levels has been investigated, existing evidence is limited to individual countries (Bellin, Dunge & Dunzenhauser, 2010). We use multilevel analysis controlling for country effects and include student, class and school characteristics. Our model explains 43% of the variance in the achievement of the 93,113 sample. Findings indicate that home educational resources and students´ attitudes toward reading produce the wider differences, followed by children´s knowledge of the alphabet before school starts, language spoken at home and parental book reading. At the class level, we find small effects for teacher gender, class compositional effects and instructional approaches. At the school level, differences relate to parental occupational status, the percentage of students from economically disadvantaged homes, school climate and parent-teacher relationships. Importantly, these findings suggest that the reciprocal relation between alphabet knowledge and phonological skills is detectable at the fourth grade level and they have implications for policy related to curriculum design and equity measures (Piasta & Wagner, 2010).
Joanne Arciuli (University of Sydney); Renae Nash - Prosody Awareness is Related to Reading Ability in Children with Autism
Prosody awareness has been linked with reading ability in typically developing children. While children with autism often have difficulty processing prosody and often have difficulties learning to read no previous study has looked at the link between explicit prosodic awareness and reading in autism. A total of 25 children with autism completed both word and nonword reading subtests from the Woodcock (WRMT-R: Woodcock, 1998) and two prosody awareness tasks: the Mispronunciation Task (Holliman, Wood, & Sheehy, 2010) and the Compound Noun Task (Whalley & Hansen, 2006). Data revealed significant positive correlations between prosodic awareness and both word and nonword reading. When we divided the sample into two groups based on word reading ability poor readers had significantly lower scores on the Compound Noun Task. These results indicate a link between prosody awareness and reading in children with autism and may assist in the development of reading interventions for this population.
Jane Ashby (Central Michigan University)Breanna Knudsen, Ana Archer, Madison Kloss, Morgan Bontrager, Hannah Faleer, Michelle Young - Phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and reading fluency in Grades 1 and 2: Online evidence from eye movements
Purpose. We examined the interplay of phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and reading fluency in grades 1 and 2 by monitoring eye movements during phonemic awareness tasks, receptive spelling, and silent sentence reading. Method. Children performed the three tasks in one session, followed by offline measures of reading fluency. Measures included time spent looking at the target and distractors, the number of looks before choosing, sentence reading times, and percent correct. Results. First graders who were faster to choose the correct last phoneme match (but not the first) were also faster readers than those who made slower phonemic decisions. In the Grade 2 sample, however, phoneme matching performance associated with stronger reading comprehension whereas better spelling performance correlated with more fluent reading. Conclusion. This pattern suggests that faster readers developed more specific orthographic and phonemic representations of written words and relates that specificity to gains in silent reading rate as well as comprehension.
Karen Au-Yeung (OISE UT);Becky Chen - English vocabulary development in English language learners in French immersion
This study investigated the English vocabulary development of English Language Learners (ELLs) in a Canadian French immersion program by comparing their performance with English first language students (EL1s) in the same program. Participants were 35 ELLs and 39 EL1s. Children were measured at three time points, at the beginning and end of Grade 1 and at the end of Grade 2. English receptive vocabulary scores of the EL1s were significantly higher than the ELLs at the three time points, whereas the ELLs' growth in receptive vocabulary was not significantly different from that of the EL1s. Overtime, a significant quadratic trend was evident. Both groups experienced faster growth in receptive vocabulary from the end of Grade 1 through the end of Grade 2 than from the beginning through the end of Grade 1. Regarding English expressive vocabulary, the EL1s had significantly higher scores at the beginning and end of Grade 1; whereas the ELLs experienced a faster growth rate from the beginning through the end of Grade 1. The ELLs' performance on expressive vocabulary was not significantly different from that of the EL1s at the end of Grade 2. For the EL1s, word reading and morphological awareness significantly predicted receptive vocabulary concurrently and longitudinally; morphological awareness also significantly predicted expressive vocabulary longitudinally. For the ELLs, morphological awareness significantly predicted receptive vocabulary concurrently but it did not predict expressive vocabulary. Results of the study suggest that ELLs develop faster in English expressive vocabulary than receptive vocabulary in a third language educational setting.
Selma Babayigit (University of the West of England, Bristol) - The reading comprehension and narrative writing skills of children who speak English as an additional language: A multi-group structural analysis
Purpose -The present study sought to address two research questions: a) what is the relative role of oral language and code level (e.g., word recognition and spelling) skills in children's reading comprehension and writing levels, and b) to what extent the observed pattern of relationships differ across the monolingual and bilingual speakers of English. Method - 102 monolingual and 81 bilingual speakers of English participated in the study, which was conducted in England (M = 115.42 months, SD = 3.64). Children's word recognition, spelling, reading comprehension (York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension), and narrative writing (WIAT) were assessed by standardized tests. Likewise, standardized measures of vocabulary, sentence processing, semantic fluency, and verbal working memory were implemented to assess children's oral language skills in English. Multi-group structural equation modelling analysis was conducted to examine the hypothesized models among each language group and to examine to what extent the observed pattern of relationships differed across the two language groups. Results -A monolingual advantage was observed on the oral language, comprehension, and writing measures. Reading comprehension and writing skills were significantly related to each other. The results have also revealed excellent model fit indices for both language groups and for both reading comprehension and writing. As anticipated, oral language made direct effects on comprehension and writing, as well as indirect effects through the code level skills. However, whereas oral language played a more significant role in reading comprehension, spelling played a more significant role in writing. The pattern of relationships was comparable across the two language groups for both comprehension and writing. Conclusions -The findings signified the importance of a) developing our understanding of the common component processes of reading comprehension and writing, and b) sustained and systematic support of the oral language skills of learners from minority language backgrounds.
Katharine Bailey (Trent University); Nancie Im-Bolter; Keely Owens-Jaffray; Fataneh Farnia; Nancy J. Cohen - Thinking it through: Social problem solving in children with reading problems
Purpose: Research indicates that children with reading disabilities have greater deficits in their social skills than children with other types of learning disabilities. It is possible that their social deficits are the result of ineffective or immature social problem solving skills. Method: Participants were 75 children between the age of 7 and 13 in four groups: 1) reading comprehension and decoding problems (n = 11), 2) reading comprehension problems only (n = 19), 3) reading decoding problems only (n = 7), and 4) typical reading ability (n = 38). Children were compared on measures of nonverbal IQ, semantic and syntactic language, and social problem solving ability. Results: The groups did not differ with respect to nonverbal IQ, age, or SES. Analyses showed that children with reading comprehension problems (either in isolation or with reading decoding problems) had the lowest language skills and least mature social problem solving ability. Children with reading decoding problems only presented with an interesting profile of strengths and weaknesses. This group was: 1) similar to peers with typical reading ability with respect to syntactic language ability, 2) similar to the other impaired groups with respect to semantic language ability, and 3) did not differ from the other groups in terms of maturity of problem solving skills. Conclusions: Results suggest that different reading profiles result in different patterns of strengths and weaknesses in both the language and social cognitive domain. Language based disabilities, such as reading comprehension problems put children at greater risk for social cognitive difficulties.
Doris Luft Baker (Center on Teaching and Learning, University of Oregon); Michael Stoolmiller - Empirical examination of the reciprocal relation between reading comprehension and passage fluency in second grade
Purpose: This study examines evidence for a reciprocal association between oral reading fluency (ORF) and reading comprehension (RC) in the context of theoretical frameworks proposed by Perfetti, 1999 and Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp & Jenkins, 2001. Design: Passive Longitudinal Participants: 228 second graders at four schools in the Pacific Northwest. Measures: DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF; Good, Kaminski, & Dill, 2002) and EasyCBM Passage Reading Fluency (PRF), and EasyCBM Multiple-Choice Reading Comprehension (MCRC; Alonzo, Tindal, Ulmer, & Glasgow, 2006) measured in fall and spring. Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-10; Harcourt Educational Measurement, 2002) measured only in the spring. Data Analysis: Structural equation modeling focused on two distinct models, (1) a cross-lagged model predicting spring ORF from fall RC, and spring RC from fall ORF, and (2) a synchronous model predicting spring ORF from spring RC and vice versa controlling for respective prior levels in fall. Results: Regardless of the type of model (cross-lagged or synchronous) and regardless of how RC was represented in the model (MCRC, SAT-10 or latent), effects were significant in both directions. Conclusions: Prior research indicates ORF is strongly dependent on word reading skills and the current research indicates that it also depends on RC both across time (i.e., a cross-lagged effect) and within time (i.e., a synchronous effect). This confirms theoretical perspectives that ORF and RC depend on each other and are reciprocally related. Practical and theoretical implications will be discussed.
Linda Baker (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) - Discussion
The final slot is filled by Linda Baker who will reflect on the four contributions.
Karen Banai (University of Haifa); Rachel Yifat - Statistical learning, phonological awareness and letter knowledge in the preschool years
Purpose: Several important reading precursors, e.g., phonological awareness (PA), rapid naming (RAN), letter knowledge (LK) were identified over the years, but these do not fully explain the variability in reading development during the early school years. Based on evidence that statistical learning (SL) accounts for unique variance in reading ability (Arciuli & Simpson, 2011) in school-age children and adults, we tested the hypothesis that statistical learning, or the ability to implicitly glean structure from on-going stimulus sequences, contributes uniquely to the explanation of variability in reading readiness in preschool children. Method: 69 children (ages 48-77 months) were tested on a battery of reading-related tasks. The contribution of SL to performance on RAN and phonological memory (PM) tasks was assessed by administrating each task twice: once using a stimulus set that allowed statistical learning (SL+) and once with a stimulus set that made statistical learning impossible (SL-). Subsequently, the contribution of statistical learning to phonological awareness (PA) and letter knowledge (LK) was tested using 2-stage regression analyses. Results: SL influenced performance in both RAN and PM tasks with moderate to large effect sizes. Furthermore, performance in the SL+ conditions explained unique variance in both PA and LK (β = 0.26 - 0.56) even after accounting for the contribution of age and of performance on the SL- conditions. Conclusion: SL, or the ability to benefit from repetition of information, is significantly related to early reading skills; further research will determine whether it plays a causal role in reading development.
Irit Bar-Kochva (University of Haifa, The Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities); Zvia Breznitz - Reading of Different Orthographies: Do Dyslexic Readers Adjust Reading Routines to the Type of Script Presented?
Purpose. Regular readers were found to adjust reading routine to the type of script read. This study examined whether dyslexics share the same trait. Method. Participants were 27 regular and 26 dyslexic adult readers. Hebrew speakers were examined as they are skilled in reading two scripts transcribing the same Hebrew language: a phonologically transparent script (with diacritics), and a phonologically opaque script (without diacritics). Behavioral and Scalp ERP data were collected while participants completed a lexical decision task in the two forms of script. In an attempt to distinguish between visual and orthographic differences between the scripts, a non-orthographic task was added: squares were presented with or without meaningless diacritics, and participants had to decide whether they were tilted. Repeated-Measure ANOVAs were carried out, with stimulus (words/pseudowords/squares) and diacritics (with/without) as within-subject factors and group (regular readers/dyslexics) as a between-subject factor. Results. Behavior: Diacritics delayed reaction of dyslexics more than of regular readers. Electrophysiology: Around 170 ms (N170) stimuli with diacritics (orthographic and non-orthographic) evoked significantly higher amplitudes than stimuli without diacritics only in regular readers. The amplitudes of stimuli with and without diacritics (orthographic only) differed in this group also around 350 ms (P3), whereas dyslexics showed a similar difference only around 500 ms. Conclusions. The form of script affected reading-time of dyslexics more than of regular readers. However, greater and earlier differences in brain activity were observed in regular readers. Therefore, dyslexic may not be as flexible as regular readers are in adjusting processing to the script read.
Adrienne Barnes (Florida State University); Young-Suk Kim; Beth Phillips - Young children's narratives: use of story structure and linguistic devices in story retell and story production
Purpose Two primary research questions were What types of linguistic devices do prekindergarten, kindergarten and first grade students use to create coherence and cohesion in their story retell and story production? To what extent is the use of these linguistic devices correlated with children's listening comprehension, inconsistency detection, and text structure knowledge? Method The sample included 178 children (52 in prekindergarten, 63 in kindergarten, and 63 first graders) in high poverty schools in a north Florida district. Data were collected on inconsistency detection (ability to detect inconsistency in short stories), narrative comprehension and production, and listening comprehension [the listening comprehension Scale of the Oral and Written Language Scales (OWLS; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1995)]. Children's retell and production were transcribed into SALT and coded for inclusion of story structure elements and use of linguistic devices. Bivariate correlations were used to examine the relations of the use of linguistic devices to their listening comprehension, inconsistency detection, and text structure knowledge. Results Children in prekindergarten use fewer linguistic devices than kindergarteners, who use fewer linguistic devices than do first graders. The use of linguistic devices were moderately related to listening comprehension, ability to detect inconsistency in a short story (i.e., inconsistency detection), and ability to include key story structural elements in story retell and production. Conclusions The results suggest that children's use of cohesive devices in their narrative oral retell and production is an important aspect of linguistic knowledge that is still developing among children in pre-k to first grade from low SES backgrounds.
Marcia A. Barnes ((voting member) Children's Learning Institute, University of Texas-Health Science Center at Houston)Claire Davis; Sarah Priebe; Nikki Arrington; David Francis; Jack Fletcher - Word-level, text-level and general purpose cognitive skills in struggling adolescent readers: Implications for assessment and intervention.
Purpose - Word- and text-level skills and comprehension-related general-purpose cognitive abilities (e.g., memory and attention) were compared in adolescent average and struggling comprehenders. Whether the relation of these skills to reading comprehension differs between groups was also tested. Method - Students in 9th to 12th grades - half who met the passing standard on the state literacy test and half who did not - were screened for word reading skills. Those with word reading below the 20th percentile for grade were excluded from further study. The remaining 400 students were classified as average or struggling comprehenders based on their reading comprehension achievement (50 average and 50 struggling comprehenders per grade). Participants were assessed on word and world knowledge; inference-making skill; and memory and attention. Data were analyzed to look at differences between groups and grades, and for moderating effects of group on the relation of these skills to reading comprehension. Results - Over 30% of students who failed the state literacy test were excluded due to word reading difficulties. For the remaining average comprehenders and struggling comprehenders/adequate decoders, group differences were found on several tasks assessing word- and text-level skills and general-purpose cognitive abilities. Conclusions: Core problems in word decoding are important sources of comprehension problems in many older struggling readers. However, many older students have difficulty understanding what they read despite adequate word reading skills. Differences between average and struggling comprehenders and the importance of these differences for comprehension will be discussed along with the implications of the findings for assessment and intervention.
Laura Barquero (Vanderbilt University); Scott Burns; Nikki Davis; Dwayne Dove; Lindsay Wilson; Sheryl Rimrodt; Laurie Cutting - Neurobiological correlates predicitng responsiveness to reading intervention in children with RD
Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between pre-intervention brain activity and responsiveness to reading intervention for children with RD. Methods: Reading ability for 14 children with RD (age 8-17 years) was assessed with a standard battery that included Word ID, Word Attack, and Passage Comprehension. Prior to reading intervention, functional MRI scans were obtained during a single word-reading task in which participants made a word/non-word determination. Subsequently, each participant received 15 hours of phonics-based reading intervention with individually targeted level of instruction. Change scores in behavioral measures were used to rank order participants and a median split designated Responders (n = 7) versus Non-responders (n = 7). Whole brain analyses of fMRI data were performed to reveal pre-intervention differences between groups. Results: Whole brain analysis (p < 0.005, 70 voxel extent) revealed that prior to intervention, relative to Nonresponders, Responders exhibited increased activation in areas including bilateral middle occipital gyri (BA 18/19), left orbital/superior frontal gyrus (BA 11), and left fusiform gyrus (BA 37). Brain activity for Nonresponders relative to Responders was characterized by increased activity in right hemisphere areas that included inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45), middle temporal gyrus (BA 22), and middle frontal gyrus (BA 46). Conclusions: Children with RD who exhibited brain activity more closely resembling typically developing readers responded better to intervention than did children exhibiting the anomalous activation associated with RD. Differences in fMRI activation may be useful in predicting responsiveness to reading instruction.
Sara Beach (MIT); Elizabeth S. Norton; Ola Ozernov-Palchik; Abigail B. Cyr; Carlos Cardenas-Iniguez; Marianna D. Eddy; John D. E. Gabrieli; Nadine Gaab - ERP mismatch negativity differentiates subtypes of kindergartners at risk for dyslexia
Purpose Early identification of children at risk for dyslexia provides the possibility of targeted intervention even before reading becomes a challenge. Dyslexia, and dyslexia risk in young children, have been associated with a reduced mismatch negativity (MMN), an automatic, pre-attentive response to deviant auditory stimuli. However, it is not known how the MMN relates to behavioral deficits in developmental dyslexia or dyslexia risk classification. Methods We investigated MMN-behavior correspondence with an auditory oddball paradigm in 23 kindergarten children. We recorded 64-channel EEG while children heard syllables "ba" and "da" (90% standards/10% deviants). Dyslexia risk classification was based on behavioral measures of phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and letter/letter-sound knowledge (LK). Results We found significant MMN attenuation over frontal sites in children at risk as compared to children who were not at risk. We further explored the types of risk associated with MMN differences. Previous studies have found that a reduced MMN to tones at midline electrode Fz coincided with familial risk for dyslexia; here, we found that the magnitude of the MMN to syllables at Fz was significantly correlated with PA and LK. RAN was not correlated with amplitude at Fz, yet we observed a different distribution of the MMN and found significantly less negativity in children at risk in RAN in left posterior regions. Conclusion These results suggest that dyslexia risk subtypes are associated with different characteristics of the MMN. MMN amplitude and distribution may identify children who go on to evince phonology-based or fluency-related reading impairment.
Nathalie Bélanger (Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego); Rachel I. Mayberry; Keith Rayner - Dissociation of orthographic and phonological codes in signing adult deaf readers: how does the use of these codes relate to reading level?
Purpose - Deaf people often achieve low levels of reading skills (Traxler, 2000). The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers is not yet fully supported in the literature (Mayberry et al., 2011). With the experiments we will present, our aim was to dissociate the effects of phonological and orthographic information and also to relate our results to reading level. Methods - In two experiments, we tested 29 deaf adults who are readers of French and signers of Quebec Sign Language. Results from a masked lexical decision task and a recall task will be presented (Bélanger et al., in Press). Deaf readers in both experiments were separated into two groups according to their reading level: skilled and less skilled readers. Groups of skilled hearing readers served as control groups in all experiments. Results - The results show that skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less skilled deaf readers used orthographic codes during word recognition and recall, but only skilled hearing readers relied on phonological codes during these tasks. Conclusion - Preliminary conclusions would suggest that deaf readers do not activate phonological codes during reading, and that phonological codes are not a determinant of reading level in adult deaf readers.
Gal Ben-Yehudah (The Open University of Israel)Dorit Shulman - Instructional order of contextual and morphological strategies influences reading comprehension in 3rd grade
Purpose: The reciprocal relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (RC) is well established. This relationship has lead practitioners to develop strategies for deriving word meaning from text. This study explored the influence of instructional order of two such strategies, contextual clues and morphological analysis, on young readers' comprehension. Methods: 85 children attending 3rd grade in an Israeli public school participated in an intervention program that taught contextual and morphological strategies for inferring the meaning of novel vocabulary in text. Each experimental group received 14-hours of instruction in one strategy and then instruction switched to the other strategy. The order in which the strategies were taught was either context-morphology or morphology-context. A control group received instruction only on the contextual strategy. Participants' abilities were assessed pre-intervention and post-intervention using three measures: RC, morphological knowledge and vocabulary breadth. Results: Pre-intervention, the three groups did not differ on any of these measures. Post-intervention, we found a significant influence of instructional order on RC, with higher comprehension scores for the context-morphology group relative to the morphology-context group. A median-split of the data based on pre-intervention comprehension scores revealed that the below-median group benefited most from the context-morphology intervention, whereas the above-median group showed a surprising setback in performance following intervention. Conclusions: These findings suggest that (1) it is important to consider the order of instruction when teaching children strategies to improve RC, and (2) initial RC ability has a non-trivial influence on children's use of new strategies to derive word meaning from text.
Sabrina Benedict (Vanderbilt University); Nicole Davis; Esther Lindstrom; Donald Compton; Laurie Cutting - The role of phonology and orthography in children's morphological word reading skills
Purpose: Morphology is known to relate to word reading. For example, word stem and suffix combinations may result in phonological and/or orthographic alterations to the root word; however, few morphology tasks measure the effect of these alterations. Furthermore, whether phonology plays a differential role depending on type of alternation is not understood. We present results from a task (MORPH) that investigated this relationship. Methods: 27 children (16 girls; x=11.3 years ±1.33) completed the Letter Word Identification (LWI) and Word Attack (WA) Woodcock Johnson subtests and the MORPH task. The MORPH task first presents word stems (MORPH-root) followed by these stems with suffixes (MORPH-suff), which were separated into 4 alteration types: no change (NONE), orthographic (ORTH), phonological (PHON), and orthographic/phonological (OR/PH). Accuracy was calculated by number of MORPH-suff items read correctly over total read. MORPH-root items read incorrectly were removed from analysis. Results: Performance on MORPH-suff alternations indicated that ORTH (x=83.13±20) and NONE (x=82.49±26.65) were easiest, OR/PH (x=67.11, ±20) was more challenging, and PHON (x=59.5, ± 33) was hardest. Repeated measures analyses indicated that NONE=ORTH (p=.81), whereas NONE and ORTH were easier as compared to both PHON and OP/PH (p<.01), even after accounting for WA skill. Poor readers showed a greater difference between the ORTHO and NONE versus PHONO and OR/PH (Condition x Group, p=.007). Conclusions: Results suggested variable performance across the four MORPH-suff alternations. Findings indicated that morphological combinations involving phonological alterations to root words cannot be fully explained by phonological decoding skill. Type of morphological change differentially impacts performance based upon reading skill.
Rachel Berthiaume (Faculté des sciences de l'éducation, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada); Daniel Daigle - Morphological processing tasks and measurement issues
Purpose: Over the last 20 years, research in morphological processing (i.e. morphological awareness and graphomorphological processing) has been the main focus of many studies on the development of reading and writing skills (see, for example, Burani et al., 2008; Casalis et al., 2011; Deacon et al., 2011). These studies differ on several grounds such as the chosen theoretical framework and methodology. Method: We systematically reviewed more than 90 studies designed to investigate morphological processing in different populations and languages. Extracted information permitted us to highlight the main conceptual definitions used in this research domain and list all experimental tasks used. We then characterized these tasks according to hypothetical processes or knowledge bases, the associated morphological domain (inflection vs derivation), the nature of the material involved (oral and/or written) and task instructions. Results: Tables are used to highlight the remarkable variability found across studies on all criteria considered. Conclusions: The observation of this variability raises many issues that need to be addressed in future research. For instance, what is morphological awareness? How does it differ from morphological processing? What is implicit or explicit about morphological tasks? How are morphological tasks conceptually constructed? Tentative answers to these questions are proposed in order to set the stage for the development of a unified framework in the systematic study of morphological processing.
Phillips Beth (Florida State University and FCRR); Galiya Tabulda; Pamela B. Webb; Smirti Jangra; T. Kayla Sedgwick - Syntax intervention in early childhood: Results from efficacy trials within three grades
Purpose: The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of three parallel 12-week small group interventions in prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. The intervention targets syntax and listening comprehension skills plus mental state vocabulary associated with literate language and theory of mind. The research questions concern the impact of the interventions on syntax measures, listening comprehension passages, theory of mind measures, and for first grade, reading comprehension. Method: Approximately 130 children per grade were screened and 82 qualifying (e.g., scoring below the 40th percentile standardized syntax instruments) children were identified. Children were randomly assigned within school to receive 12 weeks of intervention within small groups (n = 40) or to business-as-usual (n = 42). The intervention addresses grade-specific syntax targets including prepositions, conjunctions, passive, and negation. Assessments include syntax subtests from the CELF-IV or CELF-P2, Oral and Written Language Scales Listening Comprehension, researcher created syntax and listening comprehension measures, and false belief understanding. Results: The interventions are ongoing and post-testing will be completed in late spring. Results from the prior year's design study trials in each grade showed educationally meaningful effects sizes relative to a receptive vocabulary counterfactual measure after just 3 week trials. Conclusions: Results from these studies will build understanding of how to effectively build language skills relevant to reading comprehension in children at high risk for reading difficulty. Preventative interventions such as this show promise in closing the achievement gap for children who enter formal schooling with language delays due to backgrounds associated with poverty.
Yiwen Bi ()Malatesha Joshi - How does the literacy knowledge of Turkish transfer to decoding and spelling in English and Spanish?
Purpose Turkish is a transparent, agglutinative language. Spanish is also a transparent orthography, however, English is considered semi-opaque, even though all three languages use Latin script. So, do Turkish literates find it easier to decode and spell Spanish or English? That is the purpose of this study. Method Forty university students whose first language was Turkish and were literate in Turkish were administered the decoding and spelling portions of Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised (WLPB-R) and Woodcock-Munoz Bateria III. The decoding subtests were scored as right and wrong and the spelling performance was scored both quantitatively and qualitatively. It was predicted that Turkish literates would perform better on Spanish tasks than on English ones, because of the similarities in the orthographic depth in Turkish and Spanish. Results & Conclusions Statistics significance testing and regression analyses showed that Turkish literates performed better on Spanish tasks than on English ones. Qualitative analyses, by feature guide for spelling inventory (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnson, 2004) on specific phonemes, syllables and spelling stages, also reported that the performance of Turkish literates was better in Spanish than in English. The results were explained in terms of 'Orthographic Distance'. The findings indicated a better reading acquisition transfer from a transparent first language to a transparent second language, than to an opaque second language. Implications also focus on the orthography depth in second language teaching and learning. Reference Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., & Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2004). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction, 3rd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Joshi, R. M., & Aaron, P.G. (Eds.) (2006). Handbook of orthography and literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gina Biancarosa (University of Oregon); Joseph F. T. Nese; Kelli Cummings; Patrick Kennedy; Julie Alonzo; Gerald Tindal - Individual moderators of within-year ORF growth: The role of student characteristics and grade level across grades 1-8
Purpose. Recent research has suggested that within-year oral reading fluency (ORF) growth is non-linear; in early grades it is discontinuous, with greater growth in fall than in spring (Christ et al., 2010; Nese et al., in press). Most studies of ORF growth, however, incorporate only three testing occasions. This limits both the types of growth models that can be explored and the conclusions about the superiority of alternative theories of ORF development. This study aims to describe within-year growth in ORF across grades 1-8 and examine the extent to which grade level and student characteristics moderate average growth. Method. ORF was modeled with hierarchical linear modeling using six to eight testing occasions for approximately 1600 students across grades 1-8 (n ≈ 200 in each grade). We determined best fit model of growth across grades and examined how student characteristics (e.g., special education status and demographics) moderated growth estimates. Results. Results indicate that in addition to grade level differences in intercepts, most grades showed significantly different instantaneous growth rates, with lower grades outpacing upper grades. Upper grades also demonstrated a weakening of the deceleration trend witnessed in lower grades. In addition, intercepts varied on average for students receiving special education or limited English services, but grade-level differences in the intercept differences were not consistent and no significant differences in growth rates were observed. Results suggest expected patterns of oral reading fluency growth change subtly across grades one to eight and that intercept differences do not go along with differences in growth.
Maryse Bianco (Université P. Mendès France)Aurélie Nardy; françoise Toffa; Martine Rémond - Reading comprehension strategies from 8 to 11 years old children: what develops?
Purpose: To study the development of reading comprehension strategies in children aged from 8; to 11; using a thinking aloud methodology. Method: 50 children (25 grade 3 and 25 grade 5) read aloud 2 narrative texts. At 6 pre-defined test points, they were asked to say aloud what they understood at that point in the story. Each verbal protocol was parsed into clauses that were categorized according to a coding scheme inspired from previous research (Kendeou & Van den Broek, 2005; Magliano & Millis, 2003). Reading and oral comprehension, reading fluency, working memory capacities as well as cognitive development (verbal and nonverbal) were further assessed. Results: Results showed several original trends: 1) As soon as grade 3, the children proved to be able to express appropriately their thinking; they used the same pool of strategies described for older children and adults. 2) Appropriate paraphrasing ability was evident by grade 3 (52% of the protocols) but erroneous paraphrasing halved from grade 3 to grade 5. 3) Monitoring and inference strategies revealed a great inter-individual variability, both within and between grades; it increasing with age (from 16% at grade 3 to 26,5% at grade 5). 4) Monitoring and inference strategies elicited during reading positively predicted overall reading comprehension performance (ΔR2=.06, p=.05) while erroneous paraphrasing was negatively related to comprehension ((ΔR2=.04, p=.05). Conclusion: The results extend the existing research by showing that reading strategies can be elicited with young children and that they distinguish high and low comprehenders early on the process of reading acquisition.
Florence Binamé (Florence Binamé)Aurélie Defraigne; Martine Poncelet - The acquisition of new orthographic representations among dyslexic children
Purpose - In developmental dyslexia, spelling deficits have been much less explored than reading deficits, although the former tend to be more persistent than the latter. The aim of this study was to explore the ability to acquire new orthographic representations through different learning conditions in dyslexic children. Method - Fifteen dyslexic French-speaking children (mean chronological age: 11; 4 years; mean reading age: 7; 6 years), 15 chronological age (CA) and 15 reading age (RA) matched controls participated in the study. Their ability to acquire new orthographic representations was assessed through different learning conditions: isolated pseudowords decoding, text reading with embedded target pseudowords and writing of pseudowords after presentation in their visual form associated or not to a semantic representation. In each condition, ten target pseudowords were presented six times. Orthographic learning was measured by a dictation of the targets immediately after the learning session and one week later. Results - Orthographic learning of dyslexics was significantly impaired and decreased more over time relative to CA group but not to RA group. Otherwise, dyslexics, as other groups, performed better when learning conditions consisted in writing pseudowords than in decoding them. Furthermore the condition associating a semantic representation to the pseudowords did not enhance the performances in any group. Conclusions - These results confirm that decoding abilities are essential to develop orthographic representations and suggest that writing is a powerful learning mechanism in dyslexic readers as in RA and CA children. By contrast, a semantic representation seems not to support the development of orthographic representations.
Katherine Binder (Mount Holyoke College); Khanh Vy Thi Nguyen; Scott Ardoin - Mindless reading in 2nd graders: An eye movement analysis
Purpose: We examined the eye movement behavior of children as they read passages, and we detected when children engaged in off-task behavior. Thus, we examined the reading and "non-reading" behavior of children. Method: We measured the eye movements of 135 2nd grade children while they silently read a passage. We did tell the children they would be asked comprehension questions, and they should do their best reading. We also collected data on their decoding and comprehension abilities. Results: While most of the children did engage in systematic reading of the passage, nearly 25% of them stopped reading at some point during the passage. That is, they might have had typical eye movements for a few lines of the story, but at some point, their eye movements became erratic, and they either sped up their reading rate (skipping many words in the process) or they made random fixations throughout the rest of the passage. Our first goal of the study was to see if we could reliably identify the "non-readers". Then, we examined several aspects of the reading record to determine which eye movement behaviors changed as a result of the non-reading behavior. As a final goal, we tried to identify the cognitive profiles of children who engaged in non-reading behavior. Conclusions: We were able to reliably differentiate non-readers from readers, and the non-read sections differed from read sections on a number of eye movement measures. These findings have implications for the practice of sustained silent reading in the classroom.
Siti Syuhada Binte Faizal (); Rebecca Treiman - Doubling medial consonants: The role of statistical learning in spelling
*Purpose: Medial consonant doubling in English spelling is especially difficult. Even university students may be unsure whether to double the "l" in "trellis". In English, there are statistical patterns in medial consonant doubling, including more doubling after tense vowels than lax vowels, more doubling of consonants such as "b" and "p" than of "v", and less doubling before Latinate endings. We studied the influence of these patterns and spelling ability on participants' doubling of consonants in nonwords. *Method: We gave two nonword spelling tasks to 64 US university students, all native English speakers. In the choice task, participants heard a nonword and chose between two options, such as "vonid" or "vonnid". In the free task, they wrote down its best spelling. We analyzed the data using mixed-effects modeling, including item- and individual-level data in the same model. *Results: In both tasks, participants doubled more after tense vowels than lax vowels, and this was especially true for better spellers. They also doubled more with consonants such as "b" and "p" than "v". Participants were less likely to double before Latinate endings such as "ic" than non-Latinate endings such as "ow". Participants also doubled more when a nonword rhymed with a real word that has a doubled medial consonant. *Conclusions: University students appear to be sensitive to the doubling patterns in English. Even at the university level, however, spelling ability influences sensitivity to the preceding vowel context. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of statistical learning in spelling.
Jay Blanchard (Arizona State University)Herman Garcia; Kim Atwill; Glen Powell - The role of spanish proficiency in patterns of english reading skills development: a five year (k-4th) successive cohort study
Purpose: This study examined the role of Spanish proficiency in patterns of English reading skills development across five years (K-4th) of school with successive cohorts of children. Method: All children were Spanish-speaking with minimal or no English skills upon kindergarten entry. Children's Spanish proficiency in vocabulary and phonemic awareness was evaluated in kindergarten. Using scores from these assessments, children were divided into three groups: Group BB children were below proficient in Spanish vocabulary and phonemic awareness; Group AB children were at or above proficient in vocabulary yet below in phonemic awareness; and Group AA children were at or above proficient in both vocabulary and phonemic awareness. (Note: Small sample size did not permit a BA group.) From kindergarten through fourth grade, children completed English reading skill assessments linked to vocabulary, phonemic awareness, word reading fluency, and reading achievement. Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric analyses were used to evaluate ranked differences between the groups with follow-up Mann-Whitney U-tests to investigate pair-wise differences. Results: The analyses yielded varied patterns of kindergarten Spanish proficiency influence, with differences related to group, grade level, and assessment. The Group BB patterns revealed children struggling to develop English reading skills and below national norms in reading achievement. The Group AB pattern revealed children making developmental progress in early grades, limited progress in later grades, and performing below national norms in reading achievement. The Group AA pattern revealed children making normative developmental progress. Conclusion: This research documented that, like their monolingual peers, Spanish-speaking children's first language proficiency in kindergarten plays an important role in their English reading skills development patterns.
Catherine Bohn-Gettler (Wichita State University, USA) - Tracking causal information during reading comprehension
Purpose When comprehending narratives, it is important to follow changes as the story unfolds. During reading, adults simultaneously monitor changes in time, space, characters, causation, and goals. However, adolescent readers do not simultaneously monitor these dimensions during reading, and instead only monitor causal changes while appearing to ignore other event shifts (Bohn-Gettler et al., 2011). The current study examined whether manipulating the causal relevance of spatial information would encourage spatial monitoring among adolescent readers. Methods Participants included 107 seventh-grade and 109 adult readers. Participants read narratives in which spatial information was causally relevant (experimental) versus not relevant (control) to the outcome (Sundermeier et al., 2005). After reading the outcome, participants indicated whether a target word representing the spatial information appeared in the story. Reaction times and accuracies were used to determine whether participants reinstated spatial information when causally relevant. Measures of reading comprehension and working memory were also collected. Results Hierarchical linear modeling was used. Although adults reinstated spatial information when it was causally relevant, adolescent readers did not. Among adults, better comprehenders were more likely to reinstate spatial information when it was causally relevant, but this effect did not occur for adolescents. Conclusions Therefore, manipulating causal relevance does not increase the likelihood the adolescents will monitor spatial information. These results support previous work that adolescent readers do not monitor multiple dimensions during the course of reading, but instead focus only on causation as a main effect.
Marie-line Bosse (France, LPNC Grenoble); Nathalie Chaves - Lexical orthographic self-teaching during reading: effect of simultaneous versus sequential presentation
Purpose - The self teaching hypothesis suggests that most knowledge about the orthographic structure of words is acquired incidentally during reading through phonological recoding. The current study assessed whether visual processing skills during reading further contribute to orthographic learning. Method - French children were asked to read pseudo-words, in a context of stories. The whole pseudo-word letter-string was available at once for half of the targets and the pseudo-word's sub-lexical units were discovered in turn for the other half. Presentation time and total time of processing were controlled. The memorisation of target orthographic forms was assessed immediately after reading or seven days after. Results - They showed that more orthographic learning occurred when pseudo-words have been seen in their whole. The whole-word presentation effect was significant whatever the delay between reading and orthographic restitution. This effect depended on neither target reading accuracy nor target reading speed during the reading phase. Moreover, analyses revealed that orthographic learning was independent of presentation time. Conclusions - Beyond recoding skills, the ability to process the entire orthographic letter string at once during reading appears as a significant factor of efficient orthographic learning. This new finding opens the way for a better understanding of the visual-orthographic factor in the self-teaching hypothesis.
Ryan Bowles (Michigan State University)Shayne B. Piasta; Kayla Musielak - Developmental interrelations of uppercase and lowercase letter name knowledge
Purpose: Letter name knowledge (LNK) is well-established as a key predictor and perhaps causal agent in the development of reading. In light of this importance, it is crucial to understand the developmental progression of LNK. In this study, we examine the longitudinal interrelations of uppercase and lowercase letters name knowledge (LNK). Descriptive studies indicate that children tend to know more uppercase letters, suggesting that uppercase LNK temporally precedes lowercase. Some research has speculated that the relation is not merely temporal, but that uppercase LNK facilitates the development of lowercase LNK. However, this facilitation hypothesis has never been tested directly. Method: 289 preschool children were assessed on uppercase and lowercase LNK four times over the course of a school year at roughly 2 month intervals. LNK was assessed by asking the child to identify a single uppercase or lowercase letter displayed on a flashcards. Uppercase letters were assessed first, but within case, letters were randomly ordered, and the order varied across children. Data were analyzed with a cross-lagged regression model. Results: Uppercase LNK predicted lowercase LNK at the next occasion, but lowercase LNK did not predict uppercase LNK. For each additional uppercase letter known, children were predicted to identify .32 additional lowercase letters at the subsequent occasion. By contrast, the opposite cross-lag relation was .10 and not significant. Conclusions: Results supported the facilitation hypothesis. Generalization of uppercase LNK to lowercase appears to be an important way children learn lowercase letters.
Lee Branum-Martin (Department of Psychology); David J. Francis; Lama K. Farran - Phonological awareness in Spanish and English among Spanish-speaking first graders in Mexico and the US
* Purpose Detailed item response investigations are confirming that phonological awareness (PA) items measure a latent trait of PA in English. However, few studies have been conducted on PA items in Spanish. The current study tested theoretically based hypotheses of trait versus method variance in a confirmatory manner in both Spanish and English. * Method Item responses were gathered from 2,832 Spanish-speaking first grade students from 3 projects in the US and Mexico, using 4 subtests of the CTOPP and its Spanish counterpart, including blending, segmenting, and elision tasks (78 total items per language). The hypotheses tested were (a) PA is a unitary trait without method variance, (b) PA is represented by related method factors, and (c) PA is a general trait, but with systematic method variance. Cross-language relations were also explored. * Results In Spanish, results among children in Mexico suggest that PA items measure a single latent trait with negligible method variance. For children in US schools, substantial method variance was found in Spanish items. In English, results suggest PA items measure a single latent ability, but with substantial method variance. * Conclusions The results corroborate prior findings that PA items in each language measure a single ability in Spanish speaking children, with method variance particular to the tasks used. Method variance in Spanish appeared to differ across US and Mexican samples. Cross-language findings imply that method variance for children at this age is non-ignorable, and may be due to familiarity or instruction.
M. Anne Britt (Northern Illinois Univesity); Jennifer Wiley; Thomas Griffin; Brent Steffens; Project READi Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Inquiry Group - Instructional manipulations to support comprehension of history
Purpose: In recent decades, we have learned a great deal about how to improve basic literacy skills of decoding and sentence-level comprehension. However, less is known about how we should instruct students to read-for-understanding in the disciplines. Modeled after Document-Based Questions on the AP History Exam, we have designed reading-for-understanding tasks to examine the challenges of comprehension in high school history classes. Method: Sixty-eight high schoolers and 73 undergraduates read a set of several document and used them to write an essay about the Panamanian Revolution with each presenting part of an underlying causal model with few explicit connections. Several different kinds of writing prompts were tested and comprehension was measured in relation to the completeness of coverage of the causal model of the event. Results and Conclusions: In an initial study, we found that high schoolers included a limited number of causal factors in their essays (M=26%) and that prompting students to write "whether Roosevelt was responsible for the revolution" led to an average of 10% fewer concepts mentioned than prompting them to write about the "causes of the revolution". Follow-up studies are examining the effects of additional prompts that may lead to better integration across multiple documents. Preliminary results suggest that prompting students to a role (e.g., senator at the time) is less effective than prompting students to consider different perspectives about a topic. We will discuss the results of these and other manipulations and how they seem to help high schoolers to integrate information across multiple documents.
Nuria Calet (Universidad de Granada); Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma; Silvia Defior - Effects of fluency training on reading ability in spanish primary school children
Purpose Reading fluency's contribution to reading comprehension has been explained through two main approaches: The theory of automaticity and the contribution of prosody. The first one highlights speed and accuracy as two main factors underlying reading comprehension whereas the second one states that prosody is a relevant factor in reading acquisition. Each one stresses different components of fluency. The purpose of this research was to examine the efficacy of two fluency interventions based on these two approaches. Method 122 Spanish primary-school children (74 second and 48 fourth graders) participated. Children were randomly assigned to automaticity training, prosody training or to a 'no treatment' control group. Intervention consisted of repeated reading with either a focus on speed and accuracy plus phonological and orthographic awareness training or on expressivity plus prosody awareness training according to the group. Multiple measures were used to determine the pre and post-intervention performance in reading fluency, expressiveness and reading comprehension. Results Results showed that both intervention groups made statistically significant gains in word and pseudoword reading accuracy, pseudoword reading time and efficiency compared with the control group. However, the performance achieved by the prosody group was significantly better than automaticity group with respect to levels of expressiveness when reading, prosody reading comprehension, word and pseudoword stress awareness and punctuation task. Conclusions Focus in reading with expressiveness was found to be a superior repeated reading method. The importance of prosody to reading comprehension in the primary grades is debated. The implications of multidimensional fluency for instruction are discussed.
Mary Beth Calhoon (Lehigh University)Yaccov Petscher - Individual and group sensitivity to remedial reading program design: Examining reading gains across three middle school reading projects
Unlike beginning reading programs, there exists a dearth in adolescent literacy on how to best develop remedial reading program. When considering what might be effective for this population there is a critical need to understand how they develop reading skills and the factors that impact success in learning to read at this age level Therefore, the purpose of this analysis was to explore group and individual gains of adolescents (6th - 8th grades; N = 175) with reading difficulties (RD) response to three different organizational designs of the reading components (RC) within remedial reading programs. Two questions were explored: 1) What is the relationship between individual student gain and the different organizational designs of the RC for adolescents with RD? and 2) How does change in latent composites of phonetic decoding, fluency, and comprehension differ across the different organizational designs of the RC? A two-stage analysis was used to estimate individual differences for the outcomes. First, individual gain categories (low: <1year growth; average: =>1 year growth; and high: =>2 years growth ) were explored using grade equivalency scores derived from 'W-scores' to ascertain educationally meaningful gains. Secondly, latent change scores were used to describe phonics, fluency, comprehension change for each organizational design. Findings demonstrated that unlike beginning readers who respond best to simultaneous instruction in all the reading components, adolescents with RD appear to respond best to a sequential organizational design of the RC. Results will be discussed in terms of the effect of the different organizational designs of the RC within remedial programs.
David Caplan (David Caplan); Gloria Waters; Julie Bertram; Jennifer Michaud; Adam Ostrowski; Dasha Bulova - Determinants of discourse comprehension in middle and high school students
Purpose: Determine which oral language and reading component skills best predict written discourse comprehension. Methods: In 2009, 1,355 middle and high school students were tested on a battery of 11 tasks that assessed five levels of language-sublexical, lexical, morphological, sentential and discourse in each of the auditory and written modalities. Reaction time and accuracy was recorded. 1,836 students were subsequently tested in 2011on a modified version of the battery. Results: Exploratory factor analyses of the 2009 data led to a confirmatory factor analysis of the tests of sublexical, lexical, morphological and sentential processing in the 2011 data and resulted in 3 reliable factors in both modalities in middle and high school-recognizing forms of words, understanding words, and structuring and comprehending sentences. Structural Equation Models were formed on the basis of the CFAs to determine the relationship between these factors and written discourse comprehension. In middle school, the strongest determinant of written passage comprehension was understanding written simple and morphologically complex words, while in high school the strongest determinant was understanding written complex words and sentences. In both middle and high school the ability to recognize the forms of auditory and written words and understanding of words and sentences presented auditorily only showed indirect effects on written passage comprehension. Conclusions: The factors that best predict written passage comprehension reflect higher level language processing skills, and change across middle and high school with the effects of spoken language abilities seen through the mediating effects they have on written language .
Marketa Caravolas (Bangor University); Arne Lervag; Betty Mousikou; Charles Hulme - Patterns and predictors of growth in silent reading in three alphabetic orthographies: Different rates, similar patterns.
Purpose - The patterns of growth in efficiency of silent word reading and its predictors were investigated in a 2.5-year multi-language study of school beginners learning relatively inconsistent (English) and highly consistent (Czech and Spanish) alphabetic orthographies. Two questions were investigated: 1) Does reading development in English differ from that in the consistent orthographies? 2) Do phoneme awareness (PA), letter knowledge (LK) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) (measured in preschool) explain variance in growth in both the early and later phases of development, and do their impacts differ as a function of orthographic consistency? Method - A total of 523 children (English n= 185, Czech n = 150, Spanish n = 188) were assessed on the test of word reading efficiency six times (twice a year) over 30 months - beginning in preschool. Results/conclusions - The development of reading in these orthographies fitted a piecewise growth model with four growth constructs (initial reading status, early linear slope, acceleration of early linear growth and later linear growth) very well. All groups performed similarly on the reading measure at the start of the study, but further growth differed. The Spanish and Czech children had a slower start, followed by faster acceleration (relative to English) once formal reading instruction began, and then underwent a phase of slower growth in second grade. The English children showed steadier development throughout the whole period. PA and RAN predicted early growth equally strongly in all three orthographies, but LK, while predictive in all groups, was more important in the consistent orthographies.
Joanne Carlisle (University of Michigan) - Discussant
Joanne Carlisle will be the discussant for this symposium and will reflect upon the findings and themes related to the presentations. She will also address future directions related to unraveling the relationship between morphology and literacy.
Robyn Carson (University of Ottawa); Alain Desrochers - How grapheme type, word length and word frequency influence word reading accuracy across the primary grades: Evidence from French
Purpose: This study investigates the effects of four variables on word reading accuracy of children in Grades 1 through 6: word graphemic structure, length, and frequency, and school grade. Word reading accuracy was expected to be greater for shorter words with higher frequencies and simpler graphemic structures. The effect of these variables was expected to decrease with years of schooling. Method: A sample of 817 French-speaking students from Grade 1 to 6 were asked to read 192 French words orally. The stimulus list was constructed from a factorial design involving the presence of 4 different types of words (regular words with simple graphemes, with complex graphemes, with contextual graphemes, and irregular words with exceptional graphemes), 2 levels of word frequency (high versus low), and 2 levels of word length (4 versus 8 letters). Data collection was carried out in a quiet room in children's schools. Results: A mixed-model ANOVA revealed a significant effect of all four independent variables. Words were read more accurately when they had a simpler graphemic structure, a higher frequency of use, and when they were shorter; accuracy increased from Grade 1 to Grade 6. Significant interactions indicated that the frequency effect was particularly pronounced with inconsistent words, and the effect of all item variables decreased as years of schooling increased. Conclusion: These results reflect the magnitude of the obstacles young children need to overcome when they learn to read a semi-regular language, like French, with several types of graphemic units.
Séverine Casalis (Université de Lille 3 Charles de Gaulle, Lille, France) - Morphological processing in delayed readers
Purpose : The present study examines whether and how morphological information is processed by dyslexic readers in word reading. There is some evidence that dyslexic readers do process morpheme-sized units rather than grapheme-sized units when decoding. Previous studies suggest that dyslexic children make a greater use of morpheme. However, extant results do not specify (1) whether morphological information is automatically activated in dyslexia, suggesting a morphological organisation of the lexicon or (2) if the activation of morphological information is based on similar properties in dyslexic and normal readers. The aim of the present study is to investigate morphological organisation of the lexicon in dyslexic children via the masked priming paradigm. Method: 20 dyslexic children (11 years old), 20 reading age control normal readers, and 20 chronological age normal readers participated in the study. They performed a visual lexical decision task under masked priming. Three categories of primes were used: morphological, orthographic control and unrelated. In addition, two prime durations were used, 55 ms and 80 ms. Results: No priming was observed at the shortest prime duration in the dyslexic group and the reading age control group, while the older normal readers displayed morphological priming. At the 80 ms prime duration, priming was observed in all groups but the amplitude of priming differed across groups. The observation of morphological priming in dyslexics confirms that morphological activation in this group is also quick and automatic. Conclusion: Methods of investigation of morphological processing in dyslexics are discussed.
Christina Cassano (Boston University) - Patterns of growth in phonological awareness and vocabulary during preschool and kindergarten: An individual growth modeling approach
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine: (1) how phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge change with time for each child and; (2) if the differences in phonological awareness (e.g., initial status, direction and/or rate of change) are related to vocabulary knowledge (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional) and grammatical skill. Theoretical Framework: Vocabulary accounts for unique amounts of variance in phonological awareness tasks in preschool and kindergarten (e.g. Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). The lexical restructuring model (LRM) is one explanation for the relations between PA and vocabulary. LRM suggests that phonological awareness develops as a function of vocabulary knowledge, because as the size of child's lexicon grows, more attention to segmental information is required to detect differences in phonologically similar words (e.g., cat, kite, cut). Thus, phonological representations become increasingly more specified, first, as syllables, then as onsets/rimes, and ultimately as phonemes. Whether or not a larger vocabulary provides a benefit to the development of PA, and which type of vocabulary knowledge may be most beneficial, is not well understood. Additionally, practitioners often overemphasize PA instruction because of its influence on word recognition skill (Paris, 2005). The problem is, other learning, such as vocabulary and content knowledge, which are critical for longer term reading comprehension, may not receive adequate attention. A strong emphasis on PA may result in short term word recognition gains; however, if vocabulary is neglected, there are likely to be significant negative consequences for future reading comprehension. Method: Data were collected from (N=61) children ages 30-71 months recruited from two suburban preschools and divided into three aged cohorts (3-, 4-, and 5-year olds). Standardized and researcher-designed phonological awareness, vocabulary, and grammar assessments were administered every three months over a year (baseline and 3,6, and 9 months later). Results: Preliminary analyses indicate that receptive (nonlinear) , expressive vocabulary as well as grammatical skill are significant predictors of phonological awareness (p=.03, p<.001, and p=.001 respectively); however, they vary in the timing of their influence. Receptive vocabulary had a additional significant effect on the rate of growth in PA for 3-year olds (p=.021) reflecting a steeper rate of growth for this age group. Expressive vocabulary had a negative slope for 3-year olds reflecting a shallower rate of growth for them (p=.007) and a steeper rate of growth for the 4- and 5-year olds. The intercept, linear term for receptive vocabulary, definitional vocabulary and gender were not significant in the growth curve models. Conclusions: Overall, the observed variation in PA growth rates are positively related to receptive and expressive vocabulary, and grammatical skill. There is variation in the way receptive and expressive vocabulary are related to growth in PA that is tied to age-group and consistent with vocabulary development (receptive precedes productive language) as well as the lexical restructuring model (e.g., Metsala & Walley, 1989). Consistent with previous research, definitional vocabulary, essential for reading comprehension, was not related to growth in phonological awareness indicating that depth of knowledge did not provide additional "payoff" for PA (Ouellette, 2006).
Hugh W. Catts (Florida State University)Diane Nielsen; Mindy Bridges; Yi Syuan Liu - Multi-step approach to screening for reading disabilities
Purpose: In this study, we compared a two-step screening process for early identification of reading disabilities to a traditional approach in which a full screening battery is administered to all children. Method: All eligible kindergarten children in a midsized school district were selected in two consecutive years (N=366). Children were administered a battery of screening measures at the beginning of the school year. This battery included Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) and Initial Sound Fluency (ISF; DIBELS), RAN, sound matching (CTOPP), sentence imitation (TOLD-2P) and several other experimental measures. Reading outcome was assessed at the end of second grade by the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised. Results: Preliminary results are available for Cohort 1; Cohort 2 data available by May. In the first analysis, logistic regression procedures were employed to find the best combination of predictors of reading outcome. In a second analysis, a two-step approach was taken. First, we used screening and outcome data to identify a cut score on LNF, above which, almost all children turned out to be good readers. Next, we used logistic regression analyses to find the best combination of predictors for those children performing below the LNF cut score. Results showed that the two-step process eliminated the need to give the full battery to 1/3 of the children and resulted in only a small loss in overall accuracy compared to a one-step traditional approach. Conclusion: Results suggest that a multi-step screening approach can be an efficient and accurate alternative to a traditional screening approach.
Gina Cervetti (University of Michigan); Elfrieda H. Hiebert; P. David Pearson; Alison Billman - Factors that Influence the Difficulty of Science Words
The research on vocabulary acquisition offers well-tested ideas about general characteristics of instruction that result in vocabulary learning. Our understandings about what makes particular words easier or harder to learn, and how that knowledge might impact the selection and instruction of words, are less well-developed, particularly in content-area instruction. This two-part study examines the relationships between word characteristics, word knowledge, and word learning in the domain of science at the elementary level. Study 1 is an exploratory study considering the relationship between the characteristics of 92 science words and second- through fourth-grade students' knowledge of these words before a science instructional intervention. We used regression analysis to examine the predictive value of seven characteristics of words to pretest score on measures of vocabulary knowledge. These characteristics, which represent research-based linguistic indices of word complexity, are polysemy, domain specificity, concreteness, part of speech, length, frequency in written language, and frequency of morphological family. Four of these characteristics predicted students' knowledge of words prior to instruction (frequency, word length, polysemy, and morphological frequency). These results suggest that rare and multiple-meaning words may be unknown to students and may require different forms of instruction. In Study 2, we used the word characteristics to predict both knowledge before instruction and also growth in knowledge during an eight-week science-literacy instructional intervention. Results of Study 2 are pending. This two-part study contributes to understanding about frameworks for selecting words for vocabulary instruction in science.
You-Hsuan Chang ()Yi-Fen Su, Hsueh-Chih Chen - Error analysis of Chinese character recognition among learners of Chinese as a second language with different levels of Chinese vocabulary sizes
Purpose: The study intended to analyze types of errors during Chinese character recognition and to compare differences in error types between CSL learners with smaller and larger Chinese vocabulary sizes. Methods: 62 CSL learners were recruited and assigned in two groups according to their Chinese vocabulary sizes. The targeted characters were randomly selected out of 6097 frequent characters in the Chinese Orthography Database (Chen, Chang, Chou, Song, Chang, 2011) and divided into ten levels according to their frequencies. Students were asked to type the pronunciations of characters using phonetic symbols. The errors made by the students were classified into eight types: graphic error (including graphic similarity, radical deriving, radical analogy), phonetic error, semantic error, graphic-then-phonetic error, semantic-then-phonetic error, graphic-then-semantic error, graphic-phonetic-then-semantic error, and miscellaneous. The scorer reliability of error analysis was .96. Results: The study found that the three most common error types were graphic confusion, phonetic confusion, and graphic-then-phonetic confusion. Moreover, phonetic confusion was the highest-rated error among the group with smaller Chinese vocabulary sizes. Furthermore, regarding subtypes of graphic confusion, in both groups, the most common errors were those of graphic similarity, the least common were of radical analogy. Conclusions: The results reveal that the character recognition error patterns of CSL is the same as children in Taiwan, meaning children with smaller Chinese vocabulary sizes more commonly made phonetic errors. As their Chinese vocabulary sizes increases, they implicitly acquire knowledge of the sound value of phonetic radicals, which they may use to infer the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters.
Li-Yun Chang (University of Pittsburgh); Hsueh-Chih Chen; Susan Dunlap - Orthographic configuration and radical position effects in learning Chinese by Spanish and Thai speakers
Purpose: This study examined orthographic awareness of Chinese as a factor in Chinese second language (CSL) learning. Based on the Transfer Facilitation Model (Koda, 2008), we hypothesized that first-language background would affect Chinese character identification via a visuospatial orthographic perspective, separate from the grapheme-phoneme mapping process. Methods: CSL learners with contrasting orthographies in L1-Spanish and Thai-participated in two experiments that assessed their knowledge of Chinese orthographic structure. They were asked to compare two artificial characters and choose the one that was more like a real character. Experiments 1-1 and 1-2 investigated learners' awareness about configuration types in a legal-illegal structure comparison and a high-low legal frequency comparison, respectively. Experiment 2 examined learners' awareness concerning radical position. Results: Both L1 groups exhibited awareness about configuration types and radical positions of Chinese characters. In Experiment 1-1, Thai speakers had a higher rate of detection for legal configurations than Spanish speakers. In Experiment 1-2, there was a main effect of frequency, though not in the expected direction. Participants preferred medium frequency configuration more than high frequency configuration; however, low frequency was least preferred, as expected. The results of Experiment 2 showed the prominent role of position-based radical frequency as well as the different patterns between Thai and Spanish speakers. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the psychological functioning of configuration type and radical position for learners of CSL. Moreover, it suggests that L1 background has an effect on the acquisition of visuospatial information in Chinese characters.
Yu-Jen Chang ()Chih-Yu Yang; Shih-Jay Tzeng; Hwa-Wei Ko; Chih-Chien Yang - Rapid Naming and Character Recognition Predict Developmental Trajectory of Children's Oral Reading Fluency
Purpose This longitudinal study investigated the developmental trajectories of Chinese oral reading fluency in curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and general outcome measurement (GOM) from 1st grade to 6th grade. Moreover, we also examined how these two growth rates of oral reading fluency are related to non-verbal IQ, phonological awareness, and rapid naming. Method 115 first graders, 113 third graders and 117 fifth graders were administered two types of oral reading fluency seven times in subsequent two year, along with measures of rapid naming, phonological awareness, character recognition, and non-verbal IQ in the beginning. Using piecewise growth curve analysis, models of growth in three different grade phases (1st-2nd, 3rd-4th, and 5th-6th) were linked for the complete developmental trajectories of oral reading fluency, and then the significant predictors of growth rates of CBM and GOM were identified. Results Results indicated that although oral reading fluencies of CBM and GOM improved with age developmentally in elementary school-age children, the rate of growth in GOM was larger than CBM one. Regardless of grade phrases the participants were in, both naming speed and character recognition were important for the initial status of oral reading fluency. However, among these predictors, character recognition uniquely appeared to have significant influence on the growth rate of performance in 1st-2nd phase, only naming speed in the 3rd-4th phase, and none in 5th-6th phase. Conclusions Findings suggest that naming speed and character recognition are important predictors of reading fluency development before the end of 4th grade.
Michelle YH Chang ()Nora Raschle; Nadine Gaab - Examining functional brain differences in pre-readers at risk for dyslexia during a classical Eriksen Flanker task
Purpose: Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, poor spelling and decoding. There is strong evidence for a genetic basis. Structural and functional brain alterations have been reported in children with a diagnosis of DD and pre-reading children with a familial risk of DD. To date, the relationship between reading ability and executive function skills remains underexplored. In the current study, we used a variation of a classical executive functioning task in pre-reading children with (FHD+) and without (FHD-) familial risk of DD. Methods: 30 right-handed children (16FHD+/14FHD-; mean age: 5.9y) completed standardized psychometric testing. Whole brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed during a modified Eriksen flanker task (response inhibition) with congruent, incongruent and neutral trials in an event-related fMRI design. Results: FHD- children performed significantly better (p<0.05) than FHD+ children on behavioral assessments of expressive language, phonological processing and rapid naming, but not nonverbal IQ. Furthermore, during in-scanner performance all children demonstrated a significant flanker effect (p<0.05). Preliminary imaging results revealed decreased activation in bilateral dorsolateral pre-frontal areas of the brain in FHD+ compared to FHD- children for the 'incongruent > fixation' contrast (p<0.001). Conclusion: Our results suggest that pre-reading children with a family history of DD already show a disruption during response inhibition in brain areas that are commonly used in typically developing children. Future studies will look at the longitudinal developments of these networks and its relationship to developing reading skills.
Wan-Chen Chang (Graduate Institute of Learning and Instruction, National Central University); Yu-Min Ku; Chien-Hui Lin; Chien-Che Hsu - Investigating the role of vocabulary knowledge in the reading comprehension of early grade school students
Purpose The relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension has been the focus of study for a long tradition. Although most of the findings indicated that readers' vocabulary size, which generally refers to their breadth of vocabulary knowledge, has strong correlation with their reading comprehension, relatively few studies investigated how other dimensions, such as the depth of vocabulary knowledge, the receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge, contribute to the development of students' reading comprehension. The main purpose of the study was to examine the role of these four dimensions of vocabulary knowledge in children's reading comprehension. Method Participants of this study involved 52 first graders and 56 second graders. There were a series of measures developed to assess students' receptive and expressive vocabulary size and their breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Other variables, such as individual differences in cognitive abilities and home literacy backgrounds were also investigated. Results The preliminary results of the study showed that (1) significant relationships were found between children's four dimensions of vocabulary knowledge; (2) children's reading comprehension has a stronger association with their receptive vocabulary than expressive vocabulary; and (3) the results of hierarchical regression analysis showed that 58.3% of reading comprehension scores can be explained by the four dimensions of vocabulary knowledge. Conclusion The breadth of receptive vocabulary knowledge emerged as a significant predictor of the reading comprehension development of lower grades elementary school students. These findings are in line with previous studies and the more likely explanation rests in the nature of reading.
Erin A. Chaparro (Center on Teaching and Learning, University of Oregon); Yonghan Park - Evaluating equating methods for progress monitoring oral reading fluency passages in second grade
Purpose. Technical adequacy aspects of curriculum-based measures, particularly oral reading fluency, have been established but alternate form equivalency remains unresolved. The purpose of this study is (a) to investigate the comparability of one set of oral reading fluency (ORF) probes and examine potential form effects on estimating ORF level and slope, (b) to explore several approaches to equating CBM scores, and (c) to explore the technical issues for applying these equating methods to oral reading fluency. Method. Participants in this study were second grade students (n=162). Three different equating methods were applied: mean-equating, linear-equating, and equipercentile-equating (Kolen & Brennan, 2004; Livingston, 2004). We explored equivalency of ORF progress monitoring passages in two situations: level estimation within a single assessment (mixed-model ANOVA approach) and growth estimation across multiple assessments (multilevel growth modeling). We examined the same models using both raw scores and equated scores from three equating methods. Results. We found significant passage form effects on the level estimation of ORF scores and significantly different growth patterns when using raw scores. We found all three equating methods improved and removed form effects from estimations of oral reading fluency. Equipercentile equating outperformed the other two equating methods. Conclusions. This study offers evidence that commonly used sets of progress monitoring ORF passages are not equivalent, possibly leading to inaccurate instructional recommendations. The findings suggest equating methods can be used to create equivalent ORF probes for the purpose of estimating student performance levels and growth. Practical implications for equating methods of CBM are discussed.
Victoria Chen (McGill University); John R. Kirby - Effect of Temporal Arrangement of Audio and Image in Multimedia Learning Theory
Purpose. To examine the effects of prior knowledge and mode of presentation on multimedia learning. Method. Participants were 130 first year university psychology students. They completed a prior knowledge test in art history. The participants were then given a lesson on Renaissance paintings with audio presented before, with, or after each painting. Following the presentation, they were tested on three paintings from the lesson (recall images) and three new paintings (transfer images). Results. For recall images, the text corresponding to each painting was analyzed into main ideas and details (Kirby et al., 2011). For transfer images, main ideas and details that were common among the images within each image set were used as the scoring scheme. Mixed model ANOVAs showed that general prior knowledge had no effect on recall but did have an effect on transfer images. Temporal arrangement of audio and image presentation had a significant effect on both recall and transfer images, with scores highest when audio was presented with image; this was contrary to the hypotheses. Further investigation revealed a subset of participants who had specific knowledge of the presented material, and this group did show the hypothesized Expertise Reversal Effect (Kalguya et al., 2003). Conclusion. Previous multimedia learning studies have presented images that were derived from text; however this study presented text that was derived from images. These results challenge some of the principles of Multimedia Learning Theory (Mayer, 1997; Schnotz, 2001). Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for instructors and students.
Hsin-Chin Chen (National Chung Cheng University); Pei-Wen Lan - Brain activation patterns of rapid automatized naming in poor readers: An optical imaging study
Purpose The present study investigated different brain activation patterns in rapid automatized naming (RAN) between children with normal and poor reading abilities. Studies in normal adults using fMRI suggested that at least two reading systems were involved in rapid naming: an anterior system including inferior frontal cortex and a posterior system involving occipitotemporal and parietotemporal areas (Misra, Katzir, Wolf, & Poldrack, 2004). Although performance on RAN has been suggested to reliably predict reading ability, no previous hemodynamic study has specifically examined the neural correlates of RAN in children. Method A group of normal children and a matched group of poor readers were tested individually. A rapid naming task with numbers presented serially was applied. Children were to name the numbers out as quickly and as accurately as possible. During the task, neural correlates of rapid naming were monitored using near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS measures blood flow changes in the brain regions of interest after near-infrared light penetrates the scalp, is absorbed and then scattered. Both the anterior and posterior regions suggested by Misra et al. (2004) were examined. Results and Conclusions Children with poor reading abilities generally performed slower and less accurately in RAN than did the normal readers. Comparing to the brain activation patterns of children with normal reading abilities, whereas poor readers showed weaker activations in the anterior system, indicating their weaker subvocal rehearsal, stronger activations in the posterior regions were found, suggesting their increasing efforts in compensating deficits in integrating symbols and names.
Ju-Ling Chen (National Taiwan Normal University);Yao-Ting Sung;Shin-Ting Tsai; Jyun-gwang Chen; Ming-Da Wu - The web-based reading behavior of the students in the 5th and 6th grade: Evidence from eye-movement data
Components which had never appeared in the linear text-such as search engine, hyperlink, and multiple media- are now brought into reading materials as the Internet developed (Coiro, 2004). However, little empirical research has been done on the hypertext reading (Coiro & Dobler, 2007). This study aims to explore whether the hypertext reading behavior differs from that of reading the linear text by tracking participants' eye movement during their reading process. Forty-six students in the 5th and 6th grade were divided into two groups (23 poor readers, 23 good readers) based on their reading abilities. Each group was presented with two linear texts and two hypertexts, with a free-viewing and an answer-finding tasks for each text (N=4). The eye movement data were collected by Tobii x120, and the data on the headings, topic sentences, hyperlink, figure, and paragraphs were analyzed using ANOVAs. The result shows that when reading the hypertexts, both groups showed more fixation times but shorter fixation duration in the answer-finding task, compared to the results of the free-viewing task. When reading the linear text, the participants still showed shorter fixation duration in the answer-finding task but no significant difference was found in the fixation times. In conclusion, participants had a rapid and flexible information integrating process when reading hypertext, which suggests that self-regulated reading occurs more frequently while reading the hypertext. The present study provides significant empirical evidence in support of the behavioral differences between hypertext and linear text reading.
Becky Xi Chen (OISE/University of Toronto); Yang Cathy Luo; Esther Geva; Alexandra Gottardo - Learning to Read Chinese in China and in Canada: A Cross-cultural Comparison
Purpose: Previous research has shown that linguistic and cognitive factors are important for learning to read Chinese (McBride-Chang et al, 2003; 2005; Ho et al, 2007). Taking a cross-cultural perspective, the present study compares models of Chinese reading for children in China and in Canada. Method: Participants included 93 children in China and 91 Chinese-Canadian children in Canada. The Canadian children were recruited from Chinese heritage language programs. All children were in kindergarten or Grade 1. The children in both countries were tested using a battery of Chinese measures, including character reading, oral expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic processing. Results: In both countries, orthographic processing was related to character reading whereas morphological awareness was related to vocabulary. These findings are consistent with previous research involving children in China. There were also two novel findings. First, phonological awareness accounted for more variance in character reading in China. This might be due to the fact that Chinese children are taught Pinyin, a transparent alphabetic system used to transcribe character pronunciation. Second, vocabulary was more closely associated with character reading in the Chinese-Canadian children. A possible explanation is that Chinese-Canadian children develop oral language and character reading skills simultaneously. Additionally, since there is more variance in oral language proficiency in Chinese-Canadian children, it may be a better predictor of character reading in this group than in Chinese children. Conclusions: Results of the study suggest that the role of linguistic or cognitive factors in reading is influenced by the language learning environment.
Helen Chen Kingston (Harvard Graduate School of Education)James S. Kim; Thomas G. White; Lisa Hall Foster - Do children's oral retell scores from narrative and informational texts predict transfer to standardized reading comprehension tests?
Purpose: This study was part of a larger experimental evaluation of Project READS, a scaffolded summer reading intervention. In the end of third-grade, children received 6 reading comprehension lessons using narrative and informational texts. The purpose of this study was to examine whether oral retell scores predicted performance on far transfer measures of reading comprehension. Method: To assess comprehension of the lesson texts, teachers called a subsample of third-grade children during the summer and asked children to provide an oral retell of the two lesson books. Each retell was conducted by phone, recorded, and transcribed. Transcripts were coded for central and non-central content units, which convey the story content through causally or purposefully connected events (Beck et al., 1982). Results: Our results indicate that performance on oral retell tasks predicts performance on far transfer measures of reading comprehension. The percentage of total content units recalled from the narrative and expository texts were positive predictors (Beta = .19) of fall comprehension scores after controlling for pretest scores. In addition, the percentage of content units recalled on the narrative text was also a predictor of narrative comprehension subtest scores (Beta = .20). However, the percentage of content units recalled on the expository text was not a significant predictor of expository subtest scores (Beta = .10). Conclusions: Scores on oral retell tasks appear to predict children's ability to comprehend far transfer passages on narrative text, but not expository text. The results underscore the need to develop near transfer measures of expository text comprehension. Beck, I., Omanson, R., and McKeown, M. (1982). An instructional redesign of reading lessons: Effects on comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 17 (4), 462-481.  STATA analyses: (a) des statistics on oral retell, (b) does oral retell predict student outcomes, total comp. (c) narrative comp., (d) expos. comp. **does oral retell predict comp? yes overall, narrative, not exp** (a). um avgper jbper pbper Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max avgper 136 12.28676 8.543274 1 33.5 jbper 137 14.76642 12.62133 1 46 pbper 136 9.75 10.33566 1 31 (b). reg zscore_rc2 zscore_rc1 avgper, beta Source SS df MS Number of obs = 119 F( 2, 116) = 91.40 Model 95.3969482 2 47.6984741 Prob > F = 0.0000 Residual 60.5347182 116 .521851019 R-squared = 0.6118 Adj R-squared = 0.6051 Total 155.931666 118 1.3214548 Root MSE = .72239 zscore_rc2 Coef. Std. Err. T P>t Beta zscore_rc1 .8559881 .0683235 12.53 0.000 .7312139 avgper .026932 .0079682 3.38 0.001 .1972665 _cons -.2947107 .1161099 -2.54 0.012 . © . reg znarr2 znarr1 jbper, beta Source SS df MS Number of obs = 121 F( 2, 118) = 81.51 Model 68.6009645 2 34.3004822 Prob > F = 0.0000 Residual 49.6545896 118 .420801607 R-squared = 0.5801 Adj R-squared = 0.5730 Total 118.255554 120 .985462951 Root MSE = .64869 znarr2 Coef. Std. Err. T P>t Beta znarr1 .6925407 .0575171 12.04 0.000 .7205837 jbper .0154343 .0047251 3.27 0.001 .1954848 _cons -.1752405 .0907688 -1.93 0.056 . (d). reg zexp2 zexp1 pbper, beta Source SS df MS Number of obs = 119 F( 2, 116) = 43.81 Model 50.2347903 2 25.1173951 Prob > F = 0.0000 Residual 66.5030767 116 .573302386 R-squared = 0.4303 Adj R-squared = 0.4205 Total 116.737867 118 .989303958 Root MSE = .75717 zexp2 Coef. Std. Err. t P>t Beta zexp1 .6641755 .0720217 9.22 0.000 .646338 pbper .0100814 .0069014 1.46 0.147 .1023823 _cons -.1864917 .0956224 -1.95 0.054 .
Pui-wan Cheng (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)Sau-ha Sarah Luk; Wai-yee Lai; Ling-po Shiu; Qiuping Wu - Early reading intervention in Chinese for first-grade at-risk readers: effects of intervention intensity
Purpose This study reported the first-year results of a three-year project to investigate the effectiveness of a school-based model of early reading intervention in Chinese for preventing reading failure and improving student outcomes. In particular, two intervention conditions, differing in terms of program intensity (25 hours vs. 50 hours of intervention), were examined. Method Following screening of 512 children, 85 grade-one students (mean age 74.25 months) from four primary schools were selected on the basis of poor performance on Chinese character identification, Chinese word reading fluency and a digit RAN task. They were randomly assigned to three conditions within each school: a 50-hour supplemental intervention program (approximately 150 minutes of instruction per week for 20 weeks), a 25-hour supplemental intervention program (approximately 75 minutes of instruction per week for 20 weeks), and a control condition (traditional school support). Thirty students of average performance (seven to eight per school) were also selected as a comparison group. Children in the intervention conditions received instruction delivered by school teachers in lexical knowledge for word identification, vocabulary building, fluency development and reading comprehension skills. The children's progress was monitored at three time points in the intervention year: pre-, mid- and post-intervention using standardized and curriculum-based measures of character identification, curriculum-based character dictation, morphological construction fluency and reading comprehension. Results Individual growth modeling was the major tool of data analysis to examine intervention effects. The initial growth modeling analyses indicated large variation in growth across schools and students. Observed variation was positively related to individuals' age and character identification performance prior to intervention. Thus, group comparisons of inter-person level models were run controlling for the effect of age, initial character identification performance and school difference. The results showed that the 50-hour intervention group outperformed the at-risk control group at post-intervention on both of the standardized measure and the curriculum-based measure of character identification, and on curriculum-based character dictation. Moderate effect sizes (Cohen's d, from 0.46 for dictation to 0.77 for curriculum-based character identification) were obtained for the 50-hour intervention group. Conclusion The overall results of the study indicated that intervention intensity in terms of duration has a significant effect on program effectiveness. Implications for school practices and for future research are discussed.
Lynette Chesson (Roehampton University);Daisy Powell; Lance Slade; Joseph P. Levy - Investigating the precursors of reading comprehension in light of the Simple View of Reading.
Purpose: The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) suggests two distinct dimensions underlying reading comprehension: decoding skills and language comprehension. This current longitudinal study aims to investigate the precursors of reading comprehension. Language and cognitive abilities at 3 years were related to decoding and language comprehension a year later, to assess the degree to which independent sets of cognitive factors in pre-readers account for the two dimensions of the Simple View of Reading. Method: Time 1: Children (mean age = 3:10) completed a battery of tests assessing language ability and cognitive skills typically associated with reading, such as phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and working memory (WM). Time 2: Children (mean age = 4:10) completed two measures of language comprehension (story retell and comprehension questions) and their decoding skills were assessed. Results: Early cognitive measures (PA, RAN, and WM) significantly correlated to later decoding skills. Additionally, these measures correlated with later language comprehension. However, although early receptive and expressive language ability significantly correlated with later language comprehension, they were not significantly related to children's later decoding skills. Conclusions: PA, RAN, and WM correlated not only with children's later decoding skills but also with later language comprehension. However, early language ability correlated only to language comprehension, but not to decoding. This asymmetry suggests the two dimensions of the Simple View of Reading may not be independent in pre-readers. Further analysis investigating the degree to which executive function accounts for this overlap is discussed.
Fabienne Chetail (LCLD - Université Libre de Bruxelles); Alain Content - Units within words: A comparison between skilled and beginning readers
Purpose - The nature of functional orthographic units is a central issue in visual word recognition, especially with long multisyllabic words. Specifically, the processes and the cues determining orthographic grouping remain far from clear. Here, we investigated the role of written vocalic groups in the perceptual organization of letter strings in French, and how it evolves with reading acquisition. Method - First graders and adults were presented with bisyllabic words of identical length. Half of the words included a silent e between two consonants (schwa words: e.g., biberon, /bibʀõ/) thus entailing three orthographic vocalic groups, while the other half were control words with two vocalic groups (costaud, /kosto/). Participants had to estimate either the number of units or the physical length of the stimuli. Results - Despite being identical to control words in number of letters and phonemes, schwa words biased length judgements in adults and were estimated to be longer than control words. Interestingly, the effect was present in the written modality but also in the spoken modality. In beginning readers, this length bias was either absent or weaker than in adults. Conclusions - Taken together, the data suggest that letter string structuration is driven by vocalic groups and that this process develops with reading experience. Written vocalic groups appear as a strong orthographic cue influencing even spoken word length judgements. We discuss the implications of these results in view of current theories of visual and spoken word recognition in a developmental perspective.
Eunsoo Cho ()Donald Compton; Douglas Fuchs - Predictive validity of dynamic assessment of decoding in forecasting responsiveness to intervention
Purpose: Dynamic assessment (DA) is an assessment procedure that incorporates instruction into testing to measure student's responsiveness to instruction in a single testing session. Empirical evidence of predictive validity in forecasting students' reading suggest the use of DA as a supplementary screening tool in response to intervention (RTI) system. However, whether DA could predict responsiveness, as intended, has rarely been investigated. This study investigates whether the decoding DA could predict students' responsiveness during Tier 2 small group tutoring beyond static decoding measures and Tier 1 progress monitoring (PM) results in RTI system. Methods: 134 first grade nonresponders to Tier 1 general education received Tier 2 small group tutoring. Students' responsiveness were monitored using Word Identification Fluency (WIF).Two series of individual growth curve analyses were conducted using two-level models (time nested within student) to investigate the additive utility of decoding DA in predicting responsiveness (WIF final intercept and slope during Tier 2) beyond the static decoding measures (phonemic decoding efficiency; PDE, word attack; WAT) and the Tier 1 PM final intercept and slope. Results: Results indicated that WAT and PDE could predict only final intercept but not slope. When DA was added to the model, WAT lost its predictive power whereas DA predicted both intercept and slope adding 4-7% of variance explained. Also, DA predicted both intercept and slope controlling for Tier 1 PM and explained 7-13% unique variance. Conclusion: Results suggest the potential use of DA in RTI screening process predicting responsiveness to Tier 2.
Theodore Christ (University of Minnesota) - Impact of modified directions on curriculum-based measurement of oral reading fluency
Purpose: Researchers hypothesized that estimates of oral reading rate - and reading ability - vary as a function of task demands. This study evaluated the impact of alternate task demands using standard and modified directions for Curriculum Based Measurement of Oral Reading (CBM-R). There was a "best", "fast" and "comprehension" reading condition. Validity, reliability and performance level were evaluated within and across conditions. Method: Sixty student participants were sample from each of four primary grades (2nd to 5th; N= 240). In a fully crossed design, each student read a set of three counterbalanced CBM-R passages within three conditions, which provided directions to "do your best reading", "do your fastest reading" and "read so you can respond to questions about the story." Student were also administered the Gates-MacGinity as a measure of broad reading achievement. Researchers analyzed oral reading rate within and across conditions. Results: Results of repeated measures ANOVA and planed post hoc analysis indicate that reading rate was highest in the fastest conditions as compared to either the best or comprehension reading conditions. There were no differences in reading for the best and comprehension condition. Criterion validity and alternate form reliability were robust across conditions. Conclusions: Validity and reliability are robust across standard and modified CBM-R procedures. Students tend to read at similar rates within both comprehension and "best" reading conditions, which is distinct from their fastest reading. Implications are discussed, especially as they related to controlling task demands during repeated assessment and progress monitoring.
Joanna Christodoulou (); Michael Kieffer; Alison Bloomfield; Stephanie N. Del Tufo; Patricia Saxler; John Lymberis; Sonia Cosman; Gadi Geiger; John D.E. Gabrieli - Time to Read: Relationships between rapid naming automaticity, word fluency, and text fluency and reading comprehension
Purpose: The relationships between sublexical, lexical, and sentential indices of reading efficiency to reading comprehension have yet to be characterized. We characterize reading efficiency at the sublexical and lexical levels as automaticity and at the connected text levels as fluency. In the current study, we investigate whether a hypothesized model for the direct and indirect effects of multiple levels of reading efficiency on reading comprehension holds for children in Grades 3 to 8. Reading efficiency was measured using rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters, timed real word and pseudoword reading, and timed connected-text reading for sublexical, lexical and sentential levels, respectively. Method: Multivariate path analysis was used to explore the direct and indirect contributions of automaticity and fluency to reading comprehension. Results: RAN had a direct effect on word level fluency and indirect effects on sentence reading fluency and reading comprehension, but did not have a direct unique effect on these latter outcomes, in contrast to previous studies. Timed real word and pseudoword reading had direct effects on sentence level fluency, but only pseudoword reading fluency had a direct effect on reading comprehension. Grade level differences in relations were only significant for the effect of pseudoword fluency on comprehension, which decreased in magnitude at higher grade levels. Conclusions: The findings contribute a deeper understanding of the relations between levels of automaticity and fluency in developing readers in the elementary and middle school grades.
Micaela Christopher (Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder)Jacqueline Hulslander; Brian Byrne; Stefan Samuelsson; Sally Wadsworth; Richard Olson - Growth modeling of literacy measures in the Colorado longitudinal twin sample: evidence for strong genetic influence Growth modeling of literacy measures in the Colorado longitudinal twin sample: evidence for strong genetic influence
Purpose: Petrill et al. (2010) was the first study to examine genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in the growth of reading ability. They reported that both growth and intercept are driven primarily by environmental influences. The present study expanded upon this pioneering effort by (a) using data from a different twin study and (b) testing the effects of model modifications. Method: The present analyses included 489 twin pairs from Colorado. We used biometric latent growth curve modeling to partial out how much variance in initial reading ability and subsequent growth was driven by genetic and environmental factors. The models traced growth from either the end of kindergarten (for timed sight word reading and decoding) or end of 1st grade (for spelling and reading comprehension) to the end of 4th grade. Our analyses expanded on Petrill et al. by: (a) modeling growth as non-linear, (b) allowing error not captured by the model to be correlated within twin pairs, and (c) covarying potential sources of environmental variance. Results: We found that non-linear growth and correlated errors gave the best model fit and tended to decrease shared environment while increasing genetic contributions (consistent with univariate estimates for each time point). Environmental covariates predicted initial ability but not growth. Conclusion: In contrast to Petrill et al. (2010), our results support a primarily genetic influence on individual differences in both intercept and rate of reading development. We suggest that the different results are mostly driven by our narrower educational range and improved model fit.
Kevin Kien Hoa Chung (Department of Special Education and Counselling, The Hong Kong Institute of Education)Connie S H Ho: David W Chan; Tsang S M; Lee S H - Effect of syntactic and morphological processing skills on reading in Chinese dyslexic adolescents
Purpose - The present study investigated the extent and nature of syntactic and morphological processing deficits in Chinese adolescents with dyslexia. Method - A total of 78 Chinese junior secondary school students, 26 dyslexics, 26 chronological age (CA) and 26 reading level (RL) controls, participated and were administered measures of IQ, word reading, reading comprehension, verbal working memory, vocabulary knowledge, syntactic and morphological processing skills. Results - Dyslexic adolescents scored significantly lower than CA but similarly to RL controls in most measures, especially in the areas of syntactic and morphological processing skills. In regression analyses, syntactic and morphological processing skills were the strongest predictors of ability in word reading and reading comprehension measures. Conclusion - This study highlights important correlates of syntactic and morphological processing skills in Chinese reading acquisition and impairment.
Dennis Ciancio (University of Tennessee, Educational Psychology and Counseling) - Evaluation of an early primary grades vocabulary program
Purpose This report will evaluate a vocabulary program for early primary grades. The program features a novel approach to target-word selection by crossing two empirically-based word databases. Further, the instructional program integrates learning new vocabulary with multiple opportunities for students to use the target words in oral and written form after learning meanings and uses. Method The vocabulary program, designed for kindergarten and first grade students, was implemented in approximately 30 classrooms. It will be evaluated by comparing the implementation classrooms against business-as-usual classrooms. The comparison classrooms received similar professional development and comparable instructional materials. For student achievement, 200 students were evaluated pre- and post-program on proximal measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary as well as distal measures of reading and writing. Quality of instruction outcomes were evaluated through observations of reading and language arts instruction for both groups. The observations, performed at beginning, middle, and end of year, note the quality and quantity of indicators of reading and language arts instruction. Results Preliminary analysis of student achievement data indicates significant differences at pretest on all measures favoring students in the business as usual group. Analysis also indicates a time by program interaction effect favoring program students for proximal measures of vocabulary and writing. Preliminary analysis of quality of instruction indicates higher quality and more frequent vocabulary-related and writing related instruction. Conclusions We conclude that systematic implementation of a vocabulary program likely improves students' vocabulary knowledge and quality of vocabulary instruction. Further research under a more controlled setting is recommended.
Lerida Cisotto (University of Padua, Italy - Department of Educational Sciences); Silvia Del Longo; Nazzarena Novello - Reading-to-write: Written synthesis from multiple sources
Purpose - This exploratory study is part of a larger investigation on the writing competences of Italian undergraduate students. 150 pre-service primary teachers were administered a writing test, made up of eight sections. In this study we focused on the synthesis writing section. We expected that students would have difficulties in selecting relevant information and in connecting concepts from multiple sources. Method - Participants were asked to read three texts on the same topic and write a synthesis of a maximum of 150 words in one hour, integrating the information from the sources. We analyzed some linguistic and textual features using two indexes built in a previous study by Boscolo, Quarisa & Arfè (2007). The measures of comprehension were: number of information units, informativeness and integration, while those of composition were: cohesion and organization. Results - Through descriptive analysis and Pearson's correlations we found significantly high correlations among the three factors of comprehension. The measures of composition and those of comprehension highly correlated as well. Moreover, the analysis of texts showed us that a considerable number of students applied associative strategies while writing, instead of integrating information from the three sources. Conclusions - These results, together with those from the larger investigation, indicate that future primary teachers have relevant difficulties in writing, at the textual and at the process level. Our findings also highlight the need for an improvement in students' writing competences, whose mastery has proved to be essential for academic success and in future professional contexts.
Jonathan Clancy (University of Massachusetts)Jonathan Clancy; Elena Zaretsky - The role of working memory in early spelling: longitudinal kindergarten study
Purpose: Current literature suggests predictive relationship between early reading and spelling acquisition and vocabulary, PA and alphabet knowledge (Schatschneider, Fletcher, Francis, Carlson, & Foorman, 2004). However, less is known about specific role of PM and WM capacity on early spelling attempts. We examine this relationship in longitudinal data on invented spelling throughout kindergarten year. Method: 31 kindergartners were assessed on PM (NWR task) and WM capacity (CLPT) and given the spelling task at the beginning and the end of the kindergarten year. Correlations and regression analysis were used to identify specific relationships between aspects of VWM and children's abilities to represent onset, rhyme, body and coda, as well as their preferences for VC/CV consonant types and representations of consonant clusters. Results: Full file and split files, i.e., children identified as having high or low skills in vocabulary, PA and alphabet knowledge, were used for analysis. Strong and significant correlations were seen between PM and WM capacity and consonant representations at both testing time, but most significantly with all spelling parameters at time 2. Group analysis showed that children with high scores on vocabulary, PA and alphabet knowledge were more apt to rely on both aspects of VWM for spelling. Regression analysis showed that NWR task was the best predictor of spelling accuracy for high achievement group at the end of the kindergarten year. Conclusion: VWM as an integral part of code-related skills required for literacy development, adds as much contribution as PA and alphabet knowledge to spelling accuracy among kindergartners.
Virginia Clinton (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Paul van den Broek - Topic interest and learning from texts
Purpose: Topic interest, which is one's value of and feelings towards reading particular topics, and learning from texts have been found to be positively associated with each other. However, the reason for this positive association is not well understood. The purpose of this proposal is to examine a cognitive process, inference generation, that could explain the positive association between topic interest and learning from texts. Methods (Study 1): In Study 1, sixty undergraduate students participated by reading two scientific texts and writing recalls and answers to comprehension questions. Prior to reading the text, students answered comprehension questions to assess their background knowledge and completed self-reports to assess topic interest. Results (Study 1): The results indicated that topic interest was indeed positively associated with learning from texts, independent of background knowledge. Methods (Study 2): In Study 2, sixty-nine undergraduate students participated by reading two science articles while thinking aloud. Materials and measures for Study 2 were identical to Study 1 with the exception of the addition of the Nelson-Denny subtest of Reading Comprehension to control for the effects of reading comprehension skill on inference generation. Results (Study 2): The results indicated that topic interest was positively associated with inference generation while reading. Subsequent analyses indicated inference generation explained the positive association between topic interest and accurate answers to comprehension questions. Conclusions: The positive association between topic interest and inference generation provides support for the concepts of standards of coherence and depth of processing while reading.
Hugo Cogo-Moreira (Federal University of Sao Paulo);Jair de Jesus Mari; Clara Regina Brandão de Ávila; Ângela Maria Vieira Pinheiro - Modeling the reading ability of children (7-10 years old) by the teacher: an item response theory analysis of the Scale of Evaluation of Reading Competency by the Teacher (SERCoT)
Introduction: Although research has been conducted on the competency of teachers in the early identification of reading difficulties in children, a structured instrument with good psychometric indicators (e.g., Specificity and Sensitivity) for screening has not been developed. Purpose: This research aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of a screening instrument of reading abilities. Method: Dichotomous Items (Yes/No) were developed to provide primary school teachers with an instrument to enable them to evaluate the reading ability of their students on two domains: reading aloud and silent. This instrument, a questionnaire with 27 items (17 on reading aloud) were distributed to teachers of 2nd to 4th graders from 10 public schools in Sao Paulo City. The teachers of each grade were asked to evaluate for each child, his/hers reading ability on the two domains. A total of 734 questionnaires were replied. Results: A multidimensional Item Response Theory analysis showed that two items from the silent domain had very high discrimination parameters (a > 1.7) under a logistic model. Considering both domains together, eight items had high discrimination values (1.3-1.69) and 13 items obtained a moderate value (0.65-1.34). Only four items showed low or very low values (a<0.64). The statistics based on the log-likelihood indicated-2 log-likelihood=20198.98, Akaike Information Criterion 20306.98 and Bayesian Information Criterion=20555.29. Conclusion: The scale as whole has shown good psychometric indicators. For future research, exploratory and confirmatory analysis will be conducted. In addition, versions of the Brazilian questionnaire in English, French and German will be developed.
Jill Cohen (UNLV; Center for Reading, Assessment, and Evaluation);Ralph Reynolds, Ph.D (founding member; Jason Boggs; Megan Cogliano - The effect of strategy instruction on metaphor comprehension in children
Purpose- Few studies have explored metaphorical uses of language and more explicitly, children's comprehension of metaphorical language. Those that do have focused on processes of metaphorical comprehension rather than instruction in metaphor comprehension. The following is a two part study attempting to empirically test hypotheses of metaphor instruction using specific strategy instruction, practice with metaphor identification, and mere exposure to metaphor usage. Method and Results- The first trial used a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design with three treatment groups and two control groups. Participants were 47 third graders from a large public school district (chosen because this age group has exhibited the most striking metaphor comprehension performance deficits). Students were asked to read five short stories approximately five sentences long and select the metaphorical alternative that best fit with each story. Results found that students in the strategy instruction group significantly outperformed the other two groups on the metaphor comprehension test; however this group was still lower than the literal comprehension (control) group. Part two of this study hopes to extend the previous findings by adding an enhanced strategy instruction group that 1) combines both strategy instruction and metaphor identification and 2) that uses metaphors within the context of a story during instruction. Approximately 90 third graders designated as average readers by standardized reading assessments will be included and the same materials will be used. Conclusion- Given the extensive use of metaphorical language found in children's literature, this study has implications for specific methods of strategy instruction that will narrow the gap previously seen between metaphor comprehension and literal comprehension in elementary age children.
Nancy J. Cohen (Hincks-Dellcrest Centre and University of Toronto)Fataneh Farnia; Nancie Im-Bolter - Higher Order Language Impairment and Social-Emotional Problems in Clinically Referred and Non-referred Comparison Youth
Purpose: This study examined the association between difficulties in cognition and structural and higher order language skills with social-emotional adjustment in adolescents, working under the assumption that youth who have difficulty understanding others and expressing themselves are likely to have adjustment difficulties. In the transition to adolescence the demands on higher order language is especially important. Method: The study sample included 146 clinically referred and 175 nonclinical comparison youth ages 12-18. Youth were administered a battery of standardized tests of intelligence, working memory, reading achievement and receptive and expressive structural and higher order language. Parent ratings on the Child Behavior Checklist were used as a measure of social-emotional problems. Results: ANOVA indicated that clinically referred and comparison youth were similar in their intellectual abilities but clinically referred youth were less competent on measures of working memory, reading achievement and both structural and higher order language. Regression analyses indicated that higher order expressive language (expressing intent) significantly contributed to both internalizing (10%) and externalizing (10%) behaviors in clinically referred youth after the contribution of verbal and nonverbal abilities was accounted for. Also, expressive higher order language predicted externalizing (15%) behavior in non-clinic comparison youth. Conclusions: Clinically referred youth are more likely to have cognitive and language problems than non-referred youth as well as more social-emotional problems. However, having problems in higher order expressive language made both groups prone to externalizing behaviors. When language problems are left unidentified this can lead to misinterpretation of youths' behavior and failure to provide needed services.
Stéphanie Colin (Université de Lyon, Université Lumière Lyon 2); Annie Magnan; Jean Ecalle - What is the contribution of cochlear implantation and cued speech exposition in deaf children's literacy skills?
Purpose: This study aims to investigate literacy skills of primary school level deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI) and exposed to Cued Speech (CS, manual system aimed to resolve the ambiguity inherent in lipreading). A recent body of evidence has shown that these aids can respectively improve speech perception (CI: Geers et al., 2003; Watson et al., 2006; CS: Charlier & Leybaert, 2000; LaSasso et al., 2003) and reading abilities (CI: Archbold et al., 2008; Jonhson & Goswami, 2010; CS: Colin et al., 2004; 2007; Leybaert & LaSasso, 2010). However, few studies have examined the possible contribution of CS exposition in CI children's literacy skills (Bouton et al., 2011; Leybaert et al., 2009), and their results remain to be confirmed. Method: The performance of 60 deaf children with CI (early vs late) and exposed to CS (early vs late) were compared to hearing children matched for grade (from 2 to 5) in phonological skills, silent reading (word recognition and sentence comprehension), word spelling and vocabulary. Results: A significant contribution of age of implantation (after having controlled chronological age) was observed. No contribution of early exposition to CS was significant in our experimental conditions (contribution <5% of the overall variance). However, the profile of early CI children exposed early to CS was the one that was closest to that of hearing children. Conclusion: We need to investigate more precisely the conditions in which CS is offered to implanted children to examine its potential contribution in learning to read and spell.
Donald Compton (Vanderbilt University); Jennifer Gilbert; Laura Steacy; Eunsoo Cho; Amanda Miller - Behavioral Phenotypes of Children with Late-Emerging Reading Difficulties
Purpose: Some children demonstrate typical reading achievement in early school grades but fall significantly behind their peers in later grades. These children are often referred to as having late-emerging reading difficulties (LERD). The purpose of this study was to examine the behavioral phenotypes of 5th-grade children classified as exhibiting LERD, early identified reading difficulties (ERD), and typical development (TD). Profile differences across the groups on measures of academic ability, word reading skills, language and knowledge, and executive function/attention were used to define phenotypes. Methods: Participants (N = 160) were administered standardized measures of reading comprehension and word reading in the spring of grades 1-4. Scores were entered into a latent transition analysis so that students could be classified as ERD (n = 31), TD (n = 63), and LERD (n = 66). In 5th grade participants were administered a large battery of tests assessing word reading skills, reading comprehension skills, language and knowledge skills, and executive function/attention. Profile analysis was used to examine differences in elevation (group differences), flatness (measure differences), and shape (group x measure interactions) across the various domains. Results and Conclusions: Analyses indicate that for word reading skills there were level and shape effects, for language and knowledge there were also level and shape effects, and for executive function/attention there was only a level effect. Results will be used to better understand the behavior phenotypes of the 3 LERD groups.
Peggy S. Conner (CUNY Graduate Center, NY)Loraine K. Obler - A spoken word-learning deficit without dyslexia: a case study
Purpose - Many individuals with a diagnosis of dyslexia experience difficulty learning novel spoken words, a critical skill for second-language learning. Recent links between second-language learning difficulties and reading difficulties have led investigators to presume both dyslexia and second-language learning problems are derived from a core phonological deficit. Method - A 23-year-old male, B.K., who reported typically-developing reading and spelling, heard 16 novel spoken words paired with novel objects presented in a story context. He was tested after 1, 4, 7, and 10 repetitions, and again following an hour to assess his learning of the words over time. In addition, he was given tests of vocabulary comprehension, working memory, phonological awareness tasks, a just-noticeable-difference frequency-discrimination task, and the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Results - B.K. had severe difficulties on the spoken word-learning task with one correct out of 80 possible productions (16 words tested five times; matched controls' mean was 47.8). B.K. performed poorly only on tasks of phoneme reversal and JND frequency; his scores on the other tasks, most crucially reading and spelling, were comparable to controls'. Conclusions - Spoken-word-learning and reading may share underlying phonological requisites, but a phonological deficit may not similarly impact both. Deficits in phonological awareness and spoken-word-learning in the absence of a reading disability support a theoretical basis of dyslexia that is multifactorial.
Carol Connor (Florida State University and FCRR); Christopher Lonigan - Building content area literacy from kindergarten through fourth Grade: Results from iterative design and efficacy studies
Title: Building Content Area Literacy from Kindergarten through Fourth Grade: Results from Iterative Design and Efficacy Studies Authors: Carol M. Connor & Christopher Lonigan Purpose: An important predictor of students' success in reading for understanding is the background and academic knowledge they bring to the task and frequently students lack the vocabulary and understanding to text structure to learn from social studies texts. Plus, correlation studies reveal child X instruction interactions in the content areas. Here we present CALI intervention design and efficacy results, and intervention design to meet these needs. Methods: Three design trials (n = 20 students/grade, 80 overall) and one efficacy study (n = 70 students/grade, 350 overall) were conducted. Students reading comprehension, vocabulary, and content knowledge were assessed pre- and post-intervention. Design trials considered the feasibility of the small group intervention and whether children with a range of vocabulary and reading skills made similar gains. The efficacy study tests whether students participating in the CALI intervention show greater gains than students in the business as usual control using a randomized control design with students within classrooms randomly assigned to condtion. Results and Conclusions: Results of design studies revealed promise with effect sizes (d) at each grade ranging from .60 to .75. Moreover, after the third iteration, even students who began with very little social studies knowledge and weaker vocabulary and reading skills made gains that were similar to students with stronger skills. The efficacy trial is currently ongoing and will be concluded by February 2012.
Nicole Conrad (Department of Psychology, Saint Mary's University) - Implicit learning vs. explicit instruction in the acquisition of orthographic knowledge during reading and spelling
Purpose: The establishment of good quality orthographic representations in memory, necessary to support fluent reading, is thought to occur implicitly through exposure to print, and has traditionally been studied through repeated reading paradigms. However, because spelling requires production, rather than recognition, spelling may result in higher quality orthographic representations. Also, some children show deficits with implicit learning, suggesting that not all children are able to incidentally acquire knowledge about orthographic regularities, and may require explicit instruction to develop awareness of these commonalities. This study compared the acquisition of orthographic knowledge through reading and spelling, when explicit instructions regarding orthographic regularities were provided vs. no instructions. Method: Grade 2 children participated in a training study in which practice (reading/spelling) and instruction (explicit/implicit) were between-subject factors. Children practiced reading or spelling 20 words (5 words from 4 orthographic families), either with or without explicit instruction. Transfer across skill was examined through reading or spelling the practice words, opposite of what occurred during practice. Generalization within and across skill was examined through reading and spelling two different lists, each containing unfamiliar words with (generalization) and without (control) the practiced orthographic patterns. Results: All groups showed word specific and generalized transfer across skill. Transfer across skill was greater for spelling than for reading, and greatest for explicit instruction. Conclusions: Spelling aids with the development of high quality orthographic representations that can be recruited to aid in reading. Explicit instruction helps children acquire awareness of orthographic regularities. Systematic instruction in conventional spelling can contribute to developing reading skill.
Kristin Conradi (North Carolina State University) - An examination of affective reading components and their relationship to reading comprehension.
Purpose: Although recent research has demonstrated that affective components contribute to additional variance in reading achievement (e.g., Conlon et al., 2006; Katzir et al., 2009; Retelsdorf et al., 2010), the study of affective reading components fails to be a priority among reading researchers (Afflerbach & Cho, 2011). Indeed, research investigating affective dimensions in reading has long been plagued by vaguely defined constructs and, consequently, by an array of potentially problematic instruments designed to measure them. This study had two purposes: first to investigate the validity, reliability, and underlying factor structure of three affective reading measures; and next to investigate how these factors related to students' reading comprehension. Method: Participants included 492 fourth- and fifth-grade students in a Southern state. The students completed the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (ERAS), the Motivation to Read Profile (MRP), the Reading Self-Concept Scale (RSCS), and a reading comprehension measure, the Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT). Results: Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the seven subscales were represented best by two factors: self-beliefs and attitudes. The relationship between these factors and reading comprehension was next examined, with self-beliefs contributing to more variance than attitudes. Conclusions: Although the three instruments retain high validity and reliability, the conceptual overlaps among their subscales contribute to confusions in the literature. Instrument refinement is necessary and could lead to more promising and nuanced research focusing on the interplay of both affective and cognitive components as they contribute to reading comprehension.
Alain Content (Université libre de Bruxelles);Virginie Drabs; Fabienne Chetail - The influence of C/V alternation on perceptual parsing of letter strings
Purpose - Numerous recent studies suggest that letter status, consonant or vowel (C and V respectively) is extracted at an early stage during word identification, but the potential role of this early categorisation remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that C/V alternation helps readers to organize letter strings into perceptual units. Method - The pseudohomophone priming effect was examined in a lexical decision task with adults. Two kinds of pseudohomophone primes were constructed by relying on the different status of the letter E in French. In schwa target words, the E was silent, so that removing it produced a pseudohomophone prime with an orthographic CV template different from that of the base word (e.g., javlot, CVCCVC vs. javelot, CVCVCVC). In control target words, the E was part of a multiletter grapheme and removing it did not change the number of C and V groups (e.g., plateau: CCVCVVV vs. platau: CCVCVV). Results - Compared to an identity priming condition, pseudohomophone primes based on schwa words (javlot-JAVELOT) were significantly less effective than pseudohomophone primes based on control words (platau-PLATEAU). Conclusions - Both priming conditions entail homophonic primes with exactly the same orthographic overlap between primes and targets and differ only in terms of C/V structure. Hence, the results suggest that the perceptual structure of letter strings, as determined by C/V alternation, contribute to form priming effects. We propose that C/V alternation within written words is a major cue for orthographic parsing in the early stages of visual word identification.
Kim Cordewener (Radboud University Nijmegen - Behavioural Science Institute); Anna Bosman; Ludo Verhoeven - Specific language impairment affects the early spelling process quantitatively but not qualitatively
Purpose: This study investigated whether children with SLI need a special spelling education program, by examining whether the early spelling of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the spelling of typically developing children. Method: Two groups of first-grade children participated: 39 children with a typical language development between the age of 73 and 88 months, and 59 children with SLI between the age of 71 and 97 months. Results: The results indicated that children with SLI do have a quantitative delay in both grapheme knowledge and word spelling during first grade. However, there was no qualitative difference between the early spelling of children with SLI and typically developing children. Conclusions: The findings indicated that children with SLI have the same spelling processes as typically developing children, albeit they develop more slowly. This suggests that SLI has an overall effect on spelling performances; the language problems affect all aspects of spelling equally. Moreover, the results indicated differences in spelling performances between the different schools. This means that spelling performance is strongly affected by spelling education. For clinical practice, our results imply that teachers of children with SLI can practice the same skills as with typically developing children, but they have to practice a lot more.
Pierre Cormier (Universite de Moncton)Debra J. Jared, University of Western Ontario; Betty Ann Levy, McMaster University; Lesly Wade-Woolley, Queen's University - Biliterate Children's Discrimination of English and French Letter Patterns
Purpose. We investigated whether young English-French biliterate children can distinguish between common English and French orthographic patterns, and examined the difference between their performance and that of skilled adult bilinguals. Furthermore we investigated early and concurrent predictors of the children's discrimination performance. Method. Children in French Immersion programs were asked to play a Dictionary game when they were in Grade 2 and again when they were in Grade 3. They were shown pseudowords that contained either an English spelling pattern or a French spelling pattern, and they were asked to decide whether each pseudoword should go in an English dictionary or a French dictionary if it became a real word. A group of bilingual university students was asked to do the same task. A variety of reading predictor measures had been administered when the children were in Kindergarten, and measures of reading ability and reading at home were collected in Grades 1-3. Results. Children in both grades were above chance in discriminating between the two types of pseudowords, but were well below adult performance on the task. Measures obtained in Kindergarten showed that early print knowledge had some ability to predict later ability to discriminate between the orthographic patterns of the two languages. Further analyses indicated that exposure to print in each language in Grades 1-3 was strongly related to discrimination performance. Conclusions. The findings are interpreted as providing support for the view that orthographic learning involves the gradual learning of statistical co-occurences of letters from exposure to print.
Marcela Corrêa (Universidade Federal do Vale do São Francisco)Cláudia Cardoso-Martins - Reading disability in Brazilian Portuguese: The role of phonological awareness and rapid serial naming
Introduction: Phoneme awareness (PA) and rapid serial naming (RSN) are among the best predictors of literacy ability. In the present study we investigated the role played by these skills in reading difficulties (RD) in Portuguese, an orthography that is more transparent than the English orthography. Method: 19 8- to 12-year-old Portuguese-speaking children with RD and two groups of typical readers, individually matched with the RD children for chronological age (CA) or reading ability (RA), participated in the study. Children in the three groups were enrolled in the same public school in a large Brazilian city and, except for one child, all scored in or above the normal range in the Vocabulary subtest of the WISC-III (Wechsler, 2002). In addition to tests of word reading and spelling ability, participants were administered tests of PA and RSN. Results: The RD children performed significantly below the CA controls on both the PA and the RSN tasks. They also performed significantly below the RA controls on the PA tasks. However, in contrast to the results found for the comparisons involving the CA group, no significant difference was found between the RD and the RA groups on the RSN tasks. Conclusion: In line with the results of Caravolas et al.'s (2005) study, our findings question Wimmer's (1993) suggestion that, relative to RSN, PA plays a relatively weak role in the development of reading disability in consistent orthographies.
Marie-France Cote (McGill University); Julien Mercier (UQAM); Line Laplante (UQAM) - The impact of a reading intervention on transfer of knowledge of decoding skills for reading disabled children in second and third grade
Purpose: Few studies have addressed the problem of transfer of knowledge in reading and of the ones that have, a limited number succeeded in fostering transfer. However, transfer is essential to the learning process (Tardif, 1999). Thus, the aim of our study was to evaluate the impact of a reading intervention based on explicit and strategic instruction on transfer of knowledge of decoding skills for reading disabled children in second and third grade. Method: In order to answer our question, experimental single-case design with alternating treatments and multiple subjects and baselines was used. The participants (N = 3) were taught four contextual reading rules using the REEDYS program (Laplante, in press) over four weeks by a resource room teacher. Each week for ten weeks, participants were subjected to three measures: a non-word reading task, a sentence reading task and a text reading task. The data were analyzed using a visual inspection method and a process control chart (Juhel, 2008). Results: The results suggest the presence of transfer of knowledge for two out of the three participants. Transfer was observed for a variety of task and for most of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences taught. These findings indicate that explicit and strategic instruction can help foster transfer of knowledge. Conclusions: However, large-scale studies are needed to assess the extent of the effectiveness of this type of intervention to foster transfer of knowledge in reading.
Karine Côté (University of Ottawa)Alain Desrochers - How are the accuracy and latency of grammatical gender decisions influenced by word frequency and animacy?
Purpose: This study investigates the effects of 3 lexical variables on grammatical gender recognition: noun frequency, noun animacy (person vs. object), and noun gender per se (masculine vs feminine). Response accuracy and speed were expected to be greater for high-frequency words, for animate nouns, because noun gender class is strongly correlated with referents' biological gender, and for masculine words, because the distribution of gender classes in French is biased in their favour (60 vs. 40 %). Method: A sample of 60 undergraduate students (30 women and 30 men) was shown 24 practice items and 400 experimental items, all French nouns, via E-Prime. Three variables were manipulated: noun frequency, noun animacy, and noun gender class. Item length and word endings were controlled across all cells of the design. The experiment was run under E-Prime and took approximately 20 minutes. Results: Responses were faster and more accurate when French nouns had a high frequency of use and an animate referent and when they belonged to the masculine gender class. A significant interaction indicated that the gender class effect was neutralized when the noun was animate rather than inanimate. Conclusion: These results suggest that readers of French are highly sensitive to the statistical features of noun gender: the frequency of noun use in print, the distribution of nouns over gender classes, and their correlation with semantic features. The implication of these results for reading development and sentence processing are discussed.
Patricia Crespo Alberto (Universidad de La Laguna)Patricia Crespo, Doris Baker, Yohan Park, Cristina Rodríguez, Juan E. Jiménez - Patterns of Growth of Beginning Reading Skills for Spanish-Monolingual Children in Grades K-2
Purpose: This study compares the patterns of growth of beginning reading skills (i.e., phonemic awareness and vocabulary in kindergarten, pseudoword reading in first grade, and oral reading fluency in second grade) of Spanish speaking monolingual students who received a Tier 2 reading intervention with students who did not receive the intervention. Method Design: Quasi-experimental longitudinal design. Students in each grade were followed through one school year and assessed for their reading skills in the fall, winter and spring. Participants: 529 students attending 39 schools in the Canary Islands, Spain. 184 were kindergartners, 178 were first graders, and 167 were second graders. Measures: * A Spanish adaptation of The Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Behavior Checklist ( Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2002) for the purpose of early identification of at-risk readers. * Four subtests of the Indicadores Dinámicos del Éxito de la Lectura, (IDEL,Baker, Good, Knutson & Watson, 2006): Fluidez en Segmentar Fonemas (FSF, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency); Fluidez en las Palabras Sin Sentido(FPS, Nonsense Word Fluency); Fluidez en la Lectura Oral (FLO, Oral Reading Fluency); Fluidez en el Uso de la Palabra (FUP; Word Use Fluency) . Data Analysis: Hierarchical Linear Growth Modeling, with three levels: time nested within students nested within schools. Results: We found significant intervention effects on student growth on several reading skills: phonemic segmentation, and word use in kindergarten, phonemic segmentation in first grade, and oral reading fluency in second grade. Conclusions: A Tier 2 intervention focused on the core components of beginning reading and using an explicit and systematic teaching strategies, increases the reading performance of children at risk for reading disabilities in Spanish. Implications for practice within a Response to Intervention approach will be discussed.
Sarah Critten (Coventry University)Vince Connelly, Julie Dockrell, Kirsty Walter - Inflectional and derivational morphological spelling abilities in children with language impairment
Purpose: Spelling is a major constraint in the writing development of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (Dockrell et al. 2007). They experience particular difficulties with inflectional rules of regular past tense and plurals and make frequent errors at text level where the morpheme is omitted entirely (Mackie & Dockrell, 2004). Derivational spelling abilities have received less attention although a particular challenge could be where morphemes represent a phonological or orthographic shift from the base word (Silliman et al, 2006). The aim of the present study was to elucidate the inflectional and derivational spelling abilities of children with SLI using single-word spelling tasks and examine underlying linguistic predictors. Method: Thirty-three children with SLI (10-11 years), a chronological age (CA) match group and a younger language and spelling age (LA) matched group (aged 6-8 years) were given two spelling tasks comprising 24 inflectional words and 18 derivational words. Analyses were conducted on the number of words and morphemes spelled correctly while spelling errors of the morphemes only, were categorised as omitted, non-phonologically plausible or phonologically plausible. Results: The SLI group were equivalent in inflectional accuracy to their LA matches but significantly worse than the CA group although error type revealed no major group differences. However the SLI group were less accurate when spelling derivational morphemes and errors were less sophisticated compared to both control groups. Furthermore different linguistic predictors (phonological and morphological) were implicated for inflectional and derivational spelling abilities. Conclusions: Explanations for the specific difficulty with derivational morphology are considered.
Jennifer Cromley (Temple University, USA) - Discussion
Jennifer Cromley will participate as the symposium invited discussant who will offer a critique of the symposium.
Amy Crosson (UNIV OF PITTSBURGH)Margaret McKeown; Isabel Beck - Developing an Assessment to Measure Depth of Knowledge of Academic Vocabulary
Purpose Assessing students' level of vocabulary knowledge is important, as simple surface level knowledge is not sufficient to support comprehension. We present the design of an experimental measure, the Cloze Evaluation, or Clo-e, and initial results suggesting that the Clo-e can distinguish levels of word knowledge. Method The Clo-e tests 99 words from the Academic Word List. Students judge whether a word makes sense in each of four cloze sentences per word (n=396 items). The Clo-e tests different senses of target words (e.g., physical confinement and mental sense in confining one's creativity) and includes foils of varying difficulty. "Easy" foils contained no association with the target word. "Orthographic" foils present words that sound or look like a target word (confine-combine). Semantic foils provide an association with the word's meaning or use (e.g. "Prisoners often __ letters to their families" taps an association between confine and prison). The Clo-e was administered to109 monolingual English-speaking, racially diverse sixth graders. Based on signal detection theory, D prime (d') values were computed to assess students' ability to distinguish between correct word and types of foils. Results Mean d'prime values demonstrated that students had some difficulty distinguishing between hits and foils in general (d'=.624). Students were most successful at distinguishing easy foils from hits (d'=.809), less successful at distinguishing orthographic foils (d'=.694), and least able to distinguish semantic foils (d'=.492). Conclusions Results provide preliminary evidence that the Clo-e provides discrimination of partial knowledge on a set of words important for comprehension of academic texts.
Anna Cunningham (Aston University);Laura Shapiro; Caroline Witton; Joel Talcott; Kim Rochelle; Adrian Burgess; Kate Swoboda - Comparing the predictive power of speech and non-speech stimuli on early reading skills: The influence of processing demands
Purpose: Both phonological (speech) and auditory (non-speech) stimuli have been shown to predict early reading skills. However, previous studies have failed to control for the level of processing required by tasks administered across the two levels of stimuli. For example, phonological tasks typically tap explicit awareness e.g., phoneme deletion, while auditory tasks usually measure implicit awareness e.g., frequency discrimination. Therefore, the stronger predictive power of speech tasks may be due to their higher processing demands, rather than the nature of the stimuli. Method: The present study uses novel tasks that control for level of processing (isolation, repetition and deletion) across speech (phonemes and nonwords) and non-speech (tones) stimuli. 800 beginning readers at the onset of literacy tuition (mean age 4 years and 7 months) were assessed on the above tasks as well as word reading and letter-knowledge in the first part of a three time-point longitudinal study. Results: Time 1 results reveal a significantly higher association between letter-sound knowledge and all of the speech compared to non-speech tasks. Performance was better for phoneme than tone stimuli, and worse for deletion than isolation and repetition across all stimuli. Conclusions: Results are consistent with phonological accounts of reading and suggest that level of processing required by the task is less important than stimuli type in predicting the earliest stage of reading.
Márcia da Mota (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro);Silvia Guimarães; Carolina Conti - Morphological Awareness and Spelling Words with Different Spelling Rules in Brazilian Portuguese
Purpose: Alphabetic orthographies with transparent spelling rules may not require morphological analysis. Portuguese is an alphabetic language with fairly transparent orthography. However, it has many morphological complex words. It is possible that the contribution of morphological awareness for spelling may be dependent on the type of word being spelled. The focus of our study was to look at the relationship between phonological and morphological awareness in spelling Portuguese. Method One hundred and thirty-two second to fourth grade Brazilian children participated in the study. They were asked to spell words that followed grammatical rules and words with ambiguous spelling. Those were words that had sounds that could be represented with more than one letter. They were also given a vocabulary test and phonological and morphological awareness tasks. Result: There were independent contributions of morphological awareness for spellings that followed grammatical rules when all other measures were controlled for but not for the words with ambiguous spellings. Phonological awareness contributed for the spelling of both types of words. Conclusions: These results suggest that in a fairly transparent orthography as Portuguese, morphological awareness contributes to spelling when morphological analysis is required.
Sophie Dandache (Sophie Dandache K.U.Leuven)Jan Wouters , Pol Ghesquière - Exploring cognitive processes of poor and normal beginning Arabic readers
Purpose An increasing body of research evidence supports the important role that phonological awareness plays in reading acquisition in many languages. Nevertheless, little is known to date about cognitive processes used in reading in other orthographies such as Arabic. On the one hand, some researchers argued that the rich morphological inflection that characterizes Semitic languages, makes of morphology an important tool to predict reading and spelling skills in those languages. On the other hand, studies have stressed the importance of orthographic as well as phonological skills in predicting reading abilities in Arabic. Our study was carried out to investigate the processes used in reading within beginners Arabic readers. More precisely, we aim to compare the performance of poor and normal readers in those skills. Methods The participants of the study are beginners Lebanese readers (n = 450, 6 years of age, normal intelligence). The children were tested on three different skills: phonological, morphological and orthographic skills. The phonological testing involved: phonological awareness: phoneme deletion, spoonerism; verbal-short-term memory: non-word repetition, digit-span forward, digit-span backward, corsi block and Rapid Automatized Naming: digits, letters, colours, objects. Morphological tests included: turning from past to present, turning from singular to plural. Finally orthographic skills were measured through a letter knowledge test. The children's reading abilities were assessed with word and non-word reading tests. Conclusions Based on our analyses we are able to give an overview of the relative weight of phonological, orthographical and morphological skills in the development of reading in beginning Arabic readers.
Catherine Darrow (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)Lynne Vernon-Feagans - The relationship of teacher beliefs and the effectiveness of an individualized reading intervention
Purpose The Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) is designed to help rural kindergarten and first grade teachers implement individualized instruction for struggling readers. Classroom teachers work one-on-one with students while receiving intensive coaching. TRI developers hypothesize that this increase in training bolsters teachers' attitudes about students and the quality of their own instruction. The relationship between teacher feelings of self-efficacy, children's problems, and literacy development is examined in this paper. Method Fifteen rural schools (75 kindergarten and first grade classrooms), from five counties were randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions. In each classroom, three struggling readers were randomly selected to receive TRI. Teacher data were collected using two surveys (Tschannen-Moran, M., & Woolfolk Hoy, A., 2001; SECC-YD) in fall and spring of the implementation year. Child assessments included WJ-III, CTOPP, and PPVT-III. Results Preliminary results suggest TRI teachers experienced higher non-significant increases in self-efficacy (t =0.273, DF=66, p=0.785) and felt student problems significantly lessened across the year (t =-2.427, DF=65, p=0.018). Hierarchical Linear Modeling revealed that teachers' increased self-efficacy was related to gains in Letter-Word Identification (β =.86, t(56) = 2.04, p=.046) and teachers' sense of children's problem was related to gains in rapid naming colors (β =.70, t(244) = 3.54, p<.001). Conclusions When teachers are trained and coached to work one-on-one with struggling readers, their feelings of self-efficacy improve as do their attitudes concerning the abilities of their students. Multi-level analysis provided evidence that teachers' beliefs about themselves and the children they teach relate to gains in children's reading achievement.
Claire Davis (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston); Marcia Barnes; Amy Barth; Mary York; David Francis - New vocabulary learning in adolescent adequate and struggling comprehenders: Effects of reinforcement and discrimination learning.
Purpose - To determine whether new words are learned better by adequate and struggling comprehenders when meanings are reinforced (Reinforcement Learning or RL) versus discriminated (Discrimination Learning or DL). Method - Seventh to 12th grade students with adequate word reading (>20th percentile) were identified as adequate or struggling comprehenders based on their reading comprehension achievement (< 25th versus > 25th percentile). Participants (n = 386) learned half of the words in the RL condition (heard definition, read two sentences in which the word was used correctly), and half in the DL condition (heard definition, read one sentence with correct word usage and one sentence that changed a critical feature of the word's meaning to render the sentence false). Retention was assessed on a multiple choice task (choose word to fit definition), and on a semantic judgment task 1-2 days later (judge veracity of novel sentences containing learned words). Results - On the multiple choice task main effects of group and grade were qualified by an interaction of group and learning condition: adequate comprehenders, but not struggling comprehenders, retained more words learned in the DL condition. On the delayed semantic judgment task struggling comprehenders made fewer correct judgments than adequate comprehenders. There were also effects of affix frequency on the retention of new words on semantic judgment. Conclusions - The typical finding of enhanced learning under discrimination learning conditions was obtained for adequate, but not struggling comprehenders. The relevance of these findings for interventions with less skilled comprehenders is discussed.
Bronwen Davis (University of Guelph)Mary Ann Evans - Understanding skill integration in emergent reading: Variability, adaptive choice and gradual change
Purpose: Integration of the precursors to conventional reading is assumed within theories of reading development, but this process is not well understood. Siegler (1996) proposed the overlapping-waves model as a framework to understand cognitive change which emphasizes three features: variability, adaptive choice, and gradual change. The current study aimed to better understand the integration of emergent literacy skills through an investigation of these features in young children's strategy use while beginning to read. Method: Ninety-one kindergarteners read an experimentally designed alphabet book on two occasions over 2-3 months. The book was designed with pages of varying difficulty based on illustration salience and consistency of beginning letter sound cues. With the use of a puppet, children were interviewed after each reading about how they were able to 'read' each page (e.g., "How did you figure out that A was for airplane?"). Responses were audiotaped and coded. Results: Children reported using a variety of strategies across the alphabet book pages and on individual pages within it. They reported the least number of strategies on the easiest pages and the most number of strategies on the most difficult pages. The number of strategies reported and the number of accurately labeled pages increased from Time 1 to Time 2. Conclusions: Findings correspond with the overlapping-waves model. Children applied a variety of strategies in an adaptive way, tailoring the number of strategies used depending on page difficulty. Gradual changes were evident in growth in the number of strategies applied and the corresponding increase in accuracy.
Stephanie Day (Arizona State University and the Learning Sciences Institute)Carol Connor - Measuring self-regulation and academic achievement in third grade students
Purpose: The present study sought to examine the relationship between children's self-regulation skills and literacy outcomes using a newly designed measure of self-regulation. Research has found that poor self-regulation skills can negatively impact academic achievement. Previous research on self-regulation has commonly utilized parent and teacher surveys as a measure of self-regulation skills. While these measures are useful, they are open to threats of observer bias, thus, developing a more direct measure of self-regulation may be a more accurate measure of self-regulatory skills as well as a stronger predictor of academic achievement. Method: In this study, we examined the self-regulation skills of 282 third grade students using a newly designed measure of self-regulation, the Remembering Rules and Regulation Picture Task (RRRP). Children's literacy skills were measured using subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-III. In order to validate the RRRP as a measure of self-regulation skills, scores on the RRRP were also compared with other commonly used measures of self-regulation skills which included a digit span task and teacher ratings of behavior. Results: Preliminary results using hierarchical linear modeling revealed that children's performance on the RRRP in the fall and spring was positively associated with gains on students' reading skills. Scores on the RRRP were correlated with measures of working memory and teacher ratings of behavior and academic competence. Conclusions: Performance on the RRRP seems to be a strong predictor of children's literacy skills. Furthermore, the RRRP may be a useful tool for measuring self-regulation skills.
Peter F. de Jong (University of Amsterdam)Elsje van Bergen - The changing nature of nonword repetition
Purpose: Despite its importance for language and reading acquisition, it is still debated what nonword repetition reflects. Some have argued that nonword repetition reflects the ability to store phonological information temporarily. An alternative view is that nonword repetition taps the availability of segmented phonological representations. We examined the possibility that the abilities that underlie nonword repetition change as a consequence of learning to read. Method: Participants were 176 first grade children. In the fall and at the end of the year measures of nonword repetition, phonological awareness, short-term memory, vocabulary and word reading fluency were administered. Results: We found that the correlation of nonword repetition with verbal short-term memory decreased during first grade, whereas its correlation with phonological awareness increased. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that nonword repetition loaded on a working memory factor at the fall of first grade, whereas it loaded on a phonological awareness factor at the end of the year. We also found that reading ability in the fall predicted nonword repetition at the end of first grade after the autoregressive effect of nonword repetition and vocabulary were controlled. Reading ability had only a small effect on the development phonological awareness. Conclusion: We argue that these findings are most compatible with the view that learning to read changes the nature of nonword repetition. In young children nonword repetition is mainly dependent on verbal short-term memory. During early reading acquisition it becomes more similar to phonological awareness and seems more affected by the availability of segmented phonological representations.
Maria T. de Jong (Leiden University, The Netherlands); Adriana G. Bus - Do beginning struggling and normal readers profit from a digital pedagogical agent when reading an e-book?
Purpose: The study addressed the question of whether a digital pedagogical agent added to an e-book can optimize beginning readers' learning from an e-book. The screens in the e-books presented an illustration as well as print. The print lightened up when it was read aloud. Method: 48 Grade 1 children were pre- and post-tested after an intervention in which an e-book was read twice to them. One intervention group heard the text read to them while they could see a digital agent reading the text. The agent was sitting in the illustration now and then pointing to elements in the illustration. Another group heard the text without seeing the agent. In the second study, we monitored eye movements of Grade 1 normal and struggling readers. 18 Children participated in this within-subject study. Results: Complex Samples Analyses (GLM) analyses were executed on technical fluency and comprehension measures. Both analyses revealed a significant intervention by reading level effect. For normal readers the presence of a visible agent facilitated reading fluency whereas struggling readers' comprehension, but not their reading fluency, benefited from the visible agent. Conclusion: Fluency of normal readers improved more with a visible agent because the agent guided them efficiently through the illustration. Struggling readers ignored the print as a result of which their fluency did not improve. However, the agent facilitated the exploration of the illustration by pointing to key elements thus helping to concretize the story text, thereby improving story comprehension.
Ilona De Milliano (University of Amsterdam); Amos Van Gelderen; Erik Van Schooten; Peter Sleegers - Motivation and behavioral engagement in the classroom as predictors of reading comprehension development of adolescent struggling readers
Purpose: Studies in many countries have signaled that many adolescents struggle with the literacy tasks they have to perform for school (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2008; OECD, 2003; Inspectie van het Onderwijs, 2008). Apart from linguistic knowledge, motivation is claimed a key predictor of reading achievement. Higher levels of motivation and self-efficacy are in addition to behavioral engagement and self-regulation associated with better literacy abilities (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). To promote adolescents' literacy abilities, more content based approaches are urged aimed at increasing motivation and engagement in literacy activities in the classroom (Biancarosa & Snow, 2006). Due to a focus of existing studies on younger readers it is unclear which motivational facets are relevant in explaining differences in reading abilities among adolescent struggling readers. There is particularly little understanding of the role of behavioral engagement in language arts opposed to content area classrooms. Method: The reading motivation of 63 low-achieving adolescents and their behavioral engagement in language arts and content area lessons from grade 7 to 9 were examined by self-reports and observations of on-task behavior during literacy activities. In the same time span, students' reading comprehension abilities were established by the SALT Literacy Test (Van Steensel, Van Gelderen & Oostdam, submitted). Results: This study reveals that especially differences in behavioral engagement in literacy activities in content area lessons predict differences in reading comprehension development between adolescent struggling readers. Conclusions: This study supports the premise of content based language learning for promoting the reading comprehension development of struggling readers.
S. Hélène Deacon (Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) - Which comes first?: The direction of the relationship between morphological awareness and reading
Purpose: Our study examined the direction of the relationship between one of children's oral language skills, awareness of morphemes, or the smallest meaningful units in words, and their reading. Methods: We conducted a longitudinal study with 100 grade 2 children who were tested again in grade 3. We evaluated the children's morphological awareness and reading skill, each with two measures, in both grades 2 and 3. We also evaluated the children's phonological awareness, vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning. Results: Our robust structural equation model included controls for phonological awareness, vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning. It also included auto-regressor controls designed to, for the first time, evaluate the direction of the relationship between morphological awareness and reading skill. In this model, children's morphological awareness predicted their growth in reading to the same extent that their reading predicted their growth in morphological awareness. Conclusions: Our results suggest a bidirectional relationship between children's morphological awareness and their reading, a finding that substantially informs current models of reading development.
Paul Deane (Educational Testing Service)Rene Lawless; Chen Li; John Sabatini; Isaac Bejar; Tenaha O'Reilly - An Examination of Three Item Types Designed to Measure Depth of Partial Vocabulary Knowledge
Purpose - to measure (partial) vocabulary understanding in middle-school students, involving items targeting different depths of vocabulary knowledge, e.g., familiarity with common usage, word-level associations, and conceptual inference. We expected the following order of difficulty (after controlling for other factors): usage items, word association items, and conceptual inference items. Method - 1,449 7th-grade students and 1,622 8th-grade students were administered forms in a randomized, counterbalanced design systematically testing all three item types for two sets of ten words. Each form also contained 30 multiple-choice synonym items as a common anchor. We equated the test forms between the two sets of words and ran 3-parameter Item Response Theory (3PL IRT) analyses. For each item, we also calculated Natural Language Processing (NLP) features, including word frequency, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) cosines, and various related measures, and constructed regression models predicting item parameters from the NLP features. Results - We were able to fit regression models predicting item difficulty and discrimination for each item type, with R Square values between .3 and .6. Word frequency was a significant predictor only for the conceptual inference item type. Regression equations constants aligned with the mean item parameters and indicated that item type difficulty and discrimination fell in the predicted order. Conclusions - These results indicate that it may be possible to construct vocabulary items that probe depth of vocabulary knowledge, with some control over item parameters using NLP features. We are currently analyzing results from follow-up studies designed to test this hypothesis.
Louise Deault (McGill University)Robert Savage; Maria Di Stasio - Effective classroom contexts to develop literacy and attention skills for typical and at-risk first grade students
Inattention and reading problems are commonly recognized as co-occurring difficulties associated with academic underachievement. The present study used a nested design (n=18 classrooms; 285 students) and hierarchical linear modeling to assess different aspects of literacy teaching as predictors of change in students' reading and attention among first grade students in Quebec. Observations of literacy teaching were obtained using the Classroom AIMS Instrument (Roehrig et al., 2003), which assesses teaching quality with respect to Classroom Atmosphere, Literacy Instruction, Classroom Management and Student Engagement. Significant variation existed between classrooms (accounting for 8-15% of the variation) across reading measures and teacher's attention ratings. For reading comprehension, students' initial reading ability interacted with classroom factors in predicting students' reading comprehension outcomes. For students who started the year with high reading skills, classroom management predicted higher rates of growth in reading comprehension. In contrast, for students who started the year with weaker reading skills, student engagement predicted higher rates of growth in reading comprehension. However, the AIMS factors did not predict change in students' word reading and attention across the grade one year. For students at risk of attention difficulties, the overall quality of the teaching environment was an important predictor of growth in their listening comprehension skills. Students with mild attention difficulties who experienced high-quality teaching made significant gains in listening comprehension compared to students who were in less effectively taught classrooms. These results have implications for further studies exploring the contribution of literacy teaching practices to students at risk of attention problems.
Carolyn A. Denton (University of Texas Health Science Center - Houston); W. Pat Taylor; Jack M. Fletcher; Sharon Vaughn; Amy E. Barth; David J. Francis - An experimental evaluation of guided reading as an intervention for primary-grade at-risk readers
Purpose Guided Reading (GR; Fountas & Pinnell, 1996) is widely implemented in US schools, yet little experimental research exists evaluating its effects. The purpose of this study was to evaluate its efficacy for Grade 2 students with reading difficulties, contrasting it with explicit instruction (EI) and typical school practice (TSP). Method Second grade students in 10 US schools were screened to identify those with serious difficulties in word reading, fluency, and/or comprehension. Identified students were randomly assigned to receive supplemental intervention using GR (n = 70) or EI (n = 70), or to TSP (n = 67). GR intervention consisted of text reading, teaching for strategies, brief text discussion, and optional components (e.g., comprehension activities, 5 min. of word work). EI consisted of direct, systematic instruction in decoding, word reading, and comprehension, and fluency practice. These preliminary data analyses were conducted using ANOVA. Subsequent analyses will consider the nested data structure and potential covariates. Results The three groups differed significantly on timed and untimed word reading, phonological decoding, 1 measure of comprehension, and oral reading fluency (ORF); in all cases effect sizes for EI > GR and TSP. Post-hoc analyses found that EI performed significantly better than TSP on decoding, comprehension, and ORF; there were no significant differences between TSP and GR. Conclusions GR, as described by Fountas and Pinnell (1998), did not demonstrate benefits for students with reading difficulties, relative to TSP, while EI had superior outcomes to TSP in some measures of decoding, fluency, and comprehension.
Alain Desrochers (School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) - Linking suffixes to grammatical processing: Determinants of Gender Decisions in French
Purpose: In derivational languages word suffixes may highlight information about meaning (e.g. deriv-ation: process or result of process) and relations to semantically similar words. In French nouns, suffixes may also serve as grammatical gender markers as they are often highly correlated to gender classes (i.e. masculine-feminine), whether these nouns have animate or inanimate referents. We report the results of 4 experiments designed to investigate suffix processing in gender decision. Method: University students (n ≥ 24 per experiment) were shown French nouns via E-Prime and asked to quickly decide which indefinite article (masculine UN or feminine UNE) they would choose for them under different procedural conditions. Results: Gender decisions were found to be faster and more accurate when nouns carried a consistent gender marker rather than an inconsistent non-morphological ending and when they had a high frequency rather than a low frequency of use in print. The effect of word frequency was reduced when suffixes were pre-exposed and sorted into gender classes prior to gender decisions with nouns carrying these suffixes but it never was neutralized. Finally, suffix pre-exposure by itself had no effect on gender decision latency or accuracy. Conclusions: Grammatical gender identification is strongly influenced by the morphological status of noun endings but clear and consistent gender markers, however highly correlated they are to gender classes, do not override the influence of other lexical variables. Implications for morphological processing and grammatical gender acquisition are discussed.
Vassiliki Diamanti (); Dimitra Ioannou; Angeliki Mouzaki; Athanassios Protopapas - Predictors of spelling ability in Greek: morphological vs phonological awareness
Purpose: The role of phonological awareness for spelling development has been established for English but remains controversial in more transparent orthographies. On the other hand, morphological awareness has been proposed as a prerequisite for the development of morphological spelling. Greek is particularly suited for this investigation due to relatively transparent orthography and morphological richness. We examined morphosyntactic skills and phonological awareness as predictors of future spelling ability among Greek-speaking children in late elementary grades. Method: 476 Greek-speaking children attending grades 4, 5, and 6 were assessed on morphosyntax (sentence completion targeting mainly inflectional and derivational morphology and clitics), phonemic awareness (phoneme deletion using multisyllabic nonwords) and spelling (a 60-word list) at two testing occasions approximately 6 months apart. Results: Both phoneme deletion (coefficients about .54) and morphosyntax (.49) were significantly correlated with current and future spelling ability. Hierarchical linear regressions indicated that phoneme deletion (ΔR² = .133) and morphosyntax (ΔR² = .073) at time 1 were significant unique predictors of spelling at time 2, controlling for each other. However, after controlling for the autoregressive effect of spelling, phoneme deletion (ΔR² = .003, p = .003) remained the single unique longitudinal predictor of spelling. Conclusions: These findings indicate that phonological awareness, when properly assessed with a sufficiently demanding task, remains significantly correlated with, and predictive of, spelling development past the early elementary grades, even in a relatively transparent orthography in which there is little ambiguity over phonemic spellings and most spelling difficulties relate to morphological endings and word stem etymology.
Alessandra Dillenburg Scur (OISE at University of Toronto); Miranda DiLorenzo; Cara Lew; Christie Fraser; Esther Geva - Examining the role of early levels of vocabulary in reading comprehension: the effect of L1 dominant, L1-L2 balanced, and L2 dominant vocabulary knowledge
Purpose. The roles that first language (L1) and second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge play in L2 reading comprehension are complex and far from understood. Previous research suggests that vocabulary may be one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension for ELLs (NLP, 2006). The purpose of this study was to further examine the role of vocabulary knowledge in skilled reading comprehension. Specifically, we explored how early levels of L1 and L2 English vocabulary accounted for differences in later reading comprehension. Method. ELLs (N = 145) of varying home-language backgrounds were categorized into three groups based on early vocabulary knowledge in their native language and L2 English. The groups were: L1 dominant, L1-L2 balanced, and L2 dominant. Participants were also assessed on their English reading comprehension ability in Grade 4 as measured by the NEAL. Correlation and ANOVA were the primary statistical techniques used in analyses. Results. Correlations indicated significant and positive relationships between L1-L2 balanced and L2 English dominant vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. ANOVA revealed significant differences in reading comprehension between the groups. The L1 dominant group was weaker in reading comprehension than the L1-L2 balanced and L2 dominant vocabulary groups. Conclusions. Our results shed light on how vocabulary knowledge contributes to differences in reading comprehension for ELLs. It may be beneficial to make vocabulary a priority in reading curriculum for the primary grades, especially for ELLs that are L1 dominant. Future research should examine if early L2 vocabulary intervention in L1 dominant ELLs improves reading comprehension in English.
Beatriz Diuk (CIPA-UNSAM); Francisca Serrano; Marina Ferroni - Reading difficulties in Spanish-speaking low-income children
This paper reports initial results from an ongoing investigation on reading difficulties in Spanish-speaking children growing in poverty in Argentina. Approximately 25% of low-income latin-american children experience severe reading difficulties. The aim of the study is to explore the reading-related cognitive profiles of these children. Twenty-three 8-to-12 year old children reading an average of 4 years below chronological age (RD group) were compared to 23 younger reading level controls (RL). Additionally, 13 of the RD children were matched to 13 chronological age controls (CA). All children came from similar low socioeconomic background. Phonological awareness, rapid naming, letter knowledge, vocabulary, non-verbal intelligence, memory and reading tests were administered. RD children obtained significantly lower scores than CA controls in reading, phonological segmentation, rapid naming of letter, letter knowledge and non-verbal intelligence. Comparisons between RD and RL controls revealed that RD children performed significantly better then RL children in memory tasks, vocabulary, letter-name knowledge and rapid naming. No differences were found in word reading but the RD group performed significantly worse in pseudoword and nonword reading and in letter-sound knowledge. RD children show a pattern of delay when compared to CA controls. Differences between RD and RL children suggest that low knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences might hinder the establishment of the phonological path to reading, creating mapping difficulties responsible for low performance on pseudoword reading. The incidence of global teaching methods in which G-P correspondences are de-emphasized might be a critical contextual factor in turning cognitively vulnerable children into children with reading difficulties.
Christina Dobbs (Harvard Graduate School of Education) - Learning to be convincing: metadiscourse and the academic writing of middle graders
Purpose: As academic language becomes increasingly important, few studies of writing have attempted to analyze the academic language tools used by students in their persuasive essays. The purpose of this study was to use innovative tools to closely analyze the persuasive writing of middle graders to understand whether and how students organize and mark stance in their essay drafts. The study also explored how use of organizational and stance markers predicted overall writing quality. Method: Essays were collected as part of a supplementary vocabulary intervention wherein students wrote weekly essays taking a persuasive stance. Sixty-one essays were coded for metadiscourse markers (adapted from Hyland, 2006) and propositional attitudes (Reilly, Baruch, Jisa, & Berman, 2002); lexical diversity and length were analyzed and essays were scored using two holistic rubrics, one about topic/idea development and another about conventions, for writing quality. Results: Students used metadiscourse markers with varying degrees of sophistication to present their viewpoints. They used organizational and stance forms in developing ways to package their ideas for readers, and they also use informal forms, which organize or mark stance. The diversity of metadiscourse markers used in an essay was a significant predictor of quality of topic/idea development. Conclusions: Academic language skills are a key factor as students move into secondary grades, and organizational and stance markers are one tool that students use to clearly communicate their perspectives. Further study of the forms students use to organize and persuade could yield results in considering instruction and development of writing skill.
Perin Dolores ((voting member) Teachers College, Columbia University) - Writing skills of low-achieving postsecondary students
Purpose: The writing ability of low-skilled postsecondary students was analyzed in relation to reading ability, background knowledge, text characteristics, and demographic variables. Stability of performance across writing tasks was also investigated. Method: Participants attended developmental (remedial) education courses just under the college level in three community colleges. Data came from two samples using different tasks. Written summarization, composing from sources, argumentative writing, and standardized reading and writing tasks were administered. Depending on the task, dependent variables were the proportion of main ideas from the source text, accuracy, reproductions, conventions, productivity, persuasiveness, number of reasons to support a position, and overall writing quality. Results: Scores on standardized reading and writing tests were considerably below the mean. Approximately one-third of the summarized material was copied directly from the source, although instructions were to write in one's own words. One-half to one-third of the summarized material inaccurately portrayed concepts in the source text. Text density and background knowledge influenced writing quality on the composing from sources task. Ethnicity and native language were predictive of the proportion of main ideas from source text and accuracy of the written summaries. Overall persuasiveness and quality of argumentative writing were low, and reasons were often conflated with positions in the writing samples. Performance was relatively stable across summarization and argumentative writing tasks. General reading ability was not predictive of summarization or argumentative writing skill. Conclusions: Performance suggested serious writing difficulty in relation to postsecondary expectations, and indicates the need for focused writing interventions.
Qiong Dong (Beijing Normal University, Psychology Department);Hong Li;Jie Zhang;Xinchun Wu - Character learning deficit in Chinese developmental dyslexia
Purpose:Previous research suggests that Chinese dyslexic children have difficulties in orthography-pronunciation associate learning like their alphabetic counterparts. Whether Chinese dyslexic children have difficulties in orthography-meaning associate learning is less understood. The present study aimed to examine whether Chinese developmental dyslexia can use radical strategies in orthography-pronunciation associate learning and orthography-meaning associate learning of Chinese characters. Method:Thirty-five dyslexic children (mean age: 10; 4) and 32 normal readers (mean age: 10; 5) in China were trained to pronounce 12 pseudo-characters of three types: regular phonetic radicals, irregular phonetic radicals, and no phonological cues. Students were tested on the immediate recall and one-week delayed recall of the pronunciations of pseudo-characters. After one week, the same two groups of children were taught the meanings (short descriptions) of another 12 pseudo-characters of three types: transparent radicals, opaque radicals, and no meaning cues. Students were asked to produce the meanings of pseudo-characters in six immediate test-and-feedback trials and one week later. Results:Chinese dyslexic children were able to use phonetic radicals and semantic radicals to learn new phonetic-regular and semantic-transparent characters as their normal peers. The dyslexic group, however, performed less well than the normal group in learning pseudo-characters with irregular phonetic radicals, opaque semantic radicals, no phonological or semantic cues, suggesting an arbitrary visual-verbal paired-associate learning deficit in Chinese dyslexic children. The dyslexic group did not show disadvantages in the learning retention. Conclusions:These findings emphasize the importance of explicit teaching of radical knowledge for Chinese dyslexic children.
Michelle Drouin (Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne)Brent Driver - Texting, textese, and literacy skills: A naturalistic study
* Purpose: A surge in text messaging over the past decade has led a growing number of literacy researchers to examine the abbreviated language associated with this technology-textese. For English-speakers, use of textese has been associated with higher levels of literacy among children (e.g., Plester, Wood, & Bell, 2008) but lower levels of literacy among adults (Drouin, 2011). However, all known studies of textese and literacy have analyzed only experimental data. In this study, we examined actual text messages at a granular level to determine whether there were significant relationships between textism density (proportion of textisms to total words), textism categories, and literacy skills. * Method: Participants were 183 American undergraduates who completed standardized reading, spelling, and vocabulary assessments and also provided their last five text messages sent. We coded these messages using the textese category list by De Jonge & Kemp (2010), and then computed individual scores for textism density and category density (proportional use of textism categories). We then used correlational analyses to examine relationships between textism density, category density, and literacy skills. * Results: Textism density was significantly and negatively related to literacy skills. Moreover, those with lower literacy scores used proportionately more omitted apostrophes, whereas proportionately greater use of symbols and accent stylization was associated with higher reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills. * Conclusion: This granular analysis of naturalistic data provides guidance about which variables (e.g., textism categories) to include in future texting studies, and also supports claims that use of textese is associated with lower levels of literacy.
Fiona Duff (University of Oxford); Kelly Burgoyne; Paula Clarke; Sue Buckley; Margaret Snowling; Charles Hulme - Efficacy of a reading and language intervention for children with Down syndrome: a randomized controlled trial
Purpose: This study evaluates the impact of an intervention on the language and literacy skills of children with Down syndrome. Methods: Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver a reading and language intervention to individual children in daily 40-minute sessions. We used a waiting list control design: half the sample received intervention immediately, while the remaining children received intervention after a 20-week delay. Fifty-seven children with Down syndrome in mainstream primary schools were randomly allocated to intervention (40-weeks of intervention) and waiting control (20-weeks of intervention) groups. Progress was measured pre-intervention, after 20-weeks of intervention, and after 40-weeks of intervention. Results: Regression (ANCOVA) models showed that after 20-weeks of intervention, the intervention group made significantly greater progress than the waiting control group on measures of single word reading, letter-sound knowledge, phoneme blending and taught expressive vocabulary, though effect sizes were generally modest. Effects did not transfer to other skills (nonword reading, spelling, standardised expressive/receptive vocabulary, expressive information and grammar). After 40-weeks of intervention, the intervention group remained numerically ahead of the control group on most key outcome measures; but the only significant difference between groups was on single word reading. Children who were younger, attended more intervention sessions, and had better initial receptive language skills made greater progress during the course of the intervention. Conclusions: A TA-delivered intervention produced improvements in the reading and language skills of children with Down syndrome. Gains were largest in skills directly taught with little evidence of generalization to skills not directly taught.
Chantal Dufour-Martel (Dynamic Measurement Group / University of Oregon) - Investigating the psychometric properties of IDAPEL french language early literacy measures with students learning to read in french
Purpose - The study presents findings of a validation study examining the psychometric properties of French-language early literacy experimental measures known as IDAPEL. Method - We used a correlational research design. Participants (N = 300) included Kindergarten, first grade and second grade French-speaking student who were assessed at three time-points during one school year. A subset was assessed at two-week intervals using alternate forms of two measures. At the end of the school year, another subset was assessed on a set of criterion-related tests. The statistical analyses addressed four issues: measure sensitivity, two-week alternate form-reliability, construct validity correlations with criterion outcome measures both taken at year end, and predictive validity correlations between all measures taken at beginning and end of year. Results - The results indicate that most of the measures are sensitive to the change that occurred between the three time points. Test-retest correlations confirmed that the reliability of most measures is quite satisfactory, as most were positively and significantly correlated with criterion-related measures. Early Kindergarten measures were found to be strongly correlated with year-end measures of phonological awareness, letter knowledge and reading. Two Grade 1 measures were found to be most potent and consistent predictors of year-end measures of single-word and sentence reading. Conclusions - Clear empirical evidence validates that the IDAPEL battery of tests can serve several useful purposes, in example, screening students at risk of reading difficulty, and progress monitoring.
Elisabeth Duursma (University of Groningen) - Reading aloud patterns among families living in the Netherlands
It has been well documented that reading aloud is beneficial for young children's language and literacy development (e.g., Bus, van Ijzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995; Mol & Bus, 2011). However, little is known about reading aloud patterns in families residing in the Netherlands. The aim of this study was to examine reading aloud behaviors in families living in the Netherlands. We administered a questionnaire on bookreading to 444 families with children ages 0-12 years, as well as a questionnaire to 275 children (ages 8-12) about reading. We used descriptive statistics and correlations to examine patterns and relations between variables. Ninety percent of the respondents were female. Ten percent of the respondents had a university degree, 26% had attended community college, and 6% had a high school diploma. More than three quarters of the families spoke Dutch at home and about 10% spoke a local dialect. More than 60% of parents reported reading daily to their children while 5% said never to engage in any bookreading. Fifty-five percent of respondents reported that fathers also read to their children. However, in most families mothers did most of the reading (64%) while only 8% of fathers did most of the reading. Many parents reported they started reading to their children between ages 6-12 months (39%). Seventy-five percent of children ages 8-12 received some bookreading at home. Popular genres among children were adventure books, comics and stories about animals. Parents who reported they enjoyed bookreading tended to have children who also enjoyed reading.
Jaclyn Dynia (Ohio State University); Laura M. Justice - How the features of texts relate to teachers' use of print referencing
Purpose - As book reading is an important activity, it's important to investigate how this interaction may be influenced by the text. Furthermore, print features of text might influence how much teachers talk about print. Research questions: (1) to what extent does the linguistic richness and print salience of children's storybooks relate to teachers' use of print referencing?, (2) to what extent is there interplay between storybooks' linguistic richness and print salience when predicting teachers' use of print referencing? Method - 57 teachers participated in a 30-week book-reading intervention. The teachers were given identical children's storybooks and were encouraged to use print referencing style. 13 different storybooks were coded for linguistic richness and print salience. Video recordings of the book reading sessions were coded for print referencing. Results - Results indicated that print salience is highly positively related to teachers' use of print referencing. Also, the constructs of PSM and total words predicted teachers' use of print referencing and the interaction between PSM and mean length of sentence (MLS) was significant for storybooks with moderate and high PSM scores. Conclusions - These results are important, as they show that the print salience of storybooks (particularly the amount of interesting font changes contained within) is influential to teachers' attention to print when reading. Moreover, these results are not only important for intervention based book selection, but for classroom teachers' book selection as well. This study also emphasizes the need to include a well-balanced presentation of book genre during shared book reading sessions.
Lena Eckerholm (Lena Eckerholm) - Teachers` professional practice and instruction in reading comprehension among students in year 4-6 (Swedish schools)
Teachers´ professional practice and instruction in reading comprehension among students in year 4-6 Lena Eckerholm Within reading research, reading comprehension is now an area which has come to attract increasing attention. This presented study aims to elucidating teachers' education experience in reading/reading comprehension among students in year 4-6. In the study 22 teachers were interviewed about views, intentions, ideas and knowledge that according to them constituted the starting points for how they formulated their instruction practice. The interview questions were focused on the teachers' instructions, for developing the students' ability of reading comprehension through deliberately selected educational methods (Pressley, M., 2002; Langer, J., 2005; Guthrie, J., 2004). The results indicated that the teachers mainly emphasized experience of a text, writing exercises, finding facts and discussions about texts. The teachers considered that discussions about a texts' sense and interpretation were important aspects, which stood in contrast to what they regarded as difficult to implement. According to the teachers, limiting factors had to do with the economic frameworks the municipalities organized, for example, withdrawal of personnel resources, what mainly influenced the students who had needs of additional aids. The teachers stressed that the student group's composition, constituted a framework for how they could carry out the education. The teachers stated that the municipality's directives to the school, not correct coincided with the resources which had been offered, and that this was considered to counteract their ambitions. The education experience that the teachers stressed could be related to both to be action-oriented, and at the same time there was a conflict between practical requirements and reflection about learning outcome. Teacher´s opinion was to direct one´s energies towards presence, a sensitive ear and flexibility.
Linnea C. Ehri (CUNY Graduate Center)Alan Tener; - Dynamic Assessment of Word Attack Skill in Students with a Reading Disability
Purpose. In this study, dynamic assessment (DA) was applied to word attack test performance. In DA, the tester interacts with the participant to affect change in the skill being evaluated. The study was intended to determine whether DA can improve struggling readers' ability to decode unfamiliar words. Method. The participants were from middle, high school, and adult literacy schools, mean age 22 years. They were struggling readers who scored below the 25th percentile on the WRMT-R word attack test. Students were randomly assigned to either the DA treatment or a control group. When DA students misread a single syllable or multisyllabic nonword, they were taught a mapping strategy to decode the word, by matching written units to spoken units, either onsets and rimes or syllables, and blending the units. The control group practiced reading the same words but did not receive any strategy training or feedback on their accuracy. Results and Conclusions. The DA group decoded significantly more nonwords on an immediate posttest than the practice group, indicating that dynamic assessment improved performance. However, the advantage was no longer evident two weeks later. Very likely, more extensive decoding instruction is needed to have a lasting effect. The DA procedure was more informative as it exposed students' decoding strengths and weaknesses and revealed the type and amount of training each person needed to improve their success during the test, for example, lack of segmentation skill, or lack of grapheme-phoneme knowledge. Suc information is useful for designing an appropriate intervention for individual learners.
Carsten Elbro (University of Copenhagen); Carsten Elbro; Holger Juul; Anne-Mette V. Nielsen; Mads Poulsen - Do irregularly spelled words take something special to read?
Purpose: This study was concerned with prerequisite abilities for learning to decode irregularly spelled words. The question was whether irregularly spelled words add something special to what is required in order to decode regular words. One such special requirement may be a "set for variability" - being prepared to try a different pronunciation if an initial decoding attempt does not result in a known word. Another requirement may simply be vocabulary. Method: The development of irregular word reading was investigated in a longitudinal study of 187 children from preschool to the end of grade 2 learning to read in a deep orthography. Reading of individual non-words, regular and irregular words was measured bi-monthly during grade 1 and 2. Early predictors of reading development included "set for variability", productive vocabulary, budding reading abilities, phoneme awareness, and RAN. Time taken to learn to read irregular words was subjected to regression analyses controlling for time taken to learn to decode regular words. Results & conclusions: Learning to read regular words was a strong predictor of irregular word reading. Neither vocabulary nor "set for variability" predicted the development of reading of irregular words once learning to read regular words was controlled. The results are discussed in terms of orthographic irregularity versus minority rules governed by particular letter contexts. Minority rules may require extended letter-sound mapping rather than phonological flexibility.
Amy Elleman (Middle Tennessee State University)Doug Fuchs; Lynn S. Fuchs; Donald L. Compton; Peng Peng; Devin M. Kearns; Sam A. Patton; Loulee Yen Haga; Jwa K. Kim - Considering sensitivity: A construct and psychometric evaluation of a battery of tests designed to assess comprehension growth for at-risk first graders
Purpose Assessing reading comprehension growth in young children who struggle with learning to read is difficult, because they often cannot decode enough words in the test passages to demonstrate their ability to understand the meaning of the text. To increase sensitivity and adequately consider the impact of a reading intervention for at-risk first grade students, we assessed near, mid, and far transfer reading and listening comprehension skills. This study was conducted to validate the psychometrics and construct validity of the researcher-designed transfer tests. Method We designed four measures to assess near and mid transfer of both reading and listening skills and used two standardized measures, the WDRB and WRMT, as far transfer measures. For near transfer, we utilized a dynamic testing format with instruction and texts closely aligned to the intervention. For mid transfer, we used short stories similar to those found on standardized tests, offered no feedback to students, but asked questions similar to those in the intervention. We administered the listening tests at pre and posttest and the reading tests at posttest across two cohorts of students (N = 160). Using IRT and correlational analyses we considered a.) whether the items were appropriate and adequately assessed literal, synthesis and inferential comprehension, b.) the data support conceptualizing these measures as near, mid, and far transfer, and c.) whether these measures were sensitive to growth. Results and Conclusions Preliminary analyses suggest that the mid-transfer tests are inadequate for assessing growth. In contrast, the near transfer listening measure was sensitive to growth only for students who entered the study with the lowest decoding scores, and one of the far transfer measures was sensitive to growth across all students.
Asa Elwer ()Stefan Samuelsson - Developmental stability for different definitions of poor comprehension
Purpose The fact that different studies apply diverse selection criteria when identifying poor comprehenders, have lead to many uncertainties about what a poor comprehender is. The aim of this study was to compare how different selection procedures at different ages target children and how their deficits are exhibited at the time of selection but also prospectively and retrospectively. Method A total of 990 American and Swedish twins engaged in the international longitudinal twin study (ILTS) took part in the study. Two things characterize poor comprehenders independently of selection procedure; deficits in reading comprehension and age appropriate decoding skills. In this study two different procedures of selection were used; a discrepancy definition and a procedure that apply the simple view of reading. These two groups of poor comprehenders were selected at grade 2 and 4 and examined between the ages 5 and 10 on cognitive and language skills. Results Independently of the selection procedure, there were three times as many poor comprehenders at grade 4 compared to grade 2. In addition, very few of the poor comprehenders identified at grade 2 still qualified as poor comprehenders 2 years later. The results also showed that although there were some degree of overlap, using different selection procedures targeted different individuals with diverse cognitive and language profiles. Conclusions Compromised reading comprehension despite adequate decoding characterizes poor comprehenders. However, the time of identification and the group selection procedure used are of great importance in understanding the cognitive and language profiles of the poor comprehenders.
Christine Espin (Leiden University ); Siuman Chung; Marian Verhallen - Reading progress monitoring for secondary-school students
Purpose: To examine the technical adequacy of a reading progress measure for secondary-school students. Method: Two consecutive, related studies were conducted. In the first, 655 students from diverse ethnic backgrounds in 43 7th to 9th grade classrooms completed two 2-min maze-selection passages in March and June. Maze passages were scored for number of correct choices in 1 and 2 minutes. Criterion variables included scores on a national reading test, course grades, and grade and academic-level placement. Reliability, validity, and sensitivity to growth of the measures are examined. In the second study, approximately 150 7th-grade students are being monitored weekly with the maze task. The technical adequacy of the growth rates will be examined. Results: Preliminary analyses from Study 1 reveals alternate-form reliability coefficients of r=.76 and r=.82 for 1- and 2-mins respectively. Related to validity, the measures significantly differentiate students in grades 7 and 9 (F(1, 137) =8.96, p<.003) and students in practical, basic, and university-preparation programs (F(2, 137) = 82.11, p<.000), with no interaction between grade and academic program. Analyses from Studies 1 and 2 will be completed in the summer of 2012. Conclusion: Although a Response-to-Intervention (RTI) approach is increasingly being implemented at the secondary-school level, little is known about the technical adequacy of progress measures used in such a system. These studies provide information about the technical adequacy on one reading progress measure for secondary-school students.
Mary Ann Evans (Department of Psychology, University of Guelph); Jean Saint-Aubin - Eye Movements and Vocabulary Acquisition in Repeated Storybook Reading without Adult Mediation
Purpose: The study addressed the question of whether and how eye movements of preschoolers during shared book reading are related to vocabulary acquisition. Method: Thirty-six French-speaking four-year-old children were read the same three storybooks seven times over a two-week interval and their eye movements monitored on the first and seventh reading using the EyeLink II system. The books together contained 15 high frequency content words pictured in the accompanying illustration, seven or eight of which were replaced with rare or unfamiliar words. These words appeared just once in the text of the book. Children were assessed on their knowledge of rare words after the first and seventh reading using a PPVT format. Children were also administered the French version of the PPVT at the first session. Results: The data revealed a remarkable stability in eye movements, with children spending the vast majority of their viewing time at the first and seventh reading on the illustrations. Children's vocabulary gains were modest over the repeated readings. As expected, vocabulary gains were related to children's overall receptive vocabulary. Most importantly, viewing time on the illustration of the common and of the rare words at the first reading partially mediated the advantage that overall receptive vocabulary held for knowledge of rare words after the seventh reading. Conclusion: Given the importance of vocabulary knowledge for later reading comprehension, this study underscores the positive value of children primarily attending to the illustration, despite the negative effect it may have on the acquisition of print specific skills.
Fataneh Farnia (Hincks-Dellcrest Centre and University of Toronto)Esther Geva - "Late emerging" language impairment in monolinguals and ELLs
Purpose: Late emerging language problems and their relationship to reading comprehension have been discussed re monolinguals (EL1), (Catts et al, 2008) but little is known about this with regard to ELLs. This study examines later emerging language impairment (LI) in ELLs and EL1s. Questions: (a) Do students with "consistent" low performance on vocabulary have difficulties on syntax in upper elementary grades? (b) Are there ELLs and EL1s with "late emerging" oral language difficulties? (c) What are their cognitive, language, and reading profiles? Method: Sample: 282 ELLs and 121 EL1s. Performance on cognitive, language (e.g., vocabulary, syntax), word reading, and reading comprehension skills was tracked from grade 3 to 6. 25 ELLs (8.9%) and 12 EL1s (9.9%) who scored at least 1-SD below their reference group on vocabulary, 3-4 times out of 4 assessment waves (having no decoding problems) were designated as LI. Percentages were similar in ELL and EL1. Results: (a) 3.4% ELLs and 5.8% EL1s identified as consistent LI scored one SD below their reference group means on grade 5 syntax. (b) 7.6% of the ELLs and 11% of the EL1s were "late emerging", displaying syntax problems without consistent vocabulary problems. (c) Children with vocabulary and syntax problems had consistent reading comprehension difficulties from grade 4 to 6. ELLs and EL1s with LI had similar cognitive and linguistic profiles. Conclusions. Longitudinal research and consideration of the reference group enable the identification of LI (consistent and late emerging) in ELLs and EL1s. This has implications for timely identification and interventions.  
Amber Farrington (Florida State University); Christopher Lonigan - How many approaches to learning are there? Unique contributions of approaches to learning to emergent literacy skills
Purpose - Emergent literacy skills are composed of oral language (OL), phonological awareness (PA), and print knowledge (PK) skills. They develop during the preschool period and are predictive of later reading achievement. Approaches to learning, which is composed of three domains (competence motivation, attention/persistence, and attitudes toward learning), has been demonstrated to affect the development of emergent literacy skills is. However, no study has examined the separate effects of the three components of approaches to learning. The goal of this study is to evaluate the relationships between each of the approaches to learning domains and each emergent literacy skill. Method - 289 children between 45 and 72 months were administered standardized measures of OL, PA, and PK during the fall of their preschool year. Each child's teacher provided ratings on a measure of children's approaches to learning using the Preschool Learning Behaviors Scale. Results - To examine the change in variance accounted for and unique contribution of each domain of approaches to learning, structural equation modeling was used to extract three sets of variance to form latent variables of each domain. This led to an increase in variance accounted for (11% increase for OL, 8% for PA, and 6% for PK) when compared with a one-factor model. Standardized path coefficients from attention/persistence and attitudes toward learning to OL and PA were significant, whereas only the path from competence motivation to PK was significant. Conclusion -The three components of approaches to learning are differentially predictive of children's emergent literacy skills.
Jo Ann Farver (University of Southern California)Jonathan Nakamoto Christopher Lonigan - Effective Early Childhood Teacher Training: A Contrast of Two Methods for Improving Young Children's Early Literacy Skills
Title: Effective Early Childhood Teacher Training: A Contrast of Two Methods for Improving Young Children's Early Literacy Skills Introduction Early childhood (ECH) educators are on the front lines of current efforts to change children's experiences in preschool settings to support the development of their early literacy skills and ensure later academic success. Despite the strong desire to improve curricula to help children learn to read, there continues to be a mismatch between teachers' preparation and their educational practices and the expectations of parents and policy makers. Moreover, there is a range of philosophical differences in approaches to teaching young children and no consensus about how best to train ECH educators. Part of the problem lies in teachers' resistance to change. Studies have documented teachers' unwillingness to accept research on teaching or to adopt new educational practices unless the new information fits with their existing belief system. One way to address these issues is through teacher professional development (PD). There are two basic approaches used with ECH educators: the Workshop Model and the On-site Mentor/Coach Model. In this study we evaluated the relative efficacy of two PD models on teachers' success in delivering the Literacy Express Comprehensive Preschool Curriculum to Head Start preschool children. Using a randomized design, 30 classrooms were assigned to the workshop, mentored, or control conditions to address three questions: 1. Is there a relation between teachers' education level and the quality of their classroom literacy environments? 2. What is the impact of the teacher PD on the classroom quality? 3. Does the classroom quality mediate the effects of the PD on the children's Oral Language and Print Knowledge? Method Participants were 55 teachers and 47 aides and 375 preschool children (M age= 50.35 months; SD = 4.90) at the start of the preschool year. Two groups of teachers received professional development via the workshop or mentoring model across the preschool year. The control group continued to deliver their usual High/Scope Curriculum. Classrooms were observed at the beginning (October T1), middle (January T2) and end of the preschool year (April T3) using the 32-item Early Childhood Classroom Observation Measure (ECCOM; Stipek & Byler, 2004) to assess teachers' instructional practices. The items were rated using a 1 (rarely seen) to 5 (practices predominate) scale. The ECOMM yields three constructivist and three didactic subscales for instruction, management, and social climate, and an overall measure of the classroom print environment. Teachers and aides completed the Teacher/Aide Demographic Questionnaire (T1), the Frequency of Literacy and Activities in Classroom, and the Literacy Knowledge Assessment (T1 and T2). The children's oral language and print knowledge skills were assessed at T1, T2 and T3 (May) using the Preschool Language Scale (PLS; Zimmerman et al., 2002) and the P-CTOPPP Print knowledge subscale (Lonigan et al., 2002). Results Question # 1: Is there a relation between teachers' education level and the quality of their classroom literacy environments? To examine whether there was a relation between teachers' education levels and their classroom literacy environments we compared the T1 classroom observations and the teacher questionnaire data by their education levels (2 = high school degree; 5 = some university credits). As shown in the Figures 1 and 2, there were small but significant effects of teacher education on classroom climate and their reports of literacy activities in the classroom. Figure 1. The Mean Frequency of Literacy Activities in the Classroom by Teachers' Education Levels Figure 2. The Mean Classroom Climate Scores by Teachers' Education Levels Question #2: What is the impact of teacher PD on the classroom quality? To examine the impact of teacher PD development on the classroom environment, T2 classroom observations were compared by professional development group. As shown in Table 1, at T2, the constructivist climate, constructivist instruction, and constructivist management scales were significantly higher in classrooms where teachers received the mentored and workshop PD in comparison to the control conditions. Table 1. Means and Standard Deviations for the Classroom Climate Score for the PD Groups Mentored (n = 10) Workshop (n = 10) Control (n = 9) M SD M SD M SD Constructivist Climate 2.62a 0.79 2.43a 0.53 1.52 0.55 Didactic Climate 1.70 0.47 1.88 0.66 1.75 0.43 Didactic Instruction 1.76 0.59 1.98 0.51 1.84 0.62 Constructivist Instruction 2.00a 0.66 1.68a 0.49 1.18 0.39 Didactic Management 1.78 0.73 2.10 0.89 2.31 1.20 Constructivist Management 2.78a 0.86 2.43a 0.82 1.33 0.67 Print Environment 6.90 2.81 6.30 1.49 5.56 2.35 Note. a Means for the mentored and workshop groups differ significantly from the control group at p < .05 Question # 3: Does the classroom quality mediate the effects of the PD on the children's Oral Language and Print Knowledge? We used multilevel mediation analysis (Krull & MacKinnon, 2001) to examine whether the teachers' instructional practices measured by the classroom observations mediated the effects of the workshop and mentoring PD on children's Oral Language and Print Knowledge at T3. The mediation analysis showed that constructivist instruction at T2 explained the effect of the mentoring PD on children's Print Knowledge at T3. The first step in the mediation analysis showed that the mentoring PD had a significant positive impact on the children's Print Knowledge scores. As shown in Figure 1, the effect of the mentoring PD was reduced to non-significance when constructivist instruction was included in the model and the indirect effect from the mentoring PD through constructivist instruction was significant. Additionally, there were trends for the constructivist classroom climate, constructivist classroom management, didactic management, and overall print environment to mediate effect of the mentoring PD on Print Knowledge. For these measures, not all of the criteria were met for them to be considered significant mediators. However, if these trends held up with a slightly larger sample size, these measures would be significant mediators. The results of the mediation analysis showed that the workshop PD did not have significant effects on the children's Oral Language and Print Knowledge scores, which precluded us from identifying mediators of the effect of the workshop PD. In addition, there were no significant mediators of the effect of either PD on the children's Oral Language scores because none of the instructional practice measures had significant associations with Oral Language at T3. Figure 3. The mediating role of constructivist instruction in the effect of mentoring PD on Print Knowledge. Note. Standard errors are shown in parentheses. *p < .05. Conclusion The results indicate that the mentoring and workshop PD had a positive impact on the preschool classroom environment. Although the sample for the study was small, the mediation analysis identified constructivist instruction as a potential classroom-level mechanism through which the mentoring PD impacted children's Print Knowledge. The results also suggest that other aspects of the preschool environment, such as the constructivist classroom climate, constructivist classroom management, didactic management, and overall print environment may explain the link between the PD and the children's Print Knowledge. Finally, the analyses that investigated the education levels of the teachers and aides indicate that their educational levels may also impact the classroom environments. References Krull, J. L., & MacKinnon, D. P. (2001). Multilevel modeling of individual and group level mediated effects. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 36, 249-277. Lonigan, C., Wagner, R., Torgesen, J., & Rashotte, C. (2002). Preschool Comprehensive Test of Phonological & Print Processing. Tallahassee, FL: Author. Stipek, D. & Byler, P. (2004). Early Childhood Classroom Observation Measure (ECCOM). Unpublished measure. Zimmerman, I., Steiner, V., & Pond, R. (2002). Preschool Language Scale-Fourth Edition. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.
Gary Feng (Educational Testing Service)Joanna Gorin; John Sabatini; Tenaha O'Reilly; Carla Wall; Kelly Bruce - Reading for Understanding: How Comprehension Facilitates Answering Questions, and What Questions Enhance Understanding
PURPOSE: A deep understanding of a text facilitates information retrieval and inference making. We hypothesize that a well-built mental model allows the reader to (a) efficiently retrieve information from memory and (b) accurately location key information in the text, in the case one needs to look up or confirm information. These hypotheses were tested in an eye-tracking study. We predict that readers who process the text at a deeper level are less likely to look back at the text when answering comprehension questions, and when they do, they are more efficient in finding the key information in the text. METHOD: Sixty undergraduate students participated in a reading task, where they first read several expository texts. Then students in the control group were presented with two of the texts along with multiple choices comprehension questions. The experiment group saw the same materials, but was asked to summarize the text before answering the comprehension questions. Researchers identified information in the text necessary to answer each question. RESULTS: Students who summarized the text before answering the questions were significantly less likely to look back at the texts when answering comprehension questions. They were also more likely to land on the key information in the first saccade and less likely to engage in searching. CONCLUSION: Results illustrate two mechanisms with which text comprehension facilitates information retrieval and inference making. They also suggest multiple-choices comprehension questions may induce a less coherent mental model of the text, compared to tasks that require deeper processing.
Julia Ferrari (OISE/ University of Toronto ); Rhonda Martinussen - Exploring the contribution of inattention to reading comprehension in first grade students
Purpose: There is consistent evidence of a link between word reading difficulties and inattention in elementary children. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between attention and reading comprehension ability in a sample of 63 first grade children. We hypothesized that teacher-rated inattention would account for unique variance in reading comprehension independent of phonological awareness (PA), and sight word reading proficiency. Method: This study assessed participants' sound blending ability (PA), word reading efficiency, and behavioral inattention (ranging from well-below average to well-above average) in the middle of first grade. Reading comprehension was assessed with a first grade narrative passage in the spring of first grade. Participants completed an oral retell of the passage and answered implicit and explicit comprehension questions. Results: Each of the predictors were significantly related to each other. Regression analyses indicated that only PA and attention significantly predicted the total number of ideas included in the retell. Forty-two percent of the variance of the comprehension question total score was predicted by PA, word reading efficiency, and behavioral inattention. However, behavioral inattention was the only significant predictor of the comprehension question score. Results were similar when spring word reading scores were used in the analyses. Conclusion: While preliminary, these results suggest that children with attention problems may struggle to understand grade-level text independent of their word-level reading ability. There is a need to look further at inattention and comprehension in young children. Future research should include other relevant variables such as oral language proficiency.
Marina Ferroni (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas- Argentina)Beatriz Diuk - Phonological recoding as a self-teaching mechanism in Spanish, a transparent orthography
This paper aims at exploring whether phonological recoding constitutes a self-teaching mechanism contributing to the formation of orthographic representations of words in Spanish, a language with a transparent orthography. Forty-six third grade argentine children were administered a test adapted to Spanish from Share (1994; 1999). Children read out loud six brief stories including target pseudowords containing a phoneme which can be represented by two or more graphemes (/s/ as <S> or <C>). Half the children were presented with one grapheme and the other half, with the alternative one. The target pseudoword appeared either once or four times in each story. After reading the stories children had to spell the pseudoword to dictation and completed a lexical decision task including the target (Silfosa), its pseudohomophone (Cilfosa) and two foils. Results showed that bothe in the lexical decision task (Z = -4.3, p = .000) and in the spelling task (Z = -3.3, p = .001) children tended to identify the target more frequently than its pseudohomophone. Interestingly, no statistically significant differences were found between pseudowords read once or four times. However, differences were found depending on the phoneme-grapheme correspondence included in the pseudowords, with reduced effects when one of the graphemic transcriptions was much more frequent than the other one (/s/ as <S> or <C> as opposed to /y/ as <Y> or <LL>). These results give additional empirical support to the hypotheses that in transparent orthographies such as Spanish, phonological recoding words contribute to the establishment of orthographic representations of words.
Jessica Folsom (); Stephanie Al Otaiba; Luana Greulich - A comparative study on response to kindergarten Tier 1 literacy instruction for typical students and students with cognitive impairments
Purpose: To investigate the differences in reading response to instruction on standardized literacy assessments for kindergarten students with cognitive impairments (SWCI) and their typical peers in the context of high-quality, standards-based, Tier 1 instruction. Specifically we investigated the nature and variability of initial skills, literacy instruction received, and reading growth and outcomes. Method: A secondary analysis of data collected in an ongoing study on KG RTI was conducted on 1005 student (103 SWCI) participants. Three-level HLM was used to answer the research questions related to reading growth and outcomes as well as differential response to initial skills and Tier 1 literacy instruction between typical students and SWCI. Results: While typical students received more instruction and had higher outcomes than SWCI, the observed instruction and outcomes were much higher than previously reported for SWCI. The growth of SWCI was parallel to that of typical students, however, when initial skills were controlled for, there was no difference between typical students and SWCI. There was strong evidence that typical students and SWCI had differential response to the management, grouping, and content of KG literacy instruction. Conclusions: The initial skill differences of KG students may be more useful in predicting response to instruction than the disability label. KG teachers are able to provide high quality, individualized instruction tailored to meet the needs of all learners in their classrooms. Because there is evidence for differential response to instruction, the individual learning needs of all students should be taken into account when designing instruction.
Peter Foltz (Pearson Knowledge Technologies) - Improving text complexity measurement through the Word Maturity metric
Purpose: This paper describes tests of a novel approach to measuring text complexity incorporating a new metric that measures the maturity of each word in a text. Method: Traditional readability measures have relied primarily on only two main variables--word frequency and passage length-- potential causes, not measures of actual effects. More recently, these kinds of readability measures are being supplanted by more sophisticated ones that include more factors and/or model deeper aspects of language whose capture depends on sophisticated computer-based analysis and computational simulation. In this paper, we describe a measure of text complexity that incorporates a new metric of this kind, Word Maturity (Landauer, Kireyev & Panaccione, 2011), which uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a computational simulation of how every word is related to every other. WM measures how the meanings of each individual word evolves toward the level of adult knowledge as all spelled "word forms" gain and change meanings. Results: The Reading Maturity Metric performs, on average, about 30 percent better than traditional readability measures. The results will describe some tests as well as additional features of the text that can be analyzed and reported to educators using the texts. Conclusion: The paper will address measurement issues in the development and use of the metric, for assessment design and for linking assessments and education. This will include implications and examples for identifying which words, sentences and paragraphs in a text hardest and which are the ones most necessary to know in order to understand the reading.
Liliana Fonseca (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)Liliana Fonseca UNSAM; Bárbara Gottheil, UNSAM; Adriana Aldrey, UNSAM; María Pujals, UNSAM; Juan Barreyro, UBA CONICET; Inés Lagomarsino, UNSAM; Eleonora Lasala, UNSAM; Sandra Molina, UNSAM, Luciana Buonsanti UNSAM; Dolores Pueyrredón UNSAM; Leticia Freire UNSAM, Alejandra Mendivelzua, UNSAM, Mara Muñiz, UNSAM, Graciela Migliardo, UNSAM. - Enhancing reading comprehension skills in children from schools of different socio-economic status (SES)
Texts are an important tool for learning. Students need to construct meaning from texts requiring strategies that link background knowledge with information found in them. Most readers need instruction on different strategies to improve their comprehension skills but it becomes indispensable and effective for students that are struggling most (McNamara D. 2004, 2007). Ineffectual readers may come from underprivileged environments with poor oral language, emergent literacy skills, and limited prior knowledge. Purpose: to investigate the effects of an instructional program in Spanish based on explicit reading comprehension strategy teaching, in schools of different socio-economic status (SES). This program focuses on vocabulary, inference generation, text structure and monitoring (Oakhill, 2006, 2010, 2011). Method Participants: A hundred children (40 controls and 60 interventions, between 9-12.) from two different schools (middle and low SES) participated in the study. . Design: pretest, instruction period, two 80-minute weekly sessions during 8 weeks, post test. Results: Pretest showed no statistical difference between control and intervention group in verbal reasoning, verbal comprehension (WISC III), non verbal reasoning (Raven), Word and Pseudo-word Reading (LEE), Reading comprehension (LEE). Post-test: An analysis of variance was carried out and an interaction effect was found in Vocabulary (Wisc III), LEE Test, CLP, and Monitoring (experimental test) between each intervention group and its control. Pretest and post-test measures indicated significant differences in the intervention group (but not in the control group) in: vocabulary, reading comprehension (LEE and CLP), inferences (connective and elaborative), and monitoring. This intervention clearly results in a significant improvement in reading comprehension in different SES groups.
Amanda Fornecker (); Cynthia Core - Early language abilities predict later rhyme sensitivity in bilingual first language learners
Purpose: Recent studies have shown concurrent relationships between vocabulary and phonological awareness within but not across languages in bilingual children (Dickinson et al., 2003). Language proficiency is also related to phonological awareness (Verhoeven, 2007). This longitudinal study investigated language-specific relationships between early measures of language knowledge and later rhyming abilities in 4-year-old Spanish/English bilinguals. Method: Twenty-seven bilingual first language learners and 30 monolingual peers completed rhyme oddity and rhyme matching tasks at 48 months in English; bilingual children completed tasks in English and Spanish. Productive vocabulary and grammatical complexity were assessed in both languages at 22- and 30-months using parent report measures; receptive vocabulary was assessed in both languages at 48 months. Results: Vocabulary size was related to rhyming within languages but not across languages at 22-, 30- and 48 months. English grammatical complexity at 30 months was related to English but not Spanish rhyming. Monolingual and bilingual children did not differ in English rhyme ability. For bilingual children, rhyme ability across languages was strongly correlated, but English rhyming was significantly better than Spanish rhyming. Language proficiency was slightly higher in English than Spanish. Conclusions: Early language abilities are significantly related to later phonological awareness ability in the same language, reflecting language-specific contributions to phonological awareness development. Bilingual children's stronger English rhyming skills are reflective of their relatively stronger English proficiency. We conclude that language proficiency contributes to phonological awareness skills in the same language and is separate from rhyme ability that is shared across the two languages.
Jeff Franson (University if Guelph); Roderick Barron; Stefan Kremer; - A dual-route model of reading acquisition in readers with developmental dyslexia
Purpose: Dual-route models of the human reading system propose that there are two routes for reading: one for whole-word (lexical) and one for sub-word unit (non-lexical) processing (Coltheart et al., 2001; Perry et al., 2007). We present the first dual-route model with learning processes in both routes able to simulate the reading performance of children with developmental surface and phonological dyslexia. Method: Our model is based on Perry et al.'s (2007) CDP+ dual-route model, but introduces self-organizing neural networks within the lexical route and allows direct communication between the two routes. Simulated phonological and surface dyslexics underwent training to develop reading proficiency. Phonological dyslexics started off with a strong sub-lexical phonological processing deficit. Surface dyslexics started off with a weaker deficit in the same area and a connection deficit between the two routes. Training simulations used a set of 3,299 words taken from Masterson et al.'s (2010) database of children 5 to 9 years. Results: Consistent with the Manis et al. (1996) human developmental dyslexia results, the model simulations showed that both dyslexic sub-types had lower word recognition performance on irregular and non-words compared to non-impaired readers. Irregular word recognition performance was lowest for surface dyslexic simulations and non-word recognition performance was lowest for phonological dyslexic simulations. Conclusions: Compared to other dual-route models, our model is better able to simulate the development of word recognition. It is also capable of examining how reading deficits particular to each dyslexic sub-type emerge and influence word recognition over time.
Christie Fraser (OISE/UT); Mahshid Azimi; Esther Geva - Longitudinal predictors of reading comprehension in ELLs who are typically developing, poor comprehenders, or poor decoders.
Purpose. Reading comprehension is a well-documented area of weakness for ELL children. Less is known about ELLs who might be at-risk for having reading disability. This study examined: (1) early cognitive and linguistic predictors of subsequent reading comprehension in Grade 4 ELLs, and (2) cognitive and linguistic profiles of ELLs who were classified in Grade 4 as typically developing (TD) readers, poor comprehenders (PC), or poor decoders (PD). Method. ELLs (N = 130) were followed from kindergarten to Grade 4. Children's skills were assessed in five areas: non-verbal cognitive ability, prerequisite literacy skills, oral language proficiency, word reading, and reading comprehension. The Grade 4 sample was divided into three groups (TD, PC, and PD) based on Grade 4 reading and language measures. Results. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analyses indicated that oral language and decoding-related skills were the primary predictors of reading comprehension longitudinally for the whole sample. The same was true for the TD readers. Distinct profiles emerged for the two poor reader groups: word and pseudoword reading, and RAN were associated with reading comprehension for the PD group; poor performance on later-emerging oral language and reading comprehension strategies (inferencing, logical relations) characterized the PC group. Conclusions. Results are discussed in light of the relevance of the Simple View of Reading model to ELLs, and literature related to the challenges of teasing apart language proficiency from emerging reading disabilities in ELLs. Implications of the findings for timely attention to early risk markers and intervention will be discussed.
Maria Friedmannova (Oxford University, LCD group)Holly Smith; Kate Nation - Patterns of on-line resource allocation to increased inference-making demands by skilled readers: an eye movement study
* Purpose Bridging inferences are considered crucial for the construction of coherent representation of text. We measured eye movements as adults read texts to investigate the on-line processing of bridging inferences. We hypothesized that skilled readers are sensitive to the difficulty of the bridging inference to be made, allocating their processing resources accordingly and that this will be revealed in their pattern of eye movements as they read. * Method Thirty-nine undergraduate students read 27 two-sentence paragraphs containing the same target word in three different conditions. The control provided explicit information for the inference, the paraphrase condition provided contextually supporting information and the inference condition provided less contextual support. Each paragraph was followed by a comprehension question. Eye-movement measures were computed for the target word and compared across the three conditions. * Results For the measures indicative of early processing, participants showed longer first fixations and gaze durations in the paraphrase and inference condition, relative to the control. For the later processing measures, the total looking time, second pass times and regressions into the target word from further in text were significantly greater in the inference condition than the paraphrase condition, followed by the control condition. * Conclusions Consistent with skilled readers building a coherent text representation as they read, participants responded immediately during processing to the demands imposed by bridging inferences; they also invested extra resources in later processing measures as the difficulty of the inference to-be-made increased. Children's data will also be discussed.
Deanna Friesen (York University); Ellen Bialystok - Phonologically-mediated semantic activation in bilingual and monolingual readers
PURPOSE: The majority of research on bilingual word recognition investigates how a bilingual's two languages interact. We examined how bilinguals' lexical codes (e.g., orthography, phonology & semantics) interact within a single language as compared to their monolingual peers. METHOD: English-dominant bilinguals and English monolinguals decided if visually presented words were living or non-living things. Critical stimuli consisted of homophones that were not living (e.g. towed), but whose unseen homophone mates were living (e.g., toad). These homophones and their matched control words (e.g., toned) were preceded by either a prime that was related to the unseen homophone (e.g., frog) or unrelated (e.g., lion). If readers activate the critical homophone's phonology and the unseen homophone's meaning, then they should be slower to decide that the homophone is not a living thing. Additionally, if prime's activation spreads to related concepts, then the effect should be larger in the related prime condition. RESULTS: Monolinguals' response times to homophones and control words did not differ in the unrelated prime condition. However, they exhibited a large homophone interference effect in the related condition. In contrast, bilinguals exhibited the same degree of homophone interference in both the related and unrelated conditions. Importantly, the interference was less in the related condition for the bilinguals than for the monolinguals. CONCLUSIONS: Bilinguals and monolinguals activated the critical homophones' phonology, meaning and its homophone mate's meaning. However, only monolinguals exhibited spreading semantic activation from the related prime. These findings will be discussed with respect to theories of lexical-semantic organization and bilingual cognitive control.
Jan C. Frijters (Brock University)Maureen W. Lovett; Maryanne Wolf; Rose A. Sevcik; Robin Morris - Remedial outcomes across multiple comorbidities: The role of intelligence in language and attention comorbidities with reading disability
Purpose: Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) shares 15-40% comorbidity with reading disability (RD), with evidence that inattentive symptoms are most important to the overlap. Specific language impairment (SLI) is also known to be comorbid within reading disabled RD samples at rates of 14-20% (Catts et al., 2005). Method: The present study reports outcomes from 725 RD children (Mage = 7.7; SD = 0.9) who received small-group language-based intensive reading intervention comprised of phonological skills training and metacognitive instruction that focused on vocabulary and reading strategies (Morris et al., 2010). ADHD was confirmed in 25.9% via the DISC-IV and CBCL. The presence of SLI among 23.1% of the sample was determined with scores < 1 SD on three of four oral language measures (two CELF, NEPSY, and PPVT-IV). Reading outcomes were evaluated using growth curve models to generate per-participant slopes of remedial outcomes. Results: Both comorbidities demonstrated equivalent mean growth rates on single word identification. A growth rate advantage was found for ADHD+SLI participants on a decoding outcome, though this effect was fully mediated by IQ. A similar growth rate advantage was found for ADHD+RD on reading comprehension, with processing speed providing an additive and independent contribution to explaining variation in growth rates. Conclusions: Overall, the results suggest that this intervention was as effective for RD alone as for comorbid ADHD+RD and comorbid SLI+RD. This paper will address the complex inter-relationships among these comorbidities, in relation to specific aspects of intelligence in predicting remedial outcomes.
Gwen Frishkoff (Georgia State University); Kevyn Collins-Thompson; Charles Perfetti; Scott Crossley - A test of incremental and adaptive word learning from context
Purpose: Previous studies (Frishkoff, et al., 2011) have shown that MESA (Markov Estimation of Semantic Association) can be used to capture incremental gains in word knowledge over time. This study examined whether MESA is sufficiently robust to track these changes on a trial-by-trial basis. Method: English-speaking (L1) and Spanish-speaking (L2) participants were exposed to 45 very rare words in six different sentences. After each sentence, participants generated a synonym (or near-synonym) for the target word. MESA modeled response accuracy (distance from target meaning). Half of the participants received accuracy feedback ; the other half received the same amount of practice, without feedback. The degree of contextual support (high, low, or mixed-constraint) was systematically varied. Results: Replicating previous studies, the mean trajectories differed for words that were presented in high, low, or mixed-constraint contexts. Further, the MESA scores for individual words on individual trials generally increased over time and showed sensitivity to contextual support. Ongoing work is examining the effects of language proficiency and the role of feedback based on MESA scores, as well as delayed effects on familiarity and degree of semantic knowledge. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that MESA can be used to track changes in word-specific knowledge on a trial-by-trial basis. Such dynamic assessment is critical for effective instruction because robust word learning requires multiple encounters with a word in a variety of contexts. This approach should result in instruction that is both effective (i.e., robust learning) and efficient (i.e, tuned to support maximal gains on each exposure).
Douglas Fuchs (Vanderbilt University); Amanda C. Miller; Eric Dion; Lynn Fuchs; Susan Eaton - Evidence for the Effectiveness of Peer Assisted Learning Strategies in Preschool Classrooms
Purpose There is currently a push to increase academic rigor in preschool classrooms. This study employed a well-known instructional approach, Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), to see whether it can increase the phonological and alphabetic skills of preschool children. PALS teachers prepare their students to support each other's learning by taking turns as "tutor" and "tutee." PALS' efficacy has been demonstrated for a variety of learners (e.g., grades K-12; students with disabilities; ELL students). This study examines whether PALS strengthens the pre-reading performance of at-risk preschoolers. Method 402 preschool children in 33 classrooms participated. Classrooms were randomly assigned to PALS or control conditions. Children were tested before and after the 18 week treatment on five measures of phonological and alphabetic knowledge. Because there was significant classroom-related variance, hierarchical linear modeling was employed. Results PALS children scored significantly higher than comparable controls on the Letter Sound Identification post-test, controlling for pre-test score (B = 3.47, t(df = 29) = 4.09, p <. 001). There were no significant differences between the two groups on the other post-test measures Conclusion Although this first study of preschool PALS produced mixed results, it does suggest that PALS may help preschool, at-risk children learn to identify letter sounds, the building blocks to becoming a successful reader. We see these findings as encouraging future PALS work among very young children.
Sara Fulmer () - Students' emotions during a challenging reading task: Relationships to persistence, motivation, and fluency
Purpose This study explored the specific emotions that students reported before, during, and after a challenging reading task and how emotions were related to persistence, motivation, and fluency. Method Sixth and seventh grade students (N = 74) read a 500-word passage that was 50 Lexile points beyond their individual Lexile range. Students selected up to three emotions from a list of nine before, twice during, and immediately after reading. Persistence was measured with observations of task continuation when given the option to stop reading. Interest/enjoyment and perceived competence were evaluated after reading. Fluency was the percentage of words read correctly. Results The most commonly reported emotions were happy, curious, and bored. Students who persisted were more likely to report feeling happy, curious, and proud throughout the task, and anxious during and after reading. Conversely, students who stopped reading were more likely to feel bored at all time points and anxious before they started reading. Students who felt bored also had lower fluency and interest/enjoyment. Interest/enjoyment was higher for students who felt happy, curious, and proud during and after reading. Perceived competence was higher for students who felt anxious after reading and lower for students who felt ashamed during or after reading. Conclusions Positive emotions may protect students during reading challenge by sustaining motivation and persistence. Furthermore, students who felt anxious during or after reading had more positive perceived competence and were more likely to persist, suggesting that anxiety may have beneficial outcomes. As expected, boredom was detrimental for all outcomes.
Bjarte Furnes () - Examining the Double-deficit hypothesis in more and less transparent orthographies
The phonological-deficit hypothesis has been found to account for a large amount of variance seen in children with reading difficulties. However, research has also identified subgroups of individuals with reading difficulties but adequate phonological skills (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). A rival to the dominant phonological core hypothesis, the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH), is suggested to account for these individuals, which see deficits in rapid automatized naming (RAN) as an equally important cause of reading difficulties (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). According to the DDH, deficits in PA and RAN can be seen as largely independent sources of reading difficulties. Three subtypes of individuals with RD are suggested: a) the phonological deficit subtype, defined by a PA deficit but adequate RAN abilities; b) the naming speed deficit subtype, defined by a RAN deficit but adequate PA skills; and c) the double-deficit subtype, defined as showing deficits in both RAN and PA. According to this hypothesis the most severe reading difficulties are seen in individuals with a double-deficit. In this talk we will present results from a study directly investigating the double-deficit hypothesis across more and less transparent orthographies, following 755 English-speaking and 298 Scandinavian twin children between preschool and Grade 2. Children have been categorized as having a double-deficit, single deficits, or no deficit in preschool, and then compared on their reading and spelling skills in Grade 1 and Grade 2.
Brandy Gatlin (Florida State University, Florida Center for Reading Research)Stephanie Al Otaiba; Jessica Folsom; Jeanne Wanzek - An analysis of oral language abilities of african american students
The importance of oral language in the acquisition of literacy skills has empirical foundations in reading research of the past few decades. However, children from low-income homes and minority children have consistently been identified as at increased risk for academic failure because of differences or deficits in language use or exposure before they enter school. The purpose of this presentation is to compare the oral language skills of young African American students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds with those of their same-age peers. In this presentation we analyze data from two cohorts of students (n = 265) participating in a larger NICHD funded study on the school based prevention and identification of learning disabilities. These students attended seven schools in a mid-sized southern city and represent a diverse population of children (over 50% minority and over half receiving free and reduced price lunch). As a component of the larger study, these students were given individual and group administered language assessments. A MANOVA was conducted in order to determine statistically significant differences in oral language abilities between the two groups of children at grade levels K and 1. Preliminary findings reveal that on average, African American students from low income homes perform lower than their same-age peers on tests of oral language abilities. We will discuss implications related to the need for direct instruction focused on the development and improvement of language and meaning-focused skills.
Anna Gellert (University of Copenhagen); Carsten Elbro - Do experimental measures of word learning predict vocabulary development over time?
PURPOSE Experimental measures have been used in several studies to simulate real word learning. If such experimental measures provide adequate simulations of natural word learning, they can be assumed to predict vocabulary development over time. The main purpose of the present study was to test this assumption. METHOD Ninety grade 3 children were given experimental measures designed to assess phonological and semantic aspects of word learning together with standard measures of receptive and productive vocabulary and general learning ability. The vocabulary measures were administered to the same children in grade 4. RESULTS The experimental measures of word learning were found to contribute to the prediction of development in children's receptive, but not productive, vocabulary over and above their initial level of vocabulary and general learning ability. CONCLUSIONS The present study provides some initial evidence of the predictive validity of experimental measures of word learning adapted from previous studies of simulation of real word learning. However, some limitations of the measures included in this study were identified. If these limitations are considered in the development of measures of word learning for future longitudinal studies, the added predictive value of such measures may be stronger than in the present study. In that case, they might become useful tools not only in research into language acquisition, but also in educational and clinical settings.
George Georgiou (University of Alberta)Niki Tziraki; George Manolitsis; Argiro Fella - Why is RAN related to reading and mathematics? Evidence from a longitudinal study with Greek preschoolers
Purpose: Despite the acknowledged importance of RAN in the prediction of reading and mathematics (e.g., Hecht et al., 2001; Wolf & Bowers, 1999), researchers concur that the mechanism that is underlying this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine (a) how RAN components - articulation and pause time - predict reading and mathematics ability at the end of Kindergarten and Grade 1, and (b) what cognitive processing skills (speed of processing, attention, working memory, phonological processing, and letter knowledge) mediate the relationship. Method: Eighty Greek children were assessed at the beginning of Kindergarten (when they were non-readers) on RAN Colors and Objects, nonverbal IQ, speed of processing, phonological awareness, attention (Stroop), and working memory. At the end of Kindergarten and Grade 1, they were reassessed on reading and math tasks. Results: The results of correlational analyses indicated that only pause time correlated with reading and math in both Kindergarten and Grade 1. Furthermore, the results of regression analyses indicated that nonverbal IQ and speed of processing mediated the relationship of RAN pause time with math in both grades and with reading in Kindergarten. When reading fluency in Grade 1 was the dependent variable, the effect of RAN pause time was mediated by nonverbal IQ, speed of processing, attention, working memory, and letter knowledge. Conclusion: The findings suggest that RAN may be related to reading and mathematics for the same reasons in Kindergarten, but differences emerge as formal reading instruction begins.
Hope K. Gerde (Michigan State University); Gary E. Bingham - Examining materials and interaction supports for children's writing in preschool classrooms
Purpose: Young children's emergent writing skills are important predictors of later literacy achievement (Aram, 2005; NELP, 2008). Although research and policy reports identify the importance of supporting children's writing in early childhood, we know very little about how early educational settings support children's writing development. The present study observed the classroom environment and teacher-child interactions to 1) describe the material and instructional supports for writing in preschool classrooms, and 2) identify which of these materials or interactions makes a difference for children's development of writing skills. Method: A diverse group of preschool teachers/classrooms (N=64) were observed on one typical school day (~2.5-3 hours) using the ELLCO (Smith, Brady, & Anastasopoulos, 2008) and a detailed measure of material and instructional supports for writing including five areas focus: writing tools and materials, environmental print, teacher modeling, teacher scaffolding of child writing, and independent child writing. Children (n=360) were assessed for letter naming, letter sounds, and name, letter, and word writing. Results: Teachers' literacy environment per the ELLCO was Basic (M=2.84), and most classrooms included a variety of materials. However, teachers varied widely in their use of modeling or scaffolding of child writing. Further, considerable variation existed in children's independent writing. It is expected that Multilevel Modeling analysis will reveal instructional support to be a stronger predictor of children's writing than material support. The influence of specific instructional behaviors will be presented. Conclusions: Implications for future research and professional development will be discussed.
Clara Gomes (); Ian Simpson; Sylvia Defior (University of Granada) - An exploratory study investigating the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading skills
Purpose: There is a consensus that vocabulary knowledge is critical for the development of reading comprehension. Unfortunately, there are few studies that explore these relationships in detail, especially in languages other than English. Oral vocabulary growth comprises adding to and refining phonological representations in the mental lexicon as well as storing and elaborating the associated semantic knowledge (Ouellete, 2006). The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between two levels of oral vocabulary knowledge (breadth and depth) and different word reading strategies (via decoding and via lexicon), and reading comprehension. Methods: During pre-testing of reading skills in an intervention study designed to evaluate methods for fostering vocabulary development in Spanish-speaking 3rd graders (N=86), vocabulary breadth (PPVT-III) and depth (WISC-IV Subtest Vocabulary), reading comprehension (CLP), word and pseudoword reading (PROLEC-R) were measured. Children were divided into good and poor readers according to their scores in the word and pseudoword reading tasks and were then compared in relation to their performance in the vocabulary and reading comprehension measures. Results: The group of good pseudoword readers showed significantly higher scores in the measures of breadth of vocabulary and reading comprehension in comparison with the poor pseudoword readers. No significant difference was found for the measure of vocabulary depth between the two groups. Surprisingly, the opposite pattern of results was found for the good word readers in comparison to the poor word readers. Several theories that potentially explain these data will be presented.
Gabriela Gómez Vera (CIAE - Universidad de Chile) - Academic resilience in reading comprehension, school and individual factors related to performance in PISA 2009. Argentina Chile and Uruguay
According to the last version of the international PISA reading survey (2009), Latin America is one of the regions where the influence of the socioeconomic status on the outcome is among the strongest in the sample (OECD, 2010). In spite of the strong influence of the environment, there are students that escape this tendency. These students are those who come from low income families and show academic excellence: they all belong to the poorest 25% of the sample and they all attain results high above the national average. For this phenomenon the OECD has coined the term resilience. Purpose - To determine the key factors that trigger resilients' good performance in reading comprehension in three Latin American countries: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Two hypotheses are studied here: in first place the schools are analyzed, supposing that the resilient students may attend better schools, secondly, their individual characteristics are analyzed, supposing their better performance may be the outcome of personal effort. Method - To study the characteristics and schooling levels of these students in the three previously mentioned countries. Different factors such as the attitude towards study, learning strategies and the motivational drive to read are among the analyzed feature from PISA questionnaires. Results - The results show that, in the three countries, resilience is primarily linked to the individual characteristics of the students, even though there are school institutions that favor it. Conclusions - Finally, the implications of the phenomenon in reading comprehension are discussed.
M. Carmen González-Trujillo (); Nuria Calet; Sylvia Defior; Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma - Measuring the components of fluency: Spanish fluency scale
Purpose Fluency is one of the key components to success in reading, and consequently, a precise assessment is crucial for the right identification of reading problems and instruction improvements in reading development. Traditionally it has been measured as a compound of two factors: speed and accuracy, however, appropriate expression or prosody is emerging as an additional component in the construct of fluency. Therefore, fluency is considered to have two essential features: accuracy/speed of word recognition and prosody. There is a lack of instruments to measure these components in Spanish. Based in Multidimensional Fluency Scale (Zuttell and Ransinski, 1991), we have designed a Spanish fluency scale, a scale that assesses four dimensions: speed, accuracy, expressiveness and a reading quality measure. Method 122 Spanish primary-school children (74 second and 48 fourth graders) participated. Children read the text included in the Punctuation Mark Subscale of the PROLEC-R and using inter-rater criteria, eight adult expert readers assessed children's reading. Others measures of word and pseudoword reading, reading comprehension and prosody sensitivity were taken into account. Results Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient for the scale was 0.91 and the correlation with Multidimensional Fluency Scale was 0.90. To analyze the relationship between Spanish Fluency Scale scores and reading measures, a correlation analysis was carried out. Significant correlations were found for decoding measures: word reading (r=.71, p<0.01) and pseudoword reading (r=.66, P<0.01). Also, reading comprehension scores showed significant correlations: LOBROT (a sentence comprehension test (r= .67; p<0.01)), LEE Prosody Scale (r= .36; p<0.01) and CLP test that measures text comprehension (r= .48; p<0.01). Conclusions The Spanish fluency scale appears to be a useful instrument to complete reading assessment in Spanish. It may be a useful tool for identifying reading difficulties by attending to fluency and prosody in early reading performance.
Debbie Gooch (The University of York); Hannah Nash; Maggie Snowling; Charles Hulme - Attention and motor skills in children at risk of dyslexia
Purpose: Dyslexia frequently co-occurs with other developmental disorders such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD). However, the nature of these comorbidities and their impact on the manifestation of dyslexia is not well understood. This paper addresses the question of whether there are signs of comorbid difficulties in children at risk of dyslexia before they learn to read. Method: At the 2nd phase, of a 5 year longitudinal study, 205 4-5 year old children classified as family risk for dyslexia (FR, N=59), language impaired (LI, N=40), FR+LI (N=24), or typically developing (TD, N=82) completed measures to assess motor skills and executive function, alongside measures of language and early literacy. Results: The four groups were matched for age although there were group differences in non-verbal IQ ((TD=FR) > ( LI= FR+LI)). Children with LI (LI and FR+LI) performed more poorly on measures of manual dexterity and executive function (complex inhibition, memory and attention) compared to TD children. Within the FR group there were moderate correlations between children's receptive and expressive language skills and their performance on the measures of executive function and motor skills. The percentage of children in each group who displayed deficits in motor skills and/or executive function was also investigated. Conclusions: In comparison to TD children, pre-school children at risk of dyslexia, specifically those with LI, performed worse on tasks tapping skills known to be impaired in children with ADHD and DCD. The findings will be discussed with reference to current theories of LI and comorbidity.
John Goodrich (Department of Psychology, Florida State University)Christopher Lonigan - Lexical characteristics of words and phonological awareness skills of preschool children: a test of the lexical restructuring model
Purpose: The Lexical Restructuring Model (LRM; Metsala & Walley, 1998) attempts to explain the development of phonological awareness (PA). According to LRM, as children's vocabularies increase, children develop a more refined lexical representation of the sounds of which those words are comprised, and, in turn children become more sensitive to the detection of specific phonemes. LRM identifies several lexical characteristics of words that influence children's PA skills: age of acquisition, word frequency, neighborhood density, and phonotactic probability. In this study, the effects of these lexical characteristics on children's performance on PA tasks were evaluated. Additionally, moderation of these effects by children's oral language skills and ages was tested. Method: This study involved two independent samples of preschool children (Ns = 392 and 814) who completed measures of PA (blending and elision) and oral language. Values for each of the lexical characteristics for each word on the PA assessment were computed. Results: Analyses for each sample were conducted using cross-classified logistic models. For both samples, age of acquisition and word frequency were negatively related to PA skills, and phonotactic probability was positively related to PA skills. Children's ages and oral language skills were positive predictors of PA skills, and children's ages moderated the relations between age of acquisition and PA skills. Conclusions: Results for age of acquisition and phonotactic probability were consistent with LRM; however, results for word frequency and neighborhood density were not. The influence of these characteristics of PA items needs to be re-conceptualized in the context of LRM.
Amanda Goodwin (Vanderbilt University);Jennifer Gilbert; Sun-Joo Cho - Getting to the root of It: Word and person level morphological contributions to word reading
Purpose: The current study examines person and word characteristics and interactions that affect reading of morphologically complex words for 221 middle school students. We examine the direct relationship between root-word reading (isolate) and reading related derived-words (isolation) and also additional factors that contribute to word reading. Method: We use a crossed random-effects model, estimating main and interaction effects of person and word characteristics on accuracy of derived-word reading effects simultaneously while accounting for inter-person and inter-word variability. Person and word random effects are crossed rather than nested because each person attempted each word and each word was given to each person. Derived-word reading is the outcome. Word characteristics include derived-word frequency, root-word frequency, family frequency, opaqueness, and family size. Person characteristics include morphological awareness, reading ability, and vocabulary. Results: Results suggest that a person's ability to read a root-word (isolate) affects that person's ability to read a related derived-word (isolation). After controlling for root-word reading, word and person characteristics explained remaining variability in derived-word reading. The significant word level characteristics include derived-word frequency and root-word frequency, but not morpheme neighborhood size or family frequency. The significant person level characteristics include morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, but not poor reader status. Only opaqueness interacts with the effect of root-word reading, suggesting that students were less able to apply root-word knowledge when the root-word changed orthographically and/or phonologically in the larger derived-word. Conclusions: A model of morphologically complex word reading for middle school students is proposed.
Joanna Gorin (Arizona State University); John Sabatini; Tenaha O'Reilly; Gary Feng; Carla Wall - Validity evidence for reading comprehension test questions: An experimental eye-tracking study.
Purpose The study purpose was to gather validity evidence for reading comprehension scores from multiple choice (MC) and summary writing items . Eye-tracking methods were used to evaluate whether: 1. Examinees spend more time "looking" at a passage when answering a summary question than when answering a MC. 2. Examinees are more likely to read an entire passage when answering a summary question than when answering a single MC. 3. Examinees given an initial summary question spend less time "looking" at a passage when answering related MC than examinees who answer MC questions first. Method Sixty undergraduate students responded to four sets of comprehension questions - two sets with an initial summary item, two without. Passage order and item-type were counterbalanced across forms. Analyses include: graphical representations of individual and group-level data with common eye-tracking measures, and parametric and non-parametric tests of between and within group differences in gaze patterns. Results Examinees spent more time looking at a passage when answering summary questions than when answering MC. When writing summaries, examinees tend to read the entire text whereas when answering MC questions they look at portions of the text. Examinees who first wrote a summary spend less time looking at the passage when answering subsequent MC than examinees who answered MC only. Conclusions Data suggests asking students to initially summarize a passage encourages them to spend more time reading a passage than asking multiple-choice items alone. We argue answering summary questions increases the chances students are engaged in construct relevant processes.
Carolyn Gosse (University of Virginia); Anita McGinty; Andrew Mashburn; Marcia Invernizzi; Robert Pianta - The role of relational and instructional classroom supports in the language development of at-risk preschoolers
Preschoolers demonstrate a range of skills that make them differentially prepared for school success. Oral language skills are particularly important for reading success, since literacy is widely considered to be a language-based skill. Young children's experiences in preschool classrooms have been shown to contribute to their language development. The present study examined the extent to which preschool classroom supports (Relational Support [RS] and Instructional Support [IS]) were associated with children's language development and whether these associations varied as a function of children's language ability. The language skills of 360 children within 98 classrooms were assessed using an expressive narrative task in the fall and spring of the preschool year. Teachers rated RS (closeness and conflict) in the fall, and observations of IS were collected across the year. All analyses were conducted in a multilevel framework in order to account for the nested structure of the data. Findings indicated a main effect of IS, but not RS, on preschoolers' development of expressive language skills. In addition, the associations between RS and IS on children's expressive language development were moderated by children's fall language ability. Specifically, the association between IS and language development was stronger for children with stronger expressive language skills, and the association between RS and language development was stronger for children with weaker expressive language skills. These findings suggest how preschool resources might be aligned with the needs of children with weaker language skills who are at risk for difficulty acquiring literacy.
Usha Goswami (St. Johns College) - Keynote address
Keynote address
Alexandra Gottardo (Wilfrid Laurier University); Fanli Jia; Adrian Pasquarella; Xi Chen - Reading comprehension in adolescent second language learners: Models of risk and resilience
Purpose: The results of standardized testing with adolescents who are second language (L2) learners show that these students score below the mean on measures of literacy (EQAO, 2010; NAEP, 2009). The current study tests models of reading comprehension 1) the Simple View of Reading, which includes listening comprehension and decoding (SVR: Gough & Tunmer, 1986) and 2) the four component (4C) model, which adds working memory and higher-level comprehension strategies (Cain, Oakhill & Bryant, 2004) in adolescents who are L2 learners. Method: The participants were 40 Chinese-English speaking adolescents (mean age 15.5 years; range 13 to 19). They were tested on a battery of reading, language and cognitive measures in English and Chinese. The participants includes students with a wide range of experience in English having lived in Canada from 6 months to 14 years. Results and conclusions: The number of years in Canada was related to all variables and was statistically controlled in the analyses. Preliminary analyses showed that for the English measures word reading and vocabulary were related to English reading comprehension consistent with the SVR. However, vocabulary was a unique statistical predictor of reading comprehension skill (R2 = .11, t = 3.00, p < .01) while word reading was not. Additional analyses consistent with the 4C model showed that working memory skill accounted for additional unique variance in reading comprehension skill (R2 = .09, t = 2.77, p < .01). Analyses will be conducted examining the contribution of L1 skills. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Jen Goudey (); Jan Frijters; Maureen Lovett; Rose Sevcik; Robin Morris; Richard Boada; Erik Willcutt; Maryanne Wolf; Jeffrey Gruen; GRaD Study - Querying developmental versus lag motivation deficits associated with reading disabilities.
Purpose. Past descriptive and experimental research has shown that children and adolescents with reading disability (RD) have a motivational profile that is distinct from those following a normal developmental course of reading acquisition (Burden, 2008). One gap in the literature is that comparisons of motivational processes have not been based on broad and generalizable samples of both RD and normally-achieving children. Method. A community-recruited preliminary sample of 142 (2012 target = 500) normally developing children (Mage = 12.7, 9 to 15 years) was drawn from the GRaD Study (Genes Reading and Dyslexia). An identified sample of 457 RD children (Mage = 12.6, 10 to 15 years) was drawn from an IES-funded RD intervention study. Participants were assessed on reading (WJ-III reading subtests and TOWRE) and motivation (Sydney Attribution Scale). Across both samples, the study included a high proportion of African American participants (35%), along with a significant proportion of Hispanic participants (24%). Results. Age (F(6, 249) = 8.14, p < .001) but not reading level (F(6, 90) = 1.48, p = .20) matched comparisons on motivation demonstrated significant differences between RD and normally-developing children. In addition, disability status significantly moderated attributions to ability for success, with a stronger relationship between skill and attributions for normally-developing children. Conclusion. In a sample that allows for generalization to a broader range of children than typically reported in the literature, pronounced differences in motivation were observed across RD and normally developing children, but the results suggest that differences may be experiential, rather than constitutional.
Martin Goy (Technische Universität Dortmund); Rolf Strietholt; Wilfried Bos; Nele McElvany - Reading engagement at Grade 4 in international comparison: analyses of the dimensionality of the construct and its relation to reading achievement
Purpose: This study explores the dimensionality of fourth-grade students' reading engagement and its relation to reading achievement. Reading engagement, a multidimensional construct including cognitive, motivational and social aspects of reading (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000), is highly correlated with reading achievement. The Programme for International Student Assessment shows that engaged readers outperform the less engaged and that engaged readers from low SES families achieve higher scores than the less engaged from high SES backgrounds (OECD, 2011). Method: To prove whether the same holds true for samples of fourth-grade students assessed in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2006, we conducted analyses with data from Germany, Sweden and the United States. We measured reading engagement based on students' reading motivation, reading self-concept, time spent reading, diversity of materials read, and communication about reading. In confirmatory nested factor analyses (Gustafsson & Balke, 1993) we tested whether reading engagement is best measured with one general factor or whether the subdomains (reading motivation etc.) have independent explanatory power. Results: The model with orthogonal, specific factors alongside one general factor has a clearly better fit than a simple general factor model. Analyses based on this model show that students from low SES backgrounds with high reading engagement have higher reading scores than students from high SES backgrounds with low reading engagement. Conclusions: Reading engagement at Grade 4 is a complex construct with both general and specific facets. Programs to improve the reading abilities of socially disadvantaged students might focus on improving their reading engagement.
Inbal Gral Azulay ()Esther Geva - Developmental stages in emerging phonological awareness in Hebrew and English
Introduction/purpose Young children develop gradually awareness of syllable complexity, sensitivity to individual phonemes, and the ability to perform various phonological awareness (PA) manipulations. The current study examines developmental stages in emerging PA in Hebrew and English among junior (JK) and senior (SK) kindergarten children who speak English as a native/home language (L1) and learn Hebrew as a second language (L2). Methods The sample included children attending an English-Hebrew day school. In the first wave of data collection, 48 JK and 38 SK children were assessed in L1 and L2 in three domains: cognition, literacy, and language. English PA was examined with the Elision subtest of the CTOPP. Hebrew phonological awareness was examined with three tasks (first phoneme separation-FPH, last phoneme separation-LPH, and partial word separation-PW) that on the basis of factor analysis were subsequently combined into one composite score. Results One way MANCOVA with repeated measures (age as covariate) showed a significant task effect on the Hebrew PA tasks and the English PA task: FPH was higher than LPH which was higher than PW. The English PA task was higher than LPH and PW. The covariate-was not significant. The Hebrew PA composite mean was lower than the English PA mean. Conclusion While Hebrew and English PA correlate with each other, typological differences in syllable structure challenge the Hebrew PA of young beginner Hebrew as L2 learners. They need to acquire additional novel elements in Hebrew. The results underscore the linguistic challenges faced by young novice learners of Hebrew as L2.
Amy Grant (); Helene Deacon; Rauno Parrila - Self-report versus Diagnosed: How much print exposure do students with reading disabilities have?
Purpose: The current study examined differences in reading performance and print exposure in those with and without a history of reading difficulties. Differences in print exposure could suggest methods for compensation. Method: The current study examined three groups of post-secondary students. University students with diagnosed learning disabilities that included reading were recruited through an accessibility centre (Diagnosed group, N = 20). University students with a history of self-reported early reading acquisition difficulties (Self-report group, N = 31) were identified based on scores from the Adult Reading History Questionnaire-Revised (ARHQ-R; Parrila, Corkett, Kirby, & Hein, 2003). The third was a comparison group of students without a history of reading difficulties (Control group, N = 33) also identified on scores from the ARHQ-R. We compared students on reading ability across a range of standardised tests, and their scores on a print exposure measure testing author recognition. Results: The diagnosed group performed similarly to the self-report group on timed reading comprehension (p = .99). However, on an untimed measure of reading comprehension the diagnosed group performed similarly to the control group, who outperformed the self-report group (p < .01). For print exposure, the diagnosed and control group performed similarly, though the self-report group correctly recognized fewer authors than the control group (p < .05). Conclusions: Differences in print exposure between these groups shows that experiences with print differ for individuals with and without a diagnosis of a reading disability. This suggests that these two groups might differ in their avenues to compensation.
Daphne Greenberg ((voting member) Educational Psychology and Special Education, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)Justin C. Wise; Jan C. Frijters; Hye K. Pae; Alice O. Nanda - The complexities of measuring instructional gain in an adult literacy intervention
Purpose: In a recent reading intervention project, adults reading at the 3.0 through 5.9 grade equivalency levels showed minimal reading gain. The present study explored possible reasons for this finding. Method: Students were provided with an opportunity to attend 100 hours of instruction. They were randomly assigned to five different instructional approaches representing various combinations of explicit reading instruction, implicit reading instruction, and a generic adult literacy instructional approach. One hundred and thirty one students did not make it to midpoint, 66 made it to the midpoint but did not complete the intervention, and 198 completed the intervention. Students were administered a battery of diverse standardized literacy measures as well as in-house developed questionnaires focusing on demographics, reading self-concept, and exposure to print. Results: Analyses indicated that reading gains were made independent of instructional group, but these improvements were all associated with small effect sizes. Only one significant finding in word attack skills (with low effect size) was detected for instructional group. Analyses of performances on standardized tests question the reliability and validity of these types of tests for adult struggling readers. To add further complexity, analyses of the different completion groups indicate that students vary significantly on demographics, entry skill levels, educational histories, and avoidance of reading. Conclusions: To understand instructional gains of adult struggling readers, attention needs to focus on standardized test selection, and the relationships between student characteristics, persistence, and instructional gain.
Luana Greulich (Andrews University)Stephanie Al Otaiaba; Jessica Folsom - Characteristics of adequate and inadequate responders in a multi-tiered model
Pupose-The primary purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine accuracy of group membership for adequate and inadequate response using teacher judgment, initial language and literacy skills, or teacher judgment, initial language and literacy skills plus child characteristics. In addition, identifying and verifying behaviors and emotions, exhibited by adequate and inadequate responders that could expose malleable targets to improve intervention. Methods-Participants included 170 first grade students that received multi-tiered intervention for one-year in a public school system.Discriminant Fuction Analysis was used to answer 1) Can initial skills (phonological awareness, language, and reading) and teacher judgment determine group membership of adequate and inadequate responders? 2) Can initial skills and teacher judgment plus child characteristics determine group membership of adequate and inadequate responders? In addition, videotapes were reviewed and coded to determine if there were any themes or patterns that emerged during intervention exhibited by adequate and inadequate responders to further identify malleable targets to improve intervention. Results-Both DFA models were significant and had 88% accuracy for group membership and high specificity (98-99%). Inadequate responders exhibited avoidance behavior in addition to negative emotions of anxiety, shame and hopelessness. Conclusion-Using initial skills it is possible prior to intervention to determine adequate from inadequate responders. In addition, there are avoidance behaviors and emotions that are exhibited by inadequate responders that impede their learning outcomes and behaviors and emotions that are that enhance their learning outcomes in intervention settings. This study adds to the paucity of research on inadequate responders in a multi-tiered model.
Ryan Grimm (University of California, Santa Barbara); Michael Gerber; Jill Leafstedt; H. Lee Swanson - Comparing models of growth in reading between at-risk english language learners and typically developing peers
Purpose: There is a dearth of literature investigating longitudinal growth in reading of Spanish-speaking ELLs. Few, if any, studies compare growth in reading between Spanish-speaking ELLs empirically-defined to be "at-risk" for reading difficulties to groups of Spanish-speaking ELLs who are not considered to be "at-risk." This longitudinal study models and compares growth in reading among performance-based quintiles of Spanish-speaking ELLs over a ten-year span. Method: We followed a cohort (N = 267) of Spanish-speaking ELLs from 2000-03 (kindergarten through second grade). Participants came from five schools within a single elementary school district. That study showed interventions conducted in Spanish could eliminate differences in later (end of second grade) English reading between readers who performed poorly and their peers (e.g. Leafstedt, & Gerber, 2005). We reacquired this sample (N = 180/267) and obtained state standardized test scores (CST) for English Language Arts (ELA) from 2004-09. Latent growth curve analyses will examine predictors and covariates, including measures administered from 2000-03 and demographic and school characteristics, for each of the performance-based quintiles to investigate which variables uniquely predict growth in reading as measured by CST-ELA scores. Results: Preliminary analyses indicate similar growth patterns among quintiles when defined by performance measures administered in 2000-03. Differential growth among quintiles was found when defined by performance on CST-ELA after intervention, 2004. This may indicate school effects, learner characteristic effects, or both. Conclusions: These analyses provide empirical evidence informing U.S. federal policy to close the "achievement gap" between middle-class students and marginalized groups such as Spanish-speaking ELLs.
Ying Guo ( University of Cincinnati)Laura Justice-The Ohio State University; Virginia Tompkins-The Ohio State University; Yaacov Petscher-Florida Center for Reading Research - Classroom Age Composition and Vocabulary Development among At-Risk Preschoolers
Purpose: There is a great deal of variability in the age composition of preschool classrooms within the United States. Some classrooms enroll only children within a particular age range, referred to as same-age classrooms. Other classrooms are characterized as mixed-age, in which children's ages may span several years (Winsler, et al., 2002). Although the way in which children are grouped is variable, it is unclear whether classroom age composition influences children's growth (i.e., vocabulary). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which classroom age composition is associated with children's vocabulary development and examine the extent to which this association is moderated by classroom quality. Method: Participants were 130 preschool children from 16 classrooms. Children measures included vocabulary knowledge. Classroom age composition measure includes the standard deviation of the average chronological age within a given classroom. Classroom quality was measured using standardized observation tool. Results: Hierarchical linear modeling analysis showed two findings. First, classroom age composition significantly interacted with children's age in predicting children's vocabulary gains; indicating that younger children showed greater vocabulary gains when enrolled in classrooms with a greater range in age versus a lesser range. Second, the interaction between behavior management (one dimension of classroom quality) and classroom age composition was significant; indicating that a wider distribution of age was positively related to children's vocabulary gains, when classrooms provide high quality of behavior management. Conclusions: findings confirm benefits of mixed-age classrooms for younger children's vocabulary development and underscore the importance of behavior management.
Stephanie Guthrie (University of Michigan);Frederick Morrison - Effective reading instruction in first grade: Teachers' use of individualized instruction
Purpose Prior work by Morrison, Connor and colleagues has established the importance of individualizing instruction based on students' reading skill level. The current study will model how well teachers are individualizing instruction for their students. Researchers expect teachers will provide more code- and phonics-based instruction and less meaning-based instruction to lower-skilled readers, and the obverse for highly-skilled readers. Method Students (N=236) were assessed in September, and 16 classrooms were observed three times over the course of the school year. Instruction was coded for activity type and focus using a live-coding narrative system. Teachers were asked to rate students on reading-related skills. Results Teachers spent the majority of observed instructional time engaged in child-directed writing and reading activities (M=45.05 min). Code- and phonics-based activities were less common (M=22.72 min); however, all classrooms had a range of student reading ability from two years below to three years above grade-level. Researchers modeled relations between student assessments and code-focused (βdecoding=.153; βpassage comp=-2.522*) as well as meaning-focused (βdecoding=.701; βpassage comp=-.142) instruction. Models using teacher ratings of students' skills yielded similar results, and teacher ratings and student test scores are highly correlated (rdecoding=.356** rpassage comp=.336**). Conclusions These findings indicate that teachers are using reading comprehension skills in order to individualize instruction with regard to code-focused activities; however, teachers are providing consistently high levels of meaning-focused activities to all students regardless of skill level. Additional information, including final student assessments and classroom observations, will be available in early spring to investigate the effects of instruction.
Nicolas Gutierrez-Palma (University of Jaen); Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma; María José Justicia Galiano; Nieves Valencia Naranjo; María de la Villa Carpio Fernández - Stress awareness and development of stress assignment in reading Spanish
Purpose: This work investigates children's use of lexical and orthographic information for stress assignment in Spanish. In particular, we hypothesize that lexical information would be more relevant at the beginning of reading instruction, before learning the orthographic regularities of the Spanish stress. Moreover, as stress awareness is related to the learning of these regularities (Defior, Gutiérrez-Palma, and Cano Marín, in press) we hypothesize that differences would disappear once stress awareness is controlled for. Method: Children from 2nd, 4th and 6th grade took part in our study, which used a cross-sectional design. We used a pseudoword reading task and manipulated the position of the stress mark, that could, or not, be in the same original word's position (e. g., látigo: whip, láfigo vs. lafigó). Furthermore, we used phonological awareness tasks (counting and deleting sounds), and stress awareness tasks that consisted of indicating the stressed syllable of spoken words and pseudowords. Results: We obtained indexes of children's use of lexical and orthographic (stress diacritic) information. We found significant differences showing that, as expected, lexical information is gradually less used, while the opposite pattern is found for the stress diacritic. These differences are strongly reduced once stress awareness (pseudowords) is controlled for. However, controlling for phonological awareness did not have any effect. Conclusions: These results suggest that reading development further depends on prosodic awareness (stress awareness in this study), as prosody is necessary for reading. They also show a growing use of the stress diacritic as children learn to use it.
Thomas Günther (RWTH Aachen University Medical Center); Claudia Kohlen; Wolfgang Scharke; Josefine Vollmar; Stefan Heim; Ralph Radach - Eye movement patterns indicate levels of word processing in sentence reading
Purpose: We present a paradigm aimed at isolating the contributions of several levels of processing, semantic [SE], syntactic [SY], phonological [PH] and visual to word processing during reading. In this method sentence reading is combined with the detection of character-like targets, creating a unified task format and instruction for all conditions. Method: German sentences were presented in five different formats: normal sentences, random word lists [-SY], pseudowords with intact syntax [excluding SE], random pseudoword lists [-SY and -SE] and sentences with all letters replaced by closed Landolt rings [-SY, -SE, -PH]. Pseudowords were matched for articulatory complexity. Participants read and responded to words containing an error, consisting of an added character (a mirrored "c"). One out of two sentences contained targets and only target-free words were included into analyses. Results: Spatial eye movement parameters like fixation probability and saccade landing positions were remarkably consistent across all conditions. In contrast, temporal parameters reflected specific processing requirements. As an example, the time spent re-reading words was significantly different between all conditions, with normal reading and random word lists having the lowest rereading times followed by Landoldt-string sentences and sentences with pseudowords. Conclusions: Results confirm that combining reading with a character detection task has surprisingly little impact on eye word processing as indicated by eye movement patterns (Greenberg, Inhoff & Weger, 2006). The paradigm appears well suited to characterize levels of linguistic processing in terms of differential effects on word/string viewing time measures. A follow up study using fMRI methodology is currently underway.
Bente E. Hagtvet (Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo)Solveig A.H. Lyster - The importance of preschool phonological and nonphonological skills to later reading skills in children at familial risk of dyslexia.
The purpose is to investigate relations between preschool oral language skills and later reading skills in a sample of Norwegian speaking children at familial risk of dyslexia. Research questions: 1.What preschool oral language markers of reading impairment may be identified? 2. What are the language strengths of children with poor decoding skills at age 8, but adequate reading comprehension at age 9? Method. 140 children were followed longitudinally from age 5 through 9. Only children with a nonverbal IQ above 85 were included in this particular study. Cognitive and oral and written language skills were assessed annually. Preschool markers of impaired and adequate reading were traced retrospectively with reference to two subgroups: children with poor or good nonword decoding skills at age 8. To address the second research question, only poor decoders were investigated. Data were analyzed by means of ANOVAs. Results. Preschool markers of poor or adequate nonword decoding (ages 5 and 6) were found in a broad range of language and cognitive areas (such as phonemic awareness, verbal and nonverbal IQ, syntax, literacy skills). Poor decoding and adequate comprehension were associated with good nonphonological language and cognitive skills. Conclusions. The results suggest that the reading development of dyslexic children draws on phonological and nonphonological skills that in different ways moderate the development of different reading skills. The results point to a subgroup of children with poor skills in word decoding as well as reading comprehension who suffer from both specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia.
Corinne A. Haigh (Bishop's University, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada); Caroline Erdos; Fred Genesee; Robert Savage - Predicting Risk for Oral and Written Language Learning Difficulties in English-speaking Students in French Immersion Programs
Purpose: The questions addressed in the study were: (1) How and to what extent do risk for reading difficulties and risk for language difficulties overlap in English-speaking children in FI programs? (2) Can risk for reading and language learning difficulties in L2 be predicted prospectively using L1 predictors? Method: Ninety-seven students were tested in Fall of kindergarten (K), Spring of K, Grade 1, and Grade 3. A battery of L1 oral and written language predictor tests was administered in K, and L2 outcome measures of word reading, reading comprehension, and language comprehension were completed at the end of Grades 1 and 3. Results: Analyses of the K predictors revealed distinct underlying components, one related to reading and one to oral language. Measures such as phonological awareness (PA), phonological recoding, and letter-sound knowledge in L1 were significant predictors of risk for reading difficulties in L2, while performance on L1 measures such as sentence repetition, PA, and tense marking in K were predictors of risk for L1 and L2 oral language difficulties at the end of grades 1 and 3. Conclusions: Results suggest that students can be screened for risk for L2 reading and oral language difficulties using L1 tests and that screening can be both sensitive and specific to reading and language learning difficulties if carried out as early as the beginning of K. The results have implications for tailoring intervention strategies to the specific difficulties of learners rather than taking a more general approach since many children do not appear to have overlapping impairments.
Laura Halderman (Educational Testing Service); Paul Deane; Rene Lawless; Gary Feng; John Sabatini; Anita Sands - Beyond word frequency: Topic effects on domain-specific lexical judgments
Purpose - This study investigates how student judgments about domain-specific vocabulary is influenced by general lexical knowledge and by topic-specific patterns of word co-occurrence. Method - Participants were 2347 7th-grade, 1616 9th-grade, and 1035 11th-grade students from 21 schools recruited nationally. The task involved judging whether a given word is known, and if known, whether it is related or unrelated to a particular topic. There were 100 biology and 165 social studies topics. Each topic had approximately 20 "related" and 20 "unrelated" words, for a total of 10,600 vocabulary items. Relatedness was validated by 50 experts in each domain. Topics were extracted from a cluster analysis of a 465-million word corpus of English texts. From the same corpus, a measure of word/topic association strength was derived by calculating the average co-occurrence frequency (how often words occur together in a text) between the vocabulary items and their corresponding topics. Word frequency was used as a proxy for lexical familiarity. Results - Regressions on word frequency and topic co-occurrence frequency were run to predict student response patterns. For judgments on whether they knew the word, general word frequency was the sole predictor. Topic co-occurrence frequency was an additional significant predictor for relatedness judgments of known words, predicting increased accuracy on related words and higher false positive rates on unrelated words. Conclusions - The observed patterns suggest that students are relying on topical associations to make relatedness judgments. Such patterns are arguably indicative of partial vocabulary knowledge dominated by shallow processing typically associated with priming effects.
Juliet Halladay (University of Vermont) - Making monsters into meatballs: Differential impacts of oral reading error types on text meaning and reading comprehension
Purpose: This study examined the relationship between decoding accuracy, text meaning, and reading comprehension by focusing on the extent to which different types of oral reading errors affected comprehension for young readers. Method: This mixed methods study involved 70 second-grade students, from 5 classrooms, reading texts chosen during classroom-based, independent reading time. Students read passages aloud and answered passage-specific comprehension questions. All oral readings were scored for overall accuracy, with individual miscues coded according to error type (e.g., substitution, omission, etc.). Textual analysis was used to determine relationships between error types and alteration in text meaning; comprehension scores were used to determine relationships between error types and actual comprehension. Analyses were both quantitative (descriptive statistics, correlations) and qualitative (open coding, frequency counts). Results: Of the error types, substitutions and mispronunciations were most likely to alter text meaning at both the word and sentence levels. Omissions and insertions were least likely to alter meaning. The overall correlation between passage-specific accuracy and comprehension was statistically significant (.472). Accuracy and comprehension were most closely linked for students with high percentages of substitutions and least closely linked for students with high percentages of omissions and self-corrections. Conclusions: Findings suggest that error type mediates the relationship between accuracy and comprehension. While many oral reading assessments assign all errors equal weight, this study suggests a need for more sensitive measures. These findings also have practical implications for classroom teachers, who frequently use measures of oral reading to make instructional decisions about matching readers with texts.
Laurie Hansen ()Penelope Collins - Print exposure and patterns of reading Among linguistically diverse children
Purpose While the importance of print exposure in reading development is uncontroversial, few studies have examined this relationship for English learners. We examined measures of reading volume and its quality with literacy achievement for English-speakers (NS), English learners with limited English proficient (LEP), and English learners who were considered proficient in English (RFEP). Method Participants were 226 fourth graders from the three language groups. Print exposure was assessed using the Title Recognition Questionnaire and a Series Recognition test, and book data (number, difficulty and comprehension scores) from reading management software. Standardized vocabulary and reading measures were administered in the fall and spring. Results Although they read fewer books than LEP children, NS and RFEP children read more difficult books with better comprehension. For NS children, Series Recognition scores explained 3% of the variance in growth in vocabulary. For RFEP children, 7% of the variance in vocabulary growth was explained by a combination of book difficulty and comprehension rate. For LEP children, 4% of the variance in LEP children's vocabulary growth was explained by book difficulty level. Growth in reading comprehension for NS children was explained by Title and Series Recognition. For RFEP children, Title Recognition and book comprehension accounted for 22% of the variance in reading comprehension growth. Print exposure was unrelated to growth in comprehension for LEP children. Conclusions Our findings suggest that the quality of children's independent reading should be considered in addition to reading volume. Proficient English learners showed reading patterns more like those of Native Speakers than LEP children.
Nicole Harlaar (Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder)Philip Dale; Marianna Hayiou-Thomas; Robert Plomin - Individual variation in reading achievement trajectories: New evidence from a UK twin study.
Purpose - To date, behavioral genetic research on reading has mostly focused on issues of continuity and change; that is, what accounts for individual differences in the extent to which children hold their relative positions in reading test distributions over time? These studies have now collected more data across the school years, providing an opportunity to also consider children's reading growth trajectories. The current study, using a large UK-based twin sample, addresses two questions: (1) To what extent are individual differences in reading achievement at the start of the child's educational career due to genetic and environmental factors? (2) To what extent does children's growth in reading achievement reflect genetic and environmental factors? Method - Our sample was drawn from over 2,500 twin pairs at age 7 for whom teachers provided ratings of reading achievement on a national UK curriculum rating scale. Repeat assessments were obtained at ages 9, 10 and 12. Results - Latent growth curve modeling techniques revealed that the intercept and slope were positively correlated. Individual differences in the intercept was mostly due to genetic factors, whereas nonshared environmental factors made the largest contribution to individual differences in slope. Shared environmental factors accounted for significant variance in the intercept but not slope. Conclusions - This study highlights the importance of considering both genetic and environmental factors in growth trajectories in reading achievement across the early and middle school years. We discuss some priorities for future behavioral genetic research on reading growth and development.
Lindsay Harris (University of Pittsburgh); Benjamin B. Rickles; Charles A. Perfetti - Early word recognition processes predict the brain's response to errors in spelling decisions
Purpose: Recent research has shown that the error-related negativity (ERN), an ERP component that reflects certainty of response correctness, can also reflect completeness of orthographic representations. Little is known about the relationship between the ERN and earlier ERP components such as the N170 and N250. We evaluated ERP data to determine whether early word recognition processes can predict the brain's response to errors in spelling decisions. Methods: ERPs to correct and incorrect responses were recorded during a forced-choice spelling judgment task in 39 adults. Data was collected using a Geodesic sensor net and analyzed using NetStation software. Results: ERNs were observed at approximately 25 ms post-response, with more negative mean amplitudes recorded for error trials. N250s were observed between 220-330 ms and N170s were observed between 150-220 ms post-stimulus onset. The N170 was found to correlate with the ERN, and all three components were found to correlate with individual difference measures including spelling and vocabulary ability. Conclusions: The findings from the present study offer insight into word recognition processes that predict awareness of errors in reading. Our results indicate that familiarity with orthographic form predicts the ability to correctly evaluate one's response in judging that form. Moreover, early ERP components like the N170 have been taken to index perception of form in reading; the correlation of the N170 with the much later-occurring ERN suggests that lexical quality mediates both the encoding of orthographic form (thus producing the N170) and the awareness of a spelling decision error (thus producing the ERN).
Gina Harrison (Educational Psychology & Leadership Studies, University of Victoria);Kristin Sinclair; Rachel Jalbert; Caitlin Heayn; Lauren Goegan; Jessica Spurling - Cognitive, linguistic, and literacy influences on writing in first and second language learners
Purpose: Cognitive, linguistic, and literacy measures were administered to English as a second language (ESL) Canadian children and to their non-ESL (EL1) peers to examine: (a) writing performance differences between ESL/EL1 (b) predictors of writing in both groups, and (c) subtype profiles of skilled and less skilled writers. Method: 113 grade 3 children (64 ESL, 49 EL1) participated, part of a longitudinal cohort being followed to grade 5. Cognitive (RAN, verbal span, working memory), linguistic (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion), and literacy (word-level reading, decoding, spelling, handwriting fluency) measures were administered and children also wrote paragraphs. ESL/EL1 differences were analyzed with univariate ANOVAs, predictors of writing were identified using hierarchical multiple regression, and non parametric t-tests (Mann-Whitney-U) analysed writing subtype profiles. Results: EL1 achieved higher scores than ESL on the oral vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, decoding, and spelling measures. No differences in writing performance were found. Phoneme deletion alone and in combination with RAN-letters explained the most variance in overall writing ability for EL1 and ESL, respectively. EL1 also appear to be drawing on a greater breadth of skills when writing than ESL, particularly when writing well organized, thematically developed paragraphs. Performance differences on the measures of working memory, RAN-letters, and phonological processing differentiated skilled and less skilled writers irrespective of ESL status. Conclusion: ESL/EL1 children's writing achievement is similar. ESL appear to be drawing on different component processes and subskills to write, but experience difficulties with writing due to the same underlying cognitive and linguistic processes as EL1.
Sara Hart (Center for Reading Research, Florida State University)Jessica Logan; Christopher Schatschneider; Jeanette Taylor - Development of timed versus untimed measures of reading
Purpose: The present study examined the development of genetic and environmental influences on both timed and untimed reading measures from first to fourth grade. Method: Participants were drawn from the Florida Twin Project in Reading, a longitudinal sample of 4300 twins from Florida. Data were collected on each child as part of Reading First and entered into a state-wide system known as the Florida's Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network. Timed reading was measured by Oral Reading Fluency from DIBELS, and untimed reading was measured by SAT-10. Results: Development was measured utilizing latent quadratic growth curve modeling using the spring assessment point across four school years. Results from growth modeling of fluency suggested high genetic and low environmental influences on the intercept, and moderate genetic and environmental influences on the linear slope, and high environmental influences on the quadratic slope. Results from growth modeling of SAT-10 suggested moderate genetic and low environmental influences on the intercept, and low genetic and moderate environmental influences on the linear slope, and high environmental influences on the quadratic slope. Moreover, beyond those univariate estimates, there were only low shared genetic and environmental overlap among the intercept and slope factors in both models, except for moderate shared environmental overlap among the slope factors for untimed reading. Conclusions: These results highlight differing etiology of genetic and environmental influences on growth of reading depending on how reading is measured. In line with previous research, timed reading suggests higher genetic influences than untimed.
Sandra Hasko (University of Munich, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy)Katarina Groth, Jennifer Bruder, Gerd Schulte-Körne - Phonological lexical decision in children with developmental dyslexia
Purpose: The main characteristic of children with developmental dyslexia (DD) in transparent orthographies, like German, is a reading speed deficit. Studies with German adolescents and adults revealed speed impairments in a phonological lexical decision task in participants with DD compared to unimpaired control subjects. Aim of the current study was to investigate the observed speed impairment in children with and without reading and spelling difficulties and to further explore the neurophysiological underpinnings of phonological lexical decisions in children. Method: In an established phonological lexical decision task familiar and unfamiliar letter strings of existing words (e.g. Taxi versus Taksi) together with nonwords (e.g. Tazi) and symbols were presented while EEG was recorded. Children with DD (n=38) and age-matched controls (n=29) had to decide via button press whether the presented letter string sounded like an existing word or not. Results: Children with DD showed longer response latencies on all lexical measures compared to control children, false fonts did not differentiate the groups. However, the response pattern for all stimuli was identical between the groups. Despite a high response accuracy of both groups across all tasks, controls performed significantly better in all lexical measures. Conclusion: The speed impairment observed in adults could be replicated for children further substantiating the role of fluency in DD in German language. The analysis of ERP components like the N1, which reflects early lexical access and is sensitive to the orthographic information of letter strings, should elucidate if the observed latency effect is also reflected in the ERP data.
Jarkko Hautala (Researcher); Otto Loberg; Asko Tolvanen; Jukka Hyönä - Number of letters in a word, but not its spatial width is responsible for temporal word length effect in fluent and dysfluent reading in a transparent orthography
Purpose: It has been proposed that slow word recognition in dyslexia results from increased visual crowding (Martelli, Di Filippo, Spinelli, & Zoccolotti, 2009) or deficit in visuo-attentional span (Bosse, Tainturier, & Valdois, 2007). However, these hypotheses are based on findings from other than reading tasks. Here, we tested whether visual or linguistic properties of words affect eye movement measures in natural reading. Method: Participants (N=37) including 12 dysfluent readers read natural sentences presented in proportional font, containing spatially narrow and wide target words with varying number of letters (Hautala, Hyönä & Aro, 2011). The data was analyzed using multilevel regression analysis in which word properties (width, numberr of letters) were used to explain eye movement measures, and reading fluency. Results: In accordance with our earlier study (Hautala et al., 2011), gaze duration was influenced by number of letters but not by spatial width. Reading fluency was explained only by the overall level of gaze duration, not by the studied word properties. Spatial width reduced the probability of skipping a word, which was also slightly increased with reading fluency. Conclusions: In a transparent Finnish orthography, the number of letters, not the spatial width of words affects word recognition speed in natural reading as indexed by gaze duration, irrespective of the level of reading fluency. These results do not support the visual accounts (Bosse et al., 2007; Martelli et al., 2009) of slower word recognition in dyslexia, but indicate a general slowness in word recognition.
Lindsay Heggie (Queen); Lesly Wade-Woolley -
Purpose Prosody, the linguistic stress and intonation patterns of strong and weak syllables across a word (lexical stress) or an utterance (metrical stress), has recently been connected with word reading ability (e.g., Goswami et al., 2002; Holliman, Wood, & Sheehy, 2008) and reading comprehension (Whalley & Hansen, 2006; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006). At the level of the utterance, metrical stress is made overt in print through the application of punctuation. The current study sought to determine the degree to which adults are able to apply prosody to text through their manipulation and understanding of punctuation. One possibility is that sensitivity to speech rhythm is heightened as a result of musical training (David, Wade-Woolley, Kirby & Smithrim, 1997). Therefore, this study investigates whether differences in correct application of punctuation are observed in adults as a function of musical training. Method English speaking adult participants (n=100) were recruited for this task and identified as either musician (n=50) or non-musician (n=50) based on their responses to a survey of musical education and experiences. Results It is expected that adults will perform well overall on the punctuation task, and that performance will be correlated with reading ability. Further, those adults classified as musicians are expected to exhibit superior prosodic awareness and performance on punctuation. Conclusions:Prosody and musical ability are implicated in reading and in knowledge of punctuation.
Karyn Higgs (Northern Illinois University);Joe Magliano; Eduardo Vidal-Abarca; Danielle McNamara; Tomas Martinez - Using technology to study task-oriented reading comprehension
Purpose Relatively little is known about the relationship between comprehension processes and how readers approach a text in a task-oriented situation (e.g., reading to answer questions). The goal of this study was to use on-line computer-based assessment tools to explore the relationship between comprehension processes and how readers search and use a text to answer questions about it. Method We used two automated assessments. The Reading Strategy-Assessment tool (RSAT) provides measures of processes that support the construction of mental models. Read&Answer (R&A) provides assessments of how students initially read and then search a text in order to answer questions. RSAT was used to establish individual differences in the drive for establishing coherence. This was operationalized with the RSAT bridging inference score, which measures a reader's propensity to produce bridging inferences during reading. Read&Answer was used to create two different reading situations, one in which students were able to search the texts when answering short-answer questions and one in which they were not allowed to do so. HLM was used to assess the relative impact of features of the questions (level 1) and individual differences (level 2) on performance on short answer questions. Results The results revealed that individual differences in establishing coherence during reading were correlated with performance when the text was not available while answering the questions, but this was not the case when the text was available. Conclusions These results suggest that different test conditions place different demands on readers of varying skill.
Annemarie H. Hindman (Temple University); Jennifer G. Cromley - Writing development among American children in poverty: Lessons from the FACES Head Start data
Purpose: In this study, we used person-centered latent growth mixture modeling techniques to explore the early writing development of American children in poverty. In particular, we asked: 1. Are there distinct trajectories of writing skill growth among Head Start preschoolers? 2. Which ecological factors predict that growth? Method: We employed the large-scale, nationally representative United States Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) Head Start dataset, 1997 cohort, including approximately 2000 preschoolers and families in 300 classrooms, followed through first grade. Writing skills were gauged using the Woodcock-Johnson Revised Dictation measure. Data were collected at five time points: (1) fall and (2) spring of Year 1 of preschool, (3) spring of Year 2 of preschool, (4) spring of kindergarten, and (5) spring of first grade. Each spring, parents reported on child and family demographic variables, and teachers reported on classroom instruction. Results: Growth mixture modeling techniques revealed two distinct trajectories of writing growth, with 32% of children demonstrating low initial skills but rapid growth over time, and 68% of children with higher initial skills but slower growth over time. Girls were more likely to be in the initially skilled group/class. Within each group/class, classroom instruction and home involvement were modestly predictive of learning. Conclusions: American Head Start children differed from one another in their development of writing skills over the school transition period. Children with initially lower skills made greater progress and began to close the gap with their peers, at least partly because of home and classroom instruction.
Kathleen Hipfner-Boucher (University of Toronto)Katie Lam; Xi Chen - The contribution of narrative morpho-syntactic quality to reading comprehension in French immersion students
Purpose This study investigated the relationship of narrative morpho-syntactic quality to reading comprehension in a sample of grade one students enrolled in a Canadian French Immersion program. Method Participants were 81 children, tested in the spring of grade one. All children were non-native speakers of French, the language of formal instruction in their school. For the present study, the children were required to generate a narrative in French in response to a wordless picture book. Reading comprehension was assessed in French. Children also completed a range of linguistic and cognitive measures in both French and English, including phonological, syntactic and morphological awareness, vocabulary and word reading. A non-verbal reasoning task (MAT) was administered to assess general intelligence. Results To predict French reading comprehension, MAT was entered in the first step of a regression, followed by English phonological awareness. French vocabulary, word reading, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness were entered in successive steps. An index of French narrative morpho-syntactic quality (proportion of grammatically acceptable utterances) was entered in the final step. The proportion of grammatically acceptable utterances in the children's narratives was found to explain unique variance in reading comprehension after taking into account all other variables. Conclusions Previous studies have largely focused on the relationship between narrative structure and reading comprehension. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies demonstrating that the morpho-syntactic quality of narratives predicts reading outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of discourse-level language skills to reading comprehension in beginning readers.
Fei-Tai Ho (National Cheng Kung University)Aleck Shih-Wei Chen - The Impact of Frequency and Configurational Structures on Character Similarity Judgment
Given the logographic nature of the Chinese orthography, visual skills have been shown to be crucial to Chinese character recognition, with units of processing following a developmental trend from local (strokes or components) to global features (configurational structures), subject to learning experiences. The reported study explored whether the said unit preference, if any, was mediated by character frequency, using a multiple-choice similarity judgment task that varied, in addition to frequency, the three choices in terms of the units shared with the target: component (visual patterns without carrying semantic and phonetic cues), structure, or nothing. The task was administered to 97 Chinese-speaking elementary school students from grade 3 to grade 6. In contrast to earlier findings, as the results showed, although the graders did find components or structures useful cues in judging similarity among characters, the tendencies were not consistent and no significant development changes were found in terms of preferred cues. Instead, frequency was found to play an important role, with a significant preference for configurational structures found for high-frequency characters, though no significant preference was found for either components or structure for low-frequency characters.
Andrew Holliman (Coventry University)Emily Harrison; Clare Wood; Ian Hume - Exploring the relationship between prosodic sensitivity and early literacy: A critical path analysis
Purpose: A growing literature has demonstrated that prosodic sensitivity is related to early literacy development; however, the precise nature of this relationship remains unclear. It has been suggested in recent theoretical models (e.g., Wood, Wade-Woolley & Holliman, 2009) that the observed relationship between prosodic sensitivity and literacy might be (partially) mediated by children's vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness, although the validity of this model is questionable due to a lack of empirical evidence assessing each of the possible contributory pathways. Our study is the first to provide a direct assessment of this model using a critical path analysis. Method: In this correlational design, seventy-five five- to 7-year-old English-speaking children completed a new test of prosodic sensitivity and were also assessed for their vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, reading, and spelling. Results: The results are pending. Conclusions: The findings from this study will inform current models (and theories) of literacy development and may explain how children move from reading monosyllabic words to multisyllabic words.
Josefine Horbach (Child Neuropsychology Section, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Hospital of the RWTH Aachen); Wolfgang Scharke; Thomas Günther - Cause specific tasks in early recognition of dyslexia
Purpose: Dyslexia has been explained by diverging causal theories. Children at risk for dyslexia are commonly identified by phonological awareness and rapid naming tasks. These instruments, however, have deficient predictive power, which might indicate that linguistic theories alone are insufficient to explain dyslexia and that there is actually a multitude of causal factors. Furthermore, different subtypes of the disorder have been identified in elementary school children in a previous study. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to identify different subtypes of children at risk for dyslexia at preschool age. Method: 280 children in preschool age were selected out of 530, according to the inclusion criteria (native speaker) and exclusion criteria, e.g. impaired sight or hearing and intellectual disabilities. The children were tested with cause specific tasks. Data on early literacy knowledge, level of literacy in home environment and the familial disposition of dyslexia were collected via questionnaires. Phonological awareness and rapid naming were measured with a standardized test. Additionally, different attentional processes and symbol-learning skills were tested. Results: In line with our expectations, children showed different risk profiles. The cluster analysis indicated at least two different subtypes, wherein one group showed deficits primarily in language related tasks whereas the other group of children additionally presents attention deficits and/or symbol learning deficits. Conclusions: The results will be discussed with regard to the subtype hypothesis of dyslexia.
Maureen Hoskyn (Simon Fraser University)Seanna Takacs; Souad Abdelhadi - A longitudinal analysis of the cognitive and linguistic system that underlies spelling of words in everyday writing activities of young children.
Although children's development of metalinguistic knowledge of morphemes in speech has been studied extensively, far less is known about how children might use this knowledge in their everyday writing. This study investigates how children's unsystematic use of inflectional endings on verbs in their writing shifts and changes over time, until it becomes reliably accurate. Of specific interest is the relationship between the quality and the rate of growth of inflectional morpheme use and children's development of phonological awareness, for it is well documented that young children rely heavily upon phonological awareness to support their use of the alphabetic principle during spelling of words. A mixed methods approach is used to document this developmental change of inflectional morpheme use in writing for 104 children from their preschool years until grade two. Four writing samples were collected annually from each child: picture description, story telling, explanation of a game, and journal writing. These writing products were scored for frequency of accurate use of specific inflectional morphemes/sentence and this measure was mixed modeling procedures were used to estimate growth rates in automaticity of morpheme use compared to rates of growth of phonological awareness over time. The second set of analyses qualitatively addressed how children used the morphemes in their writing as they developed as writers. Findings suggest that children's growth in use of inflectional morphemes in writing varies over time as a function of factors in addition to phonological awareness, including, but not limited to, their age, gender, and access to executive resources.
Elizabeth Howard (University of Connecticut); Igone Arteagoitia; Betsy McCoach - The effects of a cognate-based intervention on middle school students' vocabulary attainment
Purpose What are the effects of a cognate-based intervention on the vocabulary attainment of Spanish-speaking middle school students? Methods This quasi-experimental study was conducted in 30 classrooms in three urban middle schools and involved 495 students in grades 6, 7, and 8. One-third of the students received a monolingual English version of the cognate curriculum; one-third received a cross-linguistic version that made explicit connections across English and Spanish; and one-third served as a control group. Students were administered an English vocabulary assessment (EVOCA, alpha=.91), that includes taught cognates, non-taught cognates, and other non-taught words. The Test of Reading Comprehension (TORC) and the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency (TOSWRF) were also administered as pre-tests of general English proficiency and English literacy, respectively. To estimate treatment effects, we ran a series of multilevel models. Results After controlling for native language, grade level, and pre-test scores on the EVOCA, TOSWRF, and TORC assessments, students from the two intervention conditions outperformed control students on the EVOCA post-test total score (Cohen's d = .30). The effect size was larger when only taught cognates were considered (Cohen's d = .50). However, there were not statistically significant differences between the two intervention conditions (monolingual vs. cross-linguistic). Moreover, native Spanish speakers scored significantly lower than other students, and treatment did not moderate this effect. Conclusion Both forms of the intervention were effective in increasing the overall vocabulary scores of all students, but neither eliminated the achievement gap between native Spanish speakers and native English speakers.
Anh Hua ()Janice M. Keenan - Do Inferencing Difficulties in Poor Comprehenders Reflect Poor Text Memory or Integration Difficulties?
Purpose: Researchers have proposed poor inferencing as a potential cause of comprehension deficits (CD). However, it is difficult to disentangle inferencing from closely related processes such as text memory. Are inference questions harder for children with CD because they do not retain the text information that needs to be integrated as well as controls do, or because they have a harder time integrating the information? Method: 23 children with CD (lowest 25% on oral comprehension) and 23 Controls matched on age and word reading skill, read and listened to passages from the QRI, then recalled, and answered comprehension questions. For each explicit and implicit question, we identified the relevant information from the text underlying the question. We compared accuracy on each question with the child's memory for the passage information underlying the question. Results: As is typical, accuracy was higher for explicit than implicit questions, F(1, 44)=55.71, p <.001, and higher for Controls than CD, F(1, 44)= 43.87, p <.001. When text memory was controlled by examining question performance only when both groups fully recalled the underlying premises, then Controls and children with CD performed equally well on explicit questions (96% and 91%, respectively), but children with CD still performed worse on implicit questions (78% vs. 54%,F(1, 44)=4.68, p <.05. Conclusion: This study shows that children with CD experienced difficulties answering inference questions even when relevant text information was available in memory. It suggests that inferencing deficits can occur independently from memory deficits.
Barry Hughes (University of Auckland); Amber McClelland; Dion Henare - The braille-reading finger and garden path sentences
Purpose: How does the reading braille-reading finger react to ambiguity in text? Do Braille readers react as print readers do, or do the movement (kinematic) properties suggest different perceptual-motor control in braille reading? Method: The dominant reading finger of experienced braille readers (n = 11) was sampled at 200Hz as it crossed sentences containing temporarily ambiguous sentences (e.g., The rich people mansions) and two control sentences (e.g., The rich inhabit mansions; The rich people bought a yacht). From the position data we derived higher order kinematic properties of the finger in action (velocity, acceleration, directional reversals). Results: Ambiguity reduces the mean reading velocity and increases the fluctuations or intermittency of the velocity trace. However, the words that disambiguate a garden path sentence and inform a reader of an earlier misparsing, are not zones from which more reversals occur. Reversals are so common in braille reading that their frequency tends not to be greater than in disambiguating sectors of the sentence. Our kinematic analysis also confirms that the fluctuations in velocity derive from the motor control of slow movements (which braille reading exemplifies), but that reading reversals are sometimes executed in rapidly and ballistically. Conclusions: Kinematics of the braille reading finger have implications for the rate and nature of cognitive-linguistic processing, and for understanding how the braille reader processes text and controls the movement of the finger. We discuss our data in terms of these more theoretical dimensions.
Charles Hulme (University College London); Monica Melby-Lervåg; Solveig-Alma Halaas Lyster; Marianne Klem; Bente Hagtvet; Arne Lervåg - Nonword Repetition Ability: More a Consequence than a Cause of Children's Vocabulary Development
Purpose: We assess the theory that vocabulary learning in children depends critically upon the capacity of a "phonological loop" (Baddeley, 1996) that is indexed by nonword repetition ability. Method: A three-year longitudinal study of 219 children spanning the ages of 4-8 years assessed nonword repetition ability and vocabulary knowledge at yearly intervals. Results: There was a considerable degree of longitudinal stability in children's vocabulary and nonword repetition skills, but there was no evidence for influences of nonword repetition ability on later vocabulary knowledge. Conclusion: Our results seriously question the theory that vocabulary learning is constrained by nonword repetition ability and are more compatible with the opposite causal theory that variations in nonword repetition are a consequence of variations in vocabulary knowledge.
Jin Kyoung Hwang (University of California, Irvine); Penelope Collins; Mark Warschauer; George Farkas; Binbin Zheng - Exploring the Writing Patterns of Elementary School Students as a Function of Their Proficiency in English
Purpose: Many studies about English learners' academic performance have focused solely on students with limited English proficiency. However, English learners are a heterogeneous group that can be classified into three designations (Ragan, & Lesaux, 2006): Initially fluent, redesignated fluent, and limited English proficient (I-FEP, R-FEP, and LEP, respectively). The purpose of this study is to examine whether students' varying English proficiency has an impact in their writing outcomes. Specifically, do texts written by 5th and 6th grade I-FEP, R-FEP and LEP students differ from those written by their English-only (EO) peers? Method: Participants were 273 5th and 6th grade students with varying levels of English proficiency. Students wrote an essay based on the prompt, "Create an animal." Essays were analyzed using VocabProfile (Cobb, 1984; Heatley, & Nation, 1994) and CohMetrix (McNamara, Louwerse, Cai & Graesser, 2005) to examine length and word use, readability, syntactic structure and cohesion. Results: Preliminary analyses revealed that I-FEP and R-FEP students wrote essays comparable in length and word use to those of EO peers. However, LEP students wrote shorter texts, had greater repetition in content word use, and fewer academic words than EO students. Conclusions: Our preliminary findings highlight LEP students' limited English vocabulary knowledge of LEP students, and their difficulty in incorporating it in their writing. Further analyses will provide insight into English learners' use of syntactic structures and coherence in essay writing. Our findings highlight the importance of considering English learners' proficiency rather than treating them as a homogeneous group. References Cobb,T. Web Vocabprofile [accessed 01 March 2011 from http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/], an adaptation of Heatley & Nation's (1994) Range. Heatley, A. and Nation, P. (1994). Range. Victoria University of Wellington, NZ. [Computer program, available at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/.] McNamara, D.S., Louwerse, M.M., Cai, Z., & Graesser, A. (2005, January 1). Coh-Metrix version 1.4. Retrieved November, 2011, from http//:cohmetrix.memphis.edu. Ragan, A., & Lesaux, N. (2006). Federal, state, and district level English language learner program entry and exit requirements: Effects on the education of language minority learners. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 14(20). Retrieved May, 2011 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n20/
Kenji Ikeda (Nagoya unversity)Kenji Ikeda; Shinji Ktagami - The interactive effect of working memory and text difficulty on metacomprehension accuracy
*Purpose - We investigated how working memory capacity (WMC) and text difficulty affect the accuracy of metacomprehension. *Method - Participants completed the operation-span test to measure WMC and ability to read expository texts. Under the easy-text condition, participants read four texts with increasing local cohesion, whereas under the difficult-text condition, participants read four original texts. Participants assigned a comprehension rating to each text and then completed a comprehension test. *Results - The result revealed a significant interactive effect of WMC and text difficulty on metacomprehension accuracy. In particular, under the easy-text condition, the metacomprehension accuracy of higher-WMC readers monitored their comprehension less accurately than did lower-WMC readers. On the other hand, under the difficult-text condition, higher-WMC readers monitored their comprehension more accurately than did lower-WMC readers. *Conclusions - These results suggested that text difficulty may affect the allocation of attentional resources. Under easy-text condition, higher-WMC readers would engage in more automatic reading and did not devote attention to meta-level processing, whereas lower-WMC readers would devote optimal effort to object-level processing and sufficient attentional resources to meta-level processing. As a result, the accuracy of higher-WMC readers was lower than that of lower-WMC readers. In contrast, under difficult-text condition, higher-WMC readers would have devoted sufficient resources to meta-level processing, whereas lower-WMC readers did not because of the allocating substantial resources to object-level processing to comprehend the text appropriately. As a result, the accuracy of higher-WMC readers was higher than that of lower-WMC readers.
Nancie Im-Bolter (Trent University); Katharine Bailey; Keely Owens-Jaffray; Fataneh Farnia; Nancy J. Cohen - Perspective taking and theory of mind: Does reading fit in?
Purpose: Theory of mind (ToM) or mental state understanding is the ability to attribute beliefs, thoughts, and desires to others. Research indicates experiences that encourage consideration of other perspectives may be important in the development of ToM. Reading comprehension requires the ability to take on different perspectives (e.g., first vs. third person) and those with reading comprehension problems may show deficits in their mental state understanding. Method: Participants were 57 children between the age of 7 and 13 who either had reading comprehension problems (but no reading decoding problems: RC group) (n = 19) or typical reading ability (n = 38). Children were compared on measures of nonverbal IQ, semantic and syntactic language, and higher order ToM. Results: Analyses showed the two groups did not differ with respect to sex, age, SES, or nonverbal IQ. Children in the RC group performed within the average range on measures of reading decoding and semantic and syntactic language; however, their scores were significantly lower than their peers with typical reading ability. On the higher order ToM task, both groups had comparable performance on the comprehension control questions but the RC group provided significantly fewer responses incorporating mental states. Conclusions: Results of this study indicate that children with reading comprehension problems show deficits in their ability to attribute mental states to others when provided with everyday social situations. It is possible that less successful experiences with perspective taking during reading comprehension puts children at risk for difficulties with perspective taking in a social context.
Sarah Ingebrand (Florida State University); Sarah Ingebrand; Carol Connor; Laura Snyder - Time spent on writing instruction and literacy outcomes
Purpose: There is little research on writing instruction in the classroom. Concern about a deficit in writing ability has been expresses by both researchers and universities that find incoming students have not learned key skills. The aim of this study was to look at what types of writing students are engaging in over the school year and how time spent on these tasks, as well as teacher characteristics, shape their writing outcomes. Method: Data were collected as part of the Individualizing Student Instruction randomized control field trial. All students were in third grade and of the 518 students sampled 334 students were randomly selected to observe (53.1% female, 33 classrooms, 7 schools). The students were assessed using a battery of measures from the Woodcock-Johnson III in both the fall and spring. The language arts instruction provided to the students was recorded in the fall, winter and spring. These videos were coded for the students' time spent on child and teacher managed writing activities. Results: Using HLM, the findings revealed that the time spent on writing varies considerably from student to student. The analysis also showed that writing instructional activities, with the exception of teacher/child-managed prewriting/planning, positively predicted gains in writing scores. Conclusion: These results reveal that time spent on writing, and in particular explicit instruction and revision, may present opportunities for improving students' writing outcomes.
Dimitra Ioannou (Center for Language, Reading and Writing); Vassiliki Diamanti; Angeliki Mouzaki; Athanassios Protopapas - The impact of morphological skills on reading achievement of Greek-speaking children in elementary Grades 3, 4, and 5.
Purpose: The relationship between phonological skills and literacy development is well established. However, the impact of morphological skills on reading acquisition is relatively understudied. The purpose of this study was to investigate the longitudinal relation between morphology and reading skills (accuracy and fluency) in the relatively transparent Greek orthography. Method: Children in Grades 3 (N=173), 4 (165), and 5 (154) were assessed in word reading accuracy and fluency, text fluency, and morphosyntax (sentence completion and sequencing emphasizing inflectional and derivational endings) at two testing times six months apart (November-time 1-and April-time 2). Spelling errors on inflectional endings were available from a spelling measure of a 60-word list administered in the previous year. Results: Hierarchical multiple regression analyses, controlling for time-1 reading skill, revealed systematic unique contributions of time-1 morphosyntactic skill to time-2 word reading accuracy (2-5% of variance). These contributions survived control for spelling performance on inflectional endings, a measure of earlier grammatical and orthographic knowledge. Contribution to time-2 text fluency was found only in fourth grade. There were no significant contributions to time-2 word reading fluency. Conclusions: The current results point to a crucial relationship between morphological skills and reading performance, highlighting the importance of assessing and supporting the development of both morphological awareness and word-level reading throughout elementary grades. The possibility of a special (possibly transient) relationship of morphosyntax to fluency of connected text has important implications for reading intervention in highly inflected languages, such as Greek, and warrants further investigation.
Christer Jacobson (Linneus University, Sweden);Thomas Nordström; Pernilla Söderberg Juhlander; Anna Fouganthine - Questionnaire results from the longitudinal study of reading development in Kronoberg, Sweden
Purpose The aim of the paper is to present an outline of results from a longitudinal study of reading disabled persons in Kronoberg, Sweden and to address several considerations to develop scientifically well-founded methods. This report presents an outline of group comparisons between reading disabled persons and the controls from eight years old in grade 2 until 29 years old at the follow-up study. Method From a total cohort of 2167 children in grade 2, a sample of 103 children was selected on the basis of different screening tests and was followed through the educational system to the end of upper secondary school. The sample was matched with a control group on age, gender, school class and nonverbal ability. The purpose of the follow up study was to investigate dyslexia's influence on quality of life regarding health and life situation in relation to background factors collected during early school years and adolescence. Due to the cut off score in the extreme lower end of the tail resulted in a larger group for boys. Results The reading disabled differed in health, self-reliance in reading, self-esteem, formal education and reported how the reading impairment had left them with bad memories of the years in school. The results also revealed challenges for future research. Conclusions Persons with early reading difficulties marry and settle down earlier, have more children and lived in own houses in higher degree compared to the controls. Good readers instead reported longer formal education and more advanced employments.
Christa Japel ()Delphine Vuattoux; Éric Dion; Véronique Dupéré - Fidelity of program implementation and at-risk preschoolers' vocabulary gains
This study examined the effectiveness of a direct vocabulary intervention developed to enhance at-risk preschoolers' vocabulary. Twenty-two (22) groups of underprivileged preschoolers (M = 4.27 years) were assigned to a control condition or to an intervention condition. Thirty (30) storybooks were developed presenting a corpus of vocabulary that distinguishes underprivileged children from those in more privileged socioeconomic conditions. Educators in the intervention group received a half-day training session on how to implement the intervention and regular support during the intervention. Observations were conducted to determine whether instructional activities were correctly implemented in the intervention condition groups. Interrater-reliability of these observations (r) was equal to .99. Results from intent to treat and efficacy subset analyses show that, compared to their peers in the control condition, children in the intervention condition provided a significantly larger number of correct word definitions at post-test. However, children's progress was associated with the degree of fidelity of program implementation. Children in the 'low fidelity' group made some gains, but those were mostly observed among children with initially higher vocabulary and behaviour regulation skills. On the other hand, the larger progress observed in the 'high fidelity' group suggests that children independent of their pre-test characteristics benefited from the intervention. These results highlight the importance of continued supervision and training during interventions and the challenges inherent in implementing interventions in a population-based sample.
Linda Jarmulowicz (University of Memphis) - Discussion
The final paper will be a discussion of four papers in the symposium and consideration of future directions for research in the area.
Christine Javier (Wilfrid Laurier University); Alexandra Gottardo; Fataneh Farnia - Expressive vocabulary in Spanish English Language Learners (ELLs): Cognates vs. non-cognates
Purpose: To explore the presence of cross-linguistic transfer of cognate words in a sample of Spanish English Language Learners (ELLs), as the two languages share an estimated 10,000-15,000 cognates (Nash, 1997). It was hypothesized that: 1) participants would perform better on cognate pairs than on non-cognate pairs on an expressive picture-naming test administered in both languages and that 2) accuracy on this measure would vary across items. Method: As part of a larger study, 44 Spanish ELLs in middle childhood (26 female, mean age = 10.10 years) were recruited from various regions of Southwestern Ontario. To obtain a measure of Spanish (L1) and English (L2) expressive vocabulary, participants were administered a modified version of the EOWPVT-SBE (Brownell, 2000) on two separate days. Results: Proportion scores were used in order to obtain a cognate score (total number of correct cognate pairs / total number of administered cognate pairs) and a non-cognate score (total number of correct non-cognate pairs / total number of administered non-cognate pairs) for each participant. A paired samples t-test revealed significant results in that participants were more likely to correctly name a picture in English AND in Spanish when the target words were cognates (i.e. "dentist" and "dentista") than when they were non-cognates (i.e. "compass" and "brujula") (t = 8.79, p < 0.001). Further analyses will be conducted in order to explore differences in response to particular items. Conclusion: The results serve as evidence for cross-linguistic transfer of vocabulary items. Implications for instruction of ELLs will be discussed.
Gracia Jiménez-Fernández (University of Granada)Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma (University of Jaén); Sylvia Defior (University of Granada) - Prosodic abilities of children with developmental dyslexia
Purpose: The relationships between phonological processing and reading difficulties have been studied extensively with phonological awareness, verbal memory or rapid naming tasks. However, the role of other important phonological processing aspects, as prosody, has been less studied. The aim of the present study is to analyze phonological abilities, mainly prosodic, in Spanish children with dyslexia. Method: A group of 31 children with dyslexia was compared to a group of 31 typical developing children who were matched on intelligence (IQ=90-110) and age (7-8 years). The two groups were assessed with a phonemic awareness task, several prosodic tasks (linguistic and non-linguistic), and two tasks of reading comprehension and use of punctuation marks. Linguistic prosodic tasks assessed word and pseudoword rhythm sensitivity, as participants were required to indicate the stressed syllable's position. The non-linguistic prosodic task consisted of reproducing a sequence of beats of increasing difficulty. Results: The dyslexia group showed significant lower scores on all prosodic tasks compared to the typical developing children. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) showed that the linguistic rhythm sensitivity effect was mediated by phonemic awareness and non-linguistic rhythm. On the other hand, significant differences between the two groups were found in the comprehension and punctuation mark tasks, even when phonemic awareness and non-linguistic rhythm were used as covariates. Conclusions: These results suggest that prosodic processing plays a critical role in reading difficulties. Both theoretical and practical implications for dyslexia intervention are discussed.
Evelyn Johnson (Boise State University);Cristianne Lane; Blanche Podhajski; Mary-Jo Surges-Prokop; Jane Nathan - Promoting Early Literacy through the Professional Development of Head Start Teachers
This study examined the effect of the BUILDING BLOCKS FOR LITERACY ® program on the emergent literacy skills of children in Head Start programs. Building Blocks for Literacy ® consists of training supported by mentoring to teach early childcare providers how to design and implement activities that promote the development of early literacy skills. A previous investigation by Podhajski and Nathan (2005) found positive effects of the program on the preliteracy skills of children in Vermont served by early childcare providers. The current study extended their work by replicating the training for Head Start teachers (n = 27) in another state. Teachers were divided into three groups. One group received the training and live mentoring; a second group received training and distance mentoring; and a third group of teachers served as controls. Results indicate that children (n = 97) served by teachers who had received the training (n = 18) made higher gains on a measure of early literacy skills (Get Ready to Read!) than those children (n = 36) served by control teachers. Gains made by children in the treatment groups were consistent for teachers who received either live or distance mentoring (F (2, 130) = 3.841, p < .024). Of greater practical importance, only 2% of children in the treatment group remained at-risk at post-test whereas 28% of control group children remained at-risk. Implications for practice are discussed.
Holly Joseph (Oxford Brookes University); Kate Nation; Simon Liversedge; Elizabeth Wonnacott - Children's resolution of anaphora during reading: Semantic typicality and distance effects
Purpose It is well-documented that adults fixate longer on an anaphor (e.g. instrument) when its antecedent is an atypical (e.g. guitar) rather than a typical (e.g. cymbal) exemplar of its semantic category, and this effect is magnified when the anaphor occurs many words downstream of the antecedent (Duffy & Rayner, 1990). However, much less is known about how children process these aspects of discourse processing. Method The current study monitored the eye movements of 24 adults and 54 children (aged 7-8 and 10-11 years) as they read short paragraphs in which (i) the semantic typicality of an antecedent and (ii) its distance in relation to the anaphor, were orthogonally manipulated. Results We saw the following differences between children and adults: (1) Adults showed immediate effects of typicality, but children showed delayed effects (i.e. the two words to the right of the anaphor) (2) Adults showed typicality effects in both distance conditions, but the effects were stronger in the far condition (in line with existing literature). In contrast, children showed typicality effects only in the near condition. Conclusions These results show that while both adults and children are sensitive to semantic typicality and distance during reading, these effects are significantly delayed in children relative to adults. Furthermore, children appear not to link the anaphor and its antecedent when they are far apart in a text, perhaps because this places too many processing demands on them. These results are discussed in relation to working memory, reading comprehension and inference-making.
Kathleen Jubenville (); Monique Sénéchal - Incidental orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition and spelling
Purpose. Our goals were to determine: (1) whether incidental exposure to orthography during oral vocabulary learning could facilitate children's acquisition of spoken words, and (2) whether the consistency of speech-to-spelling mappings would moderate orthographic facilitation effects on vocabulary and spelling. Method. 63 French Grade 3 children learned pairings between spoken nonwords and novel picture referents in one of three conditions: (a) incidental exposure to consistent orthography; (b) incidental exposure to inconsistent orthography; and (c) absence of orthography. The nonwords were the same for the consistent-orthography and no-orthography conditions, but the nonwords had a silent-consonant ending in the inconsistent condition. All nonwords had the same number of syllables, phonemes, and letters. Posttesting a day later assessed children's spoken vocabulary and spelling. Gender and reading ability were controlled by design; relevant demographics were controlled in analyses. Results. Children exposed to orthography learned spoken words more quickly than children who were not exposed to orthography, however, the facilitation effect disappeared by the end of training. One day later, there was no difference across conditions in vocabulary recall. The effect of spelling consistency was limited to children's spelling. That is, children exposed incidentally to consistent orthography spelled words more accurately than did children exposed to inconsistent spelling. Conclusions. Findings indicate that providing orthography can increase the efficiency with which literate children "anchor" phonological representations in memory. It also permits the implicit acquisition of word-specific orthographic representations, increasing the richness of lexical contents. The quality of these contents, however, may depend upon consistency.
Laura Justice (The Ohio State University ); Language and Reading Research Consortium - Developing interventions to support early reading comprehension: Results from iterative design
Purpose: Developing effective means for developing young children's language comprehension, as a potential route to improving reading comprehension, is an ambitious goal. Presently, primary-grade teachers spend relatively little time explicitly promoting language comprehension. The purpose of this set of design studies was to assess implementation fidelity and feasibility for language-focused intervention as trialed in pre-kindergarten through third-grade classrooms. Method: Two teaching trials, each lasting either two or six weeks' duration, were conducted over a one-year period (spring and fall of 2011). The trials were designed to assess fidelity and feasibility of teacher implementation of language-focused instruction in their classrooms; instruction was focused on promoting children's skills in both lower- and higher-level language skills. Data collected included classroom observations, teacher surveys, and guided interviews. Results and Conclusions: Results are presently being analyzed with respect to implementation fidelity and feasibility. Survey data from the spring of 2011 teaching trial, implemented in 16 preK to grade 2 classrooms, indicate that teachers provided average ratings with respect to feasibility on surveys conducted after each lesson: teachers strongly endorsed the focus of the lessons (building children's language skills) but viewed lessons as too long. Data from both teaching trials are currently being integrated to arrive at revised units and all data will be fully analyzed by the time of the SSSR meeting.
Laura Justice (Ohio State University); Jessica Logan - Improving children's contact with print during storybook reading: Impacts on children with language disabilities
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to replicate prior research investigating the impacts of implementing a print-referencing style of storybook reading in early childhood classrooms. A print-referencing style of reading involves adult use of systematic behaviors (e.g., pointing to print, making comments about print) to increase children's contact with print, and it has positive impacts on children's reading development. In this study, we examined intervention impacts for preschool-aged children with language disabilities who were participating in early childhood special education. Method: A multi-site randomized controlled trial design was used. Here, we present data from 140 preschoolers with language disabilities whose teachers implemented a 30-week storybook reading program involving their business as usual reading style (n = 70) and whose teachers implemented a 3-week storybook reading program in which they systematically sought to increase children's contact with print through verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Children completed pre- and post-tests of print knowledge across multiple dimensions (print awareness, alphabet knowledge, emergent writing). Results: Results suggest that children with language disabilities whose teachers used a print-referencing reading style had higher alphabet knowledge (d = 0.2) and emergent writing (d = 0.3) than children whose teachers read in their typical way. This is one of the first systematic evaluations of an early-literacy intervention approach used in early childhood special education classrooms, and thus it is difficult to contexualize the magnitude of these impacts. Consideration will be given to examining moderators of this intervention, including whether there were some children who seemed to particularly benefit.
Leonard Katz (Haskins Laboratories) - Adult poor readers do not have poor phonological lexical quality
Purpose: To test the hypothesis that adult poor readers have poor phonological lexical representations. Method: Each of 200 American college students (selected to over-represent very poor readers) received 7 hours of testing which included standardized tests of reading, vocabulary, phonology, rapid naming, IQ, ADHD, eyesight/hearing, memory, and several assessments of speech perception and production, including McGurk and artificial language learning Results: Consistent with the work of Ramus and his associates, there were no or only weak relationships between reading ability (decoding, sight word, fluency, comprehension) and measures of speech production/perception. In marked contrast, reading ability was strongly related to phonological awareness. Conclusions: Why don't poor reading adults' have clearly deficient phonological representations? Perhaps, even as children, their phonological representations were adequate and their poor reading was largely the result of the lack of phonological awareness, a problem that would hinder their acquisition of decoding skills. On the other hand, poor readers may, in fact, have had low lexical quality when learning to read as children; this would also affect phonological awareness. If the latter is the case, the quality of the phonological lexicon may improve from its low level after many years of (the normal) massive repeated exposure to spoken words. However, their reading could still remain hampered (manifest by slow and inadequate decoding) by their initial failure to develop appropriate decoding skills.
Devin Kearns ()Jennifer K. Gilbert; Donald L. Compton; Douglas Fuchs; Lynn S. Fuchs - Frequency and consistency effects in the word processing skills among different types of developing readers
Purpose - According to the connectionist account (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), children's ability to read words in isolation should moderated by frequency and the consistency of sublexical units (Waters, Seidenberg, and Bruck, 1984). Frequency and consistency should also interact, such that consistency predicts accuracy only for low frequency words (e.g., Yap & Balota, 2009) because readers use sublexical processes to read these words. It remains unclear whether students with early-emerging reading difficulty (EERD) and late-emerging reading difficulty (LERD) exhibit the same pattern of frequency, consistency, and frequency x consistency effects as students with typical achievement (TA). We answer these questions: (1) Do frequency and consistency effects function similarly across EERD, LERD, and TA students? (2) What other word and person factors predict variance in reading skill? Method - Participants were 150 fifth-grade students, including students with EERD, LERD, and TA. Exception word reading was assessed with the 50-item Adams and Huggins (1985) list. Participants were also administered tests of orthographic awareness, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, reading fluency, and vocabulary knowledge; their teachers completed surveys of attention. Words were coded for frequency, feedforward rime consistency, imageability, orthographic neighborhood size, phonological neighborhood density, and position of irregularity. Research aims were addressed using a logistic, crossed-random effects model in which persons and items were considered random. Results & Conclusions - We conclude that both person characteristics and word features affect the probability of correct exception word reading. And, we correctly predicted that word frequency, feedforward consistency, and their interaction explained variance in children's representations. Differences in effects among groups will be discussed.
Janice M. Keenan (University of Denver); Chelsea Meenan; Anh Hua - Defining Poor Comprehenders
Purpose: Studies of poor comprehenders (PCs) vary in the criteria and tests used to define poor comprehension. The purpose of this study is to compare some of these methods to determine the extent to which they identify the same individuals in order to see if having a comprehension deficit depends on the method of identification. Method: 1319 children, ages 8 - 18, took: 4 reading comprehension (RC) tests, 3 listening comprehension (LC tests), 2 single word and 2 nonword reading tests. Individuals in the low tail of each comprehension test were compared to determine consistency of identification. Poor comprehenders with specific comprehension deficits - poor RC discrepant with either word or nonword reading - were also defined. Results: Odds of 2 tests identifying the same PCs ranged from 8% - 58%, and in general were quite low. Depending on selection test, cases of specific PC ranged from 2 - 14% of sample. Removing decoding difficulties from poor comprehension using a discrepancy with word reading identified only 10 - 35% of the same cases identified by low LC, whereas using discrepancy with nonword decoding resulted in higher overlaps (45 - 57%). This difference is because when a discrepancy with word reading is used, those with poor vocabulary get removed from being poor PCs. Conclusion: Our findings underscore the complexity of comprehension and the task of defining poor comprehenders. Inconsistencies across tests present a challenge for diagnosis and research. They also show that poor comprehenders are not always poor in all the component skills of comprehension.
Ben Kelcey (University of Cincinnati); Joanne Carlisle - Patterns of Instruction in Early Reading Lessons
Purpose. Many studies of reading instruction that examine the contribution of instructional features (e.g., modeling) to students' reading achievement report small or non-significant effects. We explore a theoretical framework that uses lesson as the unit within which patterns of instructional features provide temporal and conceptual coherence to instructional events. We examine three premises: 1) patterns of instructional features more fully describe critical dimensions of effective instruction than isolated features; 2) patterns vary by literacy area (i.e., vocabulary, reading comprehension, and guided practice); and 3) contextual variables (characteristics of teachers, students, and lessons) are associated with patterns of instructional features. Method. We observed 4 literacy blocks in 87 second and third grade classrooms and coded key aspects (e.g., materials). Other data were student and teacher characteristics. Analysis focuses on two dimensions of instructional features: teachers' directed instruction (e.g., modeling) and teachers' structure for student learning (e.g., providing lesson wrap-up). Results. Multilevel two parameter IRT models suggested that instructional patterns were more faithful to the observed data than simple counts and that these patterns of instruction varied by literacy area. Analysis of the variance components show that lesson characteristics accounted for more of the variance than teacher characteristics. Aggregated student characteristics (e.g., poverty) varied in their effects. Conclusions. Results provide support for the premises of the theoretical framework and analytic procedures. Patterns of instruction did a better job of accounting for variance in reading lessons than individual features. These and other results suggest a promising new direction for study of reading instruction.
Nenagh Kemp (School of Psychology, University of Tasmania); Hollie Blackley; Imogen Cure; Rebecca Treiman; Brett Kessler - Spelling pseudowords: The effects of task instructions and wordlikeness
Purpose: Researchers often test spellers' sensitivity to spelling patterns by asking them to spell pseudowords. Because words from different sources vary in their spelling patterns, we hypothesized that participants' spelling of targeted sounds might vary depending on how strongly context suggests typical English provenance. We tested two types of context: experiment instructions and the phonotactic typicality of nontargeted parts of words. Method: In Study 1, 151 adults and children wrote 60 pseudowords: 20 presented as real English words, 20 as made-up words, and 20 as monster names. In Study 2, 84 adults and children wrote 64 pseudowords, half with typical clusters like /sp/ and half with infrequent clusters like /θp/ (thp). We counted how often targeted sounds were spelled with their most common representation in each condition. Results: Study 1 presentation conditions made no significant difference to adults' or children's spelling of the target sounds. In Study 2, adults, but not children, used less common spellings, such as <ph> for /f/, 7% more often in pseudowords that contained less typically English clusters, such as /θp/, in other parts of the word. Conclusions: We found no evidence that commonly used task instructions make much difference in how participants spell pseudowords, even if stimuli were presented as fabrications. However, adults spelled targeted sounds differently depending on how typically English the rest of the word was. This has implications for the construction of pseudowords in experiments and for our understanding of contextual effects in spelling.
Panayiota Kendeou (University of Minnesota);Timothy C. Papadopoulos; Christiana Ktisti; Argyro Fella - Precocious Readers: A Cognitive or a Linguistic Advantage?
Purpose This study examined the development of precocious readers from Kindergarten to Grade 2. Method A sample of 29 precocious readers was identified in a larger sample of 320 Kindergarteners. This sample was matched on verbal and non-verbal ability, SES, and gender with a control group of typical readers. All children were administered a battery of cognitive and linguistic measures, including planning, attention, cognitive processing, short-term memory, RAN, phonological skills, and letter identification from Kindergarten through Grade 2. Orthographic processing and reading comprehension also were administered in Grades 1 and 2. Results A series of mixed-model ANOVA with age as a within-subjects factor (age x 3) and group as between-subjects factor (group x 2) were conducted for each of the linguistic and cognitive measures. The analyses showed that precocious readers continued to have superior performance on phonological skills and RAN across development, whereas their early advantage in letter identification and attention disappeared by Grade 2. There were no group differences in short-term memory, planning, cognitive processing, orthographic processing, and WJPC. Precocious readers, however, outperformed typical readers on the CBM-Maze test. Conclusions The present findings expand our understanding of reading precocity by showing that even though precocious readers differ from typical readers with respect to rate of development they do not have a different cognitive profile; they have a different linguistic profile. In turn, the advantage in reading comprehension is apparent only when the task poses processing demands on those linguistic skills that differentiate them from typical readers.
Shawn Kent (Florida State University/ Florida Center for Reading Research) ;Young-Suk Kim; Stephanie Al Otaiba; Jeanne Wanzek - Kindergarten predictors of first grade writing quality
Purpose: At present, relatively few studies have examined component skills of early writing development at the earliest grades, kindergarten and first grade. This study specifically explored the role of reading, transcription skills, vocabulary, and attention, as measured in kindergarten, on the quality of writing in first grade. Several different models that included these potential component skills were investigated. Method: We utilized extant data collected from a previous large scale research study. Students were assessed on a variety of literacy, attention and socio-emotional measures in both kindergarten and first grade. The sample of 265 students was diverse, containing 70% students of minority backgrounds and nearly two-thirds of low SES. To address the research questions, structural equation modeling was used to analyze the relationships between kindergarten predictor variables and first grade writing quality using both latent and observed variables. Results: Preliminary results from SEM revealed that transcription and attention were positively and uniquely related to first grade writing quality after accounting for reading and vocabulary. Reading and transcription however, were highly correlated and results suggest that the effect of reading in kindergarten on first grade writing may operate through transcription skills such as spelling and letter writing fluency. Conclusions: Findings provide initial evidence for the role of early transcription and attention skills in the development of early writing. We will conduct further analyses to examine these component skills relationships to writing at the end of kindergarten in order to compare with these longitudinal results. All results are discussed from a developmental perspective.
Yvette Kezalis (); Emma Halpin; Meredith McKague - Inhibitory and facilitatory masked-priming effects as an index of lexical-quality
Purpose: A masked-primed lexical decision experiment with skilled readers (N=173) tested the Lexical Quality Hypothesis that high-quality lexical representations enable competition from visually-similar words to be inhibited more efficiently than low-quality lexical representations. Method: High- and low-lexical-quality groups were formed from the upper and lower 25th percentiles of a principal component score derived from spelling-to-dictation accuracy and word/nonword discrimination. For lexical decision, 40 high-frequency and 40 low-frequency target words were preceded by four types of masked-prime; a higher-frequency-neighbour (HFN) prime (call-CALM); an unambiguous-partial-word prime, consistent with only the target word (c#lm-CALM); an ambiguous-partial-word prime, consistent with the target and its higher-frequency-neighbour (cal#-CALM); an all-letters-different-baseline prime (silk-CALM). All target-words were four or five letters in length and were drawn from high-density orthographic neighbourhoods. Results: Inhibitory HFN-priming was observed only in the high-lexical-quality group, and was found to be specific to low-frequency, five-letter target words. In contrast, the groups showed similar levels of facilitatory priming from partial-word primes and a similar "ambiguity-effect", with unambiguous partial-primes producing significantly more facilitation than ambiguous partial-primes. Like the HFN-priming effect, the ambiguity-effect interacted with both the length and frequency of target words. Conclusions: The finding that masked higher-frequency-neighbour primes only inhibited lexical decision response times for the high lexical-quality group is consistent with the view that high-quality lexical representations enable the rapid suppression of competition from neighbouring words. Furthermore, the specificity of this effect to low-frequency, five-letter words supports the view that lexical-quality also varies between words within an individual reader's lexicon.
Michael Kieffer (New York University)Rose K. Vukovic - Growth in reading-related skills of language minority learners and their classmates with and without reading difficulties
Purpose: This study investigated growth in reading-related skills between Grade 1 and 4 for Spanish-speaking language minority (LM) learners and their native English-speaking classmates from similarly low socioeconomic backgrounds. In particular, growth trajectories in reading-related skills were compared by language background and by whether students encountered reading difficulties in Grade 4. Method: 148 participants (73 Spanish-speaking LM learners, 65 native English) were assessed annually between Grade 1 and Grade 4 on standardized English measures of vocabulary, oral comprehension, phonological awareness, letter-word identification, and working memory. In Grade 4, students were also assessed in reading comprehension and classified as demonstrating specific reading comprehension difficulties or word reading difficulties. Results: Overall, LM learners demonstrated consistent weaknesses in language comprehension and working memory, combined with consistent strengths in phonological awareness and letter-word identification. Among those with word reading difficulties in Grade 4, native English speakers' difficulties were more specific to phonological awareness, whereas LM learners' difficulties were associated with weaknesses in both phonological awareness and language comprehension. Among those with specific reading comprehension difficulties, both language groups demonstrated consistently limited oral language comprehension. Both types of difficulties in both groups were also associated with consistent working memory weaknesses. Conclusions: Findings indicate both similarities and differences between LM learners and their native English-speaking classmates in sources of reading difficulties. Although phonological awareness and working memory appear to play similar roles for LM learners and their peers, neither skill explains LM learners' disproportionate difficulties. Oral language weaknesses may be particularly important to these learners' difficulties.
David Kilpatrick (State University of New York, College at Cortland) - How much can an enhanced Simple View of Reading model explain? An examination with typical second and fifth graders
Purpose The Simple View of Reading (SVR) proposes that reading comprehension (RC) is the product of oral language comprehension (LC) and word level decoding (D). The original model says decoding is based on cipher knowledge and word specific knowledge. Given the extensive research on the correlates of reading, this paper examines whether the SVR can be refined in such a way that it becomes a sufficiently comprehensive and practical model to inform our understanding of the reading process and guide instructional practices and assessments. Method Second and fifth graders were administered a battery of tests to assess each component of a refined SVR model. Reading comprehension, LC and related skills (vocabulary, background knowledge, attention), and D and related skills (phonic recoding, exception word reading, phonemic awareness, blending, rapid automatized naming, and working memory) were assessed. Results For second graders, regression analyses demonstrate that 60% of the variance in LC and 73% of the variance in D could be accounted for with the model factors. When all model factors were combined, an amazing 83% of the variance in RC was accounted for (all estimates based on Adjusted R-Square in SPSS). However, while the model accounted for 76% of D with fifth graders, it did poorly for RC and LC relative to second grade results. Conclusions When refined based upon known cognitive, linguistic, and academic factors, it appears that for typical second graders, the proposed SVR model is capable of delineating the factors necessary for skilled reading comprehension.
James Kim (Harvard University)James Kim, Thomas White, Helen Kingston, Lisa Foster - Improving Project READS: Content vs. Strategy- and Fluency-Oriented Comprehension Scaffolding
Purpose. Project READS is a summer reading program with demonstrated effectiveness (Kim, 2006; Kim and White, 2008). It provides books matched to students' reading levels and interests and comprehension scaffolding through lessons at the end of the school year. The purpose of this study was to compare two approaches to comprehension instruction in these end-of-year lessons; 1) content-oriented and 2) strategy- and fluency-oriented. Method. In spring 2011, 19 schools were matched on the basis of mean reading scores (two small schools were treated as a member of one pair) and randomly assigned to one of the two lesson type conditions. In both conditions, Grade 3 children received 6 teacher-directed lessons and 10 matched books over the summer months. In the content-oriented condition, teachers used a story impression activity to help children understand features of narrative text, and used a KWL activity to help children understand features of expository text. In the strategy- and fluency-oriented condition, teachers taught comprehension strategies (e.g., asking questions) and provided oral reading fluency practice. Results. We used a school-level random effects model to estimate treatment effects on a standardized test of reading comprehension. We found that students who received content-oriented lessons focused on features of text scored significantly higher on the reading comprehension posttest (d = .10) than students who received strategy- and fluency-oriented lessons. There was no difference between lesson conditions in the amount of reading during the summer. Conclusions. The results indicate that READS could be made more effective by incorporating content-oriented comprehension lessons.
Young-Suk Kim (Busan National University of Education)Chea HyungPark - Relations among listening comprehension, list reading fluency, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension in Korean
Purpose: This study examined (1) whether listening comprehension is uniquely related to oral reading fluency over and above list reading fluency; (2) whether oral reading fluency is uniquely related to reading comprehension over and above list reading fluency and listening comprehension; and (3) whether reading comprehension is uniquely related to oral reading fluency after accounting for list reading fluency and listening comprehension (see Jenkins et al., 2003). Participants: 180 first grade students in South Korea Measures: The following were developed and assessed in Korean. Three passages of oral reading fluency; three list reading fluency, in which words from the oral reading fluency tasks were randomly ordered in a list format; 3 reading comprehension tasks; and 2 listening comprehension tasks. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used. RQ 1: listening comprehension was uniquely related to oral reading fluency after accounting for list reading fluency. RQ 2: Oral reading fluency was not uniquely related to reading comprehension after accounting for list reading fluency and listening comprehension. RQ 3: Reading comprehension was not uniquely related to oral reading fluency after accounting for list reading fluency and listening comprehension. Conclusions: The findings for the first research question support the hypothesis by several researchers (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001; Samuels, 2007). The findings for research questions 2 & 3 are discrepant from previous studies with English-speaking children (Kim, Wagner, & Foster, 2011; Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, in review; Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, in preparation). Longitudinal data are needed for further understanding.
John Kirby (Queen's University, Canada); Miao Li - Unexpected poor comprehenders among adolescent ESL students
Purpose The purposes of this study are (a) to explore the characteristics of reading comprehension difficulties among Chinese students learning English as a second language and (b) to test the poor comprehenders framework (Cain, et al., 2004) in Chinese ESL poor comprehenders. Method The participants were 246 Grade 8 students in an English immersion program in China. Measures included the Gates-MacGinitie (reading comprehension), age, Raven's Matrices, Test of Word Reading Efficiency (word reading), several vocabulary breadth and depth tests (Gates-MacGinitie, word definitions, multiple meanings, and morphological awareness), inference, strategy, listening comprehension (Woodcock), and summary writing. Results Regression was employed to identify three groups: unexpected good comprehenders (UGC), expected average comprehenders (EAC), and unexpected poor comprehenders (UPC) (Tong, et al., 2011; White & Kirby, 2008). Groups differed in vocabulary depth, breadth, and higher level processes. Vocabulary breadth and multiple meanings distinguished between the UPC and EAC groups. Inference, strategy, listening comprehension, and morphological awareness distinguished between the EAC and UGC. Conclusion Among Chinese ESL students, unexpected poor comprehenders have difficulties with both vocabulary breadth and depth. This is consistent with Lesaux and Kieffer's (2010) finding that vocabulary was the main source of reading comprehension difficulties in ESL students in the US. Higher level processes distinguish between average and unexpected good comprehenders, suggesting that the advantage of the latter group is primarily due to discourse comprehension and strategic processes, and only possible with high language proficiency. Discussion will focus on the implications of these results for second language education.
Yu-Min Ku (National Central University, Taiwan); Yu-Jun Chen; Wan-Chen Chang; Chien-Hui Lin; Chien-che Hsu - Investigating the development of oral and written language comprehension among students from preschool through second grade
Purpose The importance of oral and written language comprehension has been widely recognized in the development of children's early literacy skills, and yet the complex interaction between the development of oral and written language comprehension remain unknown. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the development of oral and written language comprehension among students from preschool through second grade. Method Participants were 128 students recruited from preschool, kindergarten, first grade, and second grade classes in a public elementary school in Taiwan. There were a series of tasks developed to collect their oral and written language comprehension abilities. Surveys were also administered to the children's teachers and parents in order to gain more details information about how young children acquire their oral and writing language comprehension. Results The preliminary results of the study showed that (1) young children's oral and written language comprehension appears to increase with age, especially in expressive aspects; and (2) significant relationships were found between children's vocabulary knowledge (measured by PPVT) and their receptive and expressive oral language abilities. Conclusions Young children gradually develop their oral and written language comprehension with age, especially when they enter elementary school. Furthermore, children's development of oral language ability reached a more advanced level than their written language; however, their growth in expressive aspect is relatively slower than receptive aspect.
Victor Kuperman (McMaster University); Victor Kuperman; Julie Van Dyke; Regina Henry - The visuo-oculomotor component of RAN is a strong predictor of eye-movements in reading
Purpose: While Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks are excellent predictors of reading comprehension, the causes of this correlation are debated. We argue that the cause is the similarity between the eye-movement patterns required both for a good performance in the RAN tasks and for efficient text reading (Jones et al., 2008, 2010). Method: 30 undergraduate students read texts for comprehension and participated in a battery of psychometric and verbal skill tests; and tests of serial non-linguistic processing (serial finger tapping task). The critical tests were (a) the standard naming of digits and letters; (b) visual inspection of grids of digits and letters without naming; and (c) visual inspection of grids with asterisks without naming. Eye-movements were recorded during all these tests (and during text reading): this revealed behavioural patterns observed during the standard RAN (a); in the absence of naming (b) and in the absence of lexical access and naming (c). Results: Eye-movements observed in Test (c) were the strongest predictors of the eye-movements observed in text reading, even though the former test required no lexical access, or activation of phonological codes. Unique variance in the eye-movements during reading was also explained by individual performance in the serial finger tapping task. Conclusions: The known strong effect of RAN on reading comprehension may be due to a largely overlooked serial visuo-oculomotor component inherent in both tasks: namely, the ability to repeatedly engage and disengage attention as the eyes move through the text.
Marie Lallier (Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, Spain); Guillaume Thierry; Manuel Carreiras; Marie-Josèphe Tainturier - Impact of Cross-linguistic Interactions on Reading and Visual Attention Span (VAS) skills: Evidence in Early Bilingual Adults
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to clarify whether learning to read in a transparent language (Welsh) in parallel to an opaque language (English) will modify VAS skills as compared to learning in an opaque orthography only. Method: In Study-1, electrophysiological recordings were taken from 16 Welsh-English and 16 English monolinguals skilled readers whilst performing a n-back task measuring their VA Span abilities (detecting whether a letter was present in a previous consonant string). In Study-2, a full neuropsychological screening battery in English was administered which includes the assessment of reading/spelling (pseudo-words and irregular words), phonological processing and VAS (global, sequential and partial report tasks) to 15 Welsh-English bilingual dyslexic, 15 English monolingual dyslexic and 30 skilled readers (15 bilinguals and 15 monolinguals). Results: Results of Study-1 showed that the number of letters that can be processed simultaneously is reduced in Welsh-English bilinguals as compared to English monolinguals. Results of Study-2 showed that Welsh-English bilingual dyslexics exhibit a smaller decoding deficit in English as compared to English monolingual dyslexics but a stronger VAS deficit. Conclusion: Overall, the results suggest that learning to read in a transparent orthography in parallel to an opaque language boosts decoding strategies but reduces the number of visual distinct elements that can be processed simultaneously (VAS). Such results have strong implications for the diagnosis and remediation programs of bilingual dyslexic individuals, since dyslexia in bilinguals expresses differently than in monolinguals, even though the language of assessment is similar.
Katie Lam (OISE/University of Toronto)Kathleen Hipfner-Boucher; Xi Chen - The cross-language role of English syntactic awareness in French reading comprehension among French Immersion students
Purpose This study examined the cross-language relation of English syntactic awareness to French reading comprehension in grade one children enrolled in a Canadian French Immersion program. Method Participants were 81 children, tested in the spring of grade one. Children received formal instruction entirely in French at school. All were non-native speakers of French, with average English vocabulary and word reading ability. To measure syntactic awareness, grammatical error correction tasks were administered in French and English. Reading comprehension was examined in French. Additionally, children completed a range of linguistic and cognitive measures in both French and English, including phonological and morphological awareness, vocabulary and word reading. A non-verbal reasoning task (MAT) was administered to assess general reasoning ability. Results To predict French reading comprehension, MAT was entered in the first step of a hierarchical linear regression, followed by English phonological awareness, French vocabulary, French word reading, French morphological awareness, and French and English syntactic awareness in successive steps. English syntactic awareness was found to uniquely predict French reading comprehension, over and above the effects of all other variables. Conclusion Our results point to the significant role syntactic awareness plays in reading comprehension among beginning readers. In particular, we demonstrated cross-language transfer of English syntactic awareness to French reading comprehension among non-native French speakers. The issue of whether bilingualism and/or the shared properties of the sentence structure between the two languages have facilitated the transfer is considered. This study contributes to ongoing discussions about general cognitive mechanisms that operate across languages to facilitate biliteracy development.
Karin Landerl (University of Graz); Anne Rau; Kristina Moll - Development of eye-movement patterns during word and nonword reading in English and German
Purpose: To investigate similarities and differences in the development of eye-movement patterns during reading in a consistent and an inconsistent alphabetic orthography. The focus was on the development of standard effects of word reading (lexicality, frequency, and length). Method: Participants were English and German readers of different age groups (8-, 9-, and 10-year olds and young adults). Target items with experimentally controlled lexicality (words vs. nonwords), word frequency (high vs. low) and length (3 - 6 letters vs. 7 - 10 letters) were embedded in a sentence reading paradigm in order to mimic a natural reading situation. Both, target items and sentence frames were specifically selected to be highly similar in the two languages. Eye movements were recorded with an EyeLink 1000 (SR-Research). Results: Among the German readers, the lexicality effect was stronger in older, more proficient than in younger, less proficient readers and both effects of frequency and length were strongest in the youngest group of readers and progressively decreased with increasing reading proficiency. The English data are currently under analysis. Conclusions: Eye-tracking measures provide further empirical support for stronger reliance on nonlexical reading in young readers acquiring a consistent orthography with an increase of the relative importance of lexical word recognition with increasing reading experience. English readers on the other hand need to acquire lexical and nonlexical processes simultaneously.
Nicole Landi (Haksins Labs)Nicole Landi;Stephen Frost;W. Einar Mencl; Jonathan Preston;Leslie Jacobsen; Maria Lee;Carolyn Yrigollen;Kenneth R. Pugh & Elena L. Grigorenko - COMT Val/Met polymorphism is associated with reading skill and related patterns of functional neural activation.
Purpose: The purpose of the current work was to investigate the relationship between variation in the COMT gene and reading skill. We chose to investigate COMT because it is involved in dopamine regulation and related aspects of higher order cognition: Specifically, COMT contains a single nucleotide polymorphism at codon 158, known as rs4680, which results in a substitution of Methionine (Met) for Valine (Val) - this substitution is associated with better performance on prefrontal and metacognitive tasks. We hypothesized that variation in COMT genotype may be important for developing readers learning to read. Method: A subset of data from a larger longitudinal study of reading in young children was used for the current report. Children participated in a picture word match task while being scanned (fMRI task), a battery of reading assessments and provided a DNA sample. Individuals were grouped based on their COMT genotype at into 1) Met carriers and non-Met carriers, and these two groups were compared on behavioral performance and patterns of functional neural activation. Results: Met carriers showed significantly better performance on a number of measures of reading and reading related skills and showed patterns of neural activity consistent with better readers. These results are consistent with literature on working memory and other metacognitive tasks that show better performance for Met carriers. Conclusions: We argue that this polymorphism has broad cognitive effects and may mediate (likely through frontal lobe function) reading skill and the impact of genes that are strongly linked to reading skill (candidate RD/reading genes).
Linda Larsen (Macquarie University); Saskia Kohnen; Lyndsey Nickels; Genevieve McArthur - Investigating non-lexical reading processes in young children: How do parsing ability and GPC knowledge relate?
Purpose: Deficits in decoding are one of the most common features of developmental dyslexia. Decoding involves three operations to occur in serial order (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001): (1) parsing the word into its constituent graphemes (e.g., for the printed word CHEAP, ch-ea-p), (2) converting these graphemes to their corresponding phonemes (tch-ee-p), and (3) blending these phonemes to form the spoken word ('cheap'). The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between two of these processes, namely, parsing and grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC knowledge), as this relationship is relatively unexplored. Method: A series of single-case studies were carried out with children whose non-lexical reading was below that expected for their age despite having age-appropriate lexical reading (i.e., a phonological dyslexia reading profile). Each child's grapheme-phoneme knowledge was first assessed and two sets of multi-letter graphemes selected: those that they consistently provided the phoneme for 'known' and those that they did not 'unknown'. Tasks were then devised to examine whether reading and parsing ability varied across these sets of graphemes. Results: Preliminary results show that accurate sounding out of multi-letter graphemes is not necessarily associated with accurate parsing of these graphemes. Also, accurate sounding out of multi-letter graphemes is not necessarily associated with correct reading of nonwords containing these graphemes. Conclusion: The results of this study point to a complex relationship between parsing and grapheme-phoneme conversion that does not readily fit with the serial operations of decoding as proposed in dual-route models of reading (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001).
Kristen Lauer (U.S. Department of Education)Elizabeth Albro - Funding opportunities at the National Center for Education Research and National Center for Special Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences
The National Center for Education Research and National Center for Special Education Research in the Institute of Education Sciences support rigorous research that contributes to the solution of significant education problems in the United States. Both Centers engage in research activities that will result in improved outcomes for all children and youth, including children and youth with disabilities, and in increased access to and opportunity for postsecondary education. The goal of the research programs is to provide scientific evidence of what works, for whom, why, and under what conditions. Improving literacy is an important goal for both Centers. The Centers administer literacy-related research grant programs across the developmental range from birth to adulthood. The programs include research to build on the theoretical and empirical evidence base in literacy, to understand advances that have been gained through the cognitive sciences and applying them to education practice, to develop and conduct rigorous evaluations of literacy-focused interventions, and to develop and validate literacy assessments. During the interactive paper, staff from both Centers will meet with potential applicants and discuss the Centers' funding opportunities. It is important to note that organizations outside the United States are able to apply for funding; however, the research must be relevant to education in the United States.
Ruth Leavett (University of York); Hannah Nash; Maggie Snowling - Factors affecting self report of dyslexia in adults
Purpose: The accurate identification of adults with dyslexia is important in family risk studies. It is not always feasible to assess parents and questionnaires provide a time saving method of estimating risk. The Adult Reading Questionnaire (ARQ) correctly identified 67% of dyslexic adults and only a small number of normal readers self reported as dyslexic (Snowling et al, in press). Clearly, there are a number of people with literacy difficulties who do not self-report as dyslexic and others who do self-report but do not appear to have poor literacy. The aim of this study was to investigate the factors which affect self-report of dyslexia. Method: We tested 334 parents of children taking part in a longitudinal study. They completed the ARQ and tests of literacy, language and non-verbal ability. Information about socio-economic status and education level was also collected. Results: 33% of the adults tested did not self-report as dyslexic despite meeting criteria for poor literacy. This group was significantly younger, more likely to be female and of lower socio-economic status than those who did self-report. Conversely, 7% of the sample self-reported despite not having poor literacy skills. This group showed evidence of mild literacy difficulties in the context of higher general ability and they were older, more likely to be male and of higher socio-economic status. Conclusions: The likelihood of adults self-reporting as dyslexic is influenced by age, gender, and SES. It is hypothesised that this is because people's perception of their ability is affected by their peer group.
Amy Lederberg (Georgia State University)Amy R. Lederberg; Mi-Young Webb; Carol M. Connor - Understanding the Nature of Foundational Skills for Reading in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children
Purpose. The goal of the current study was to examine the structure of foundational skills of early literacy development in the current cohort of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children. Participants. 139 DHH children (M age = 65.25 months; SD = 13.6 months; range 42 - 105 months) were assessed with a battery of measures in the fall and the spring of the school year. 108 children were acquiring spoken language (some with sign). Data Analyses and Results 1. Test of a measurement model:. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) results indicated an adequate model fit (χ2 (84) = 150.471, p < .001, CFI = .968, TLI = .954, RMSEA = .075). Measures loaded on three factors: Phonological Awareness (TOPEL-PA, PAT, Letter Sound Knowledge), Reading (WJ letter-word ID, WJ Passage Comp), and Vocabulary (PPVT, EOWPT, WJ-Vocab). Factor loadings ranged from .69 to .97. Inter-correlations among the latent variables were high. 2. Structural equation modeling also suggested that associations among constructs for DHH children are similar to those found with normal hearing. At each time point, the three factors showed moderate to strong correlations. Spring reading was predicted by both fall reading and phonological awareness skills. The fit of the model was (χ2 (113) = 256.046, p < .001, CFI = .937, TLI = .915, and RMSEA = .095). Conclusion Results support the view that reading develops in a similar fashion in DHH and hearing children, despite differences in access to spoken phonology. Assessments for hearing children also seem to be valid for use with DHH children.
Julia Lee (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak); Stephanie Al Otaiba; Jessica S. Folsom; Luana Gruelich - Classification of literacy and language skills in first grade: latent profiles, class membership stability, and underlying predictors.
The present study examined the heterogeneity and prevalence of literacy and language skill patterns among 521 first graders. Within the larger study, all participants received high quality core instruction and some, who qualified, received tiered supplemental intervention. The first research question of the present study examined the heterogeneity and prevalence of latent classes that can be identified from literacy and language measures at the end of first grade. The second research question examined the covariates that predict the latent classes at the end of first grade. Specifically, latent class analysis was conducted to examine these two research questions. The third research question examined whether latent classes based on language and literacy measures change from the beginning to the end of first grade. The fourth research question examined the significant predictors that determined class membership transition and stability. Latent transition analysis was conducted to examine these last two research questions. For both data analyses, classification variables entailed the following constructs: word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, spelling, vocabulary, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension; predictor variables entailed cognitive and linguistic constructs, demographics, and intervention. Preliminary findings suggest that there is dissociation between linguistic comprehension, as represented by vocabulary, and decoding related skills for some latent classes. Results also suggest that there is a larger proportion of participants who are movers (i.e., membership transition) rather than stayers (i.e., membership stability). The implications for early identification, instruction, and intervention of literacy and language skills are discussed.
Sung Hee Lee (West Virginia University)Joseph Jenkins; Sarah Rose - Story retelling and Vocabulary Knowledge
Story retelling is one of the most common text-level vocabulary comprehension measurements because of its brevity and well-documented relationship with reading comprehension. Students should show a better story retelling performance after reading a text comprising few unknown words than a text comprising more unknown words. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether story retelling reflects a student's target word knowledge in the text because, for instance, the student may use the target words even though he/she does not fully understand the meaning of the target word. Purpose: This study is intended to investigate the validity of story retelling as a text-level vocabulary comprehension measure. Method: We created three sets of target words and three texts, each containing one set of target words. Three sets of target words had comparable difficulties and all the stories were created to be comparable by ensuring several features, such as story structure and length. The participants in this study were 24 fourth grade students. All the participants took a vocabulary definition test, a story retelling test, and TOSREC. Results: A repeated measure of ANOVA revealed that students knew more definitions from one set of target words than other two sets. However, their story retelling performances were not significantly different. There was no significant correlation between word knowledge and story retelling performances. Conclusion: Story retelling is not a valid measure to reflect text-level vocabulary comprehension or the influence of vocabulary knowledge on story comprehension. Researchers studying vocabulary and classroom teachers should be cautious in using story retelling measurements.
Erica Lembke (University of Missouri); Sarah Beyers - Curriculum-based measurement in the content areas: Examining social studies measures
Purpose: The primary purpose of this study is to further examine the validity and reliability of vocabulary-matching as an indicator of performance and progress of student learning in social studies. Method: Using a quasi-experimental design, 150 6th grade students in a Midwestern, mid-sized school district were administered vocabulary matching measures each week for 32 weeks. In addition, 20 students who were the lowest achieving in reading based on standardized test data were provided reading intervention using an evidence-based program 2 times per week for 30 minute sessions for 10 weeks. Hierarchal Linear Modeling will be used analyze the data to see if how the measures functioned to capture student growth in Social Studies. An ANOVA will be used to compare the effects of the intervention on the social studies growth of students in the treatment condition as compared to the control condition. Results: While data is still being collected at this time, results with respect to reliability, criterion validity, and growth will be presented for the social studies measures. In addition, the utility of using the measures for progress monitoring for students that are receiving intervention will be discussed. Conclusions: Little research has focused on CBM at the secondary level, especially in the content areas. With a heightened need for schools to collect data to monitor students' performance and progress, secondary teachers need tools to use to monitor student progress.
Chris Lemons (University of Pittsburgh); Naomi Zigmond; Amanda Kloo - Early-grade reading CBM for students with significant cognitive disabilities
Purpose: Limited research has been conducted to document the reading abilities of children who participate in the alternate assessment based on alternate academic achievement standards (AA-AAS). The purpose of this project was to assess the early reading skills of children with significant cognitive disabilities (SCD) and to examine relationships between early reading skill, AA-AAS performance, and disability category. Methods: Early grade reading CBM (word and passage fluency) were administered to 7,440 students in grades 3-8 and 11 who participated in the AA-AAS in one northeastern state. Results: Students who participate in the AA-AAS exhibit a range of performance on early reading CBM. However, a majority of students at each grade level fail to perform above a 2nd grade benchmark. Different patterns of performance were demonstrated across disability categories. Also, early CBM accounted for a minimal amount of variance in AA-AAS score. Conclusions: Children with SCD are currently obtaining some level of early reading skill. However, the AA-AAS may not be designed to capture this skill. Recommendations for research, assessment design, and practitioners will be discussed.
Cayne Letizia (); Joanna Uhry ; Thanos Patelis - The utilization of curriculum based measurements to predict comprehension performance in Reading First schools
Purpose This study investigated the use of curriculum based measures such as the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) in respect predicting later reading comprehension on standardized tests such as the TerraNova Exam, 2nd Edition © . This was achieved by studying the three-year implementation of the Federal Reading First Program. Method This study utilized existing archival data of a cohort of students ( N = 243) in grades 1-3 who participated in the Reading First Program for a three-year period beginning in fall 2005. Students were administered the DIBELS ORF subtest three times a year and the TerraNova Exam, 2nd Edition © , comprehension, word analysis and vocabulary subtests once a year in the spring. Descriptive statistics, linear regressions, correlational statistics, and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. A SEM methodology was used to test the hypothesis for all three research questions in terms of the theoretical relations among fluency, vocabulary skills, word analysis skills, and reading comprehension. An initial model was developed based on Chall's developmental model of reading. Results The findings of this research project revealed a statistically significant relationship between the DIBELS ORF subtest and the TerraNova Exam, 2nd Edition © , comprehension subtest for 243 children tested in grades 1-3. ORF also was found to significantly correlate to the TerraNova Exam, 2nd Edition© , word analysis and vocabulary subtests. Conclusions The findings of this study support findings of other research that highlights the correlation between ORF and norm-referenced comprehension assessments. This study further extends the findings on CBMs such as the DIBELS ORF in regard to their predictive utility on standardized comprehension assessments by determining the relationship between the ORF and the TerraNova Exam, 2nd Edition © , vocabulary and word analysis subtests.
Rosemary Lever (Carleton University); Monique Sénéchal - Composing Written Stories from Pictures
Purpose. Illustrations can provide children with a supportive channel to construct meaning from stories, and conversely, construct stories with meaning. While composing stories from wordless picture books, children process the visual information in order to plan the construction of their stories. This study assessed the role of children's online planning behaviors on the quality of their written stories. Method. 100 Grade 4 children composed stories based on wordless picture books. Observations were made during the composition task to assess online planning. Online planning is defined as the frequency with which children looked at the pictures in the book as well as the number of times they paused in thought. The compositions were analyzed for story quality, a composite measure of story grammars, the number of ideas, and the number of morphemes. To control for possible confounds, basic literacy skills (spelling and word reading) and higher-level literacy skills (i.e., reading comprehension) were also measured. Results. Fixed-order regressions indicate that the overall model accounted for 61% of the variance in children's composition quality. Importantly, online planning skills accounted for the most variance in the model (∆R2 = .38), after entering the basic level (∆R2 = .11) and higher level (∆R2 = .12) literacy skills. Conclusions. When children are asked to construct a written story using a wordless picture book, children's frequent attention to the illustrations and their thoughtful processing of this information allows them to compose better quality stories, over and above their spelling, word reading, and reading comprehension skills.
Kyle Levesque (Dalhousie University); S. Hélène Deacon - Semantics and the base morpheme frequency effect: Children's sensitivity to the morphological structure of words read in context
Purpose: Research suggests that young readers are sensitive to the morphological structures of words that they read in isolation (Deacon, Whalen, & Kirby, 2011). In an attempt to measure more authentic reading experiences, this study investigated whether children's sensitivity to morphological structure differed when words were read in context. Method: Fifty-two English-speaking students in Grades 3 and 5 were asked to read 48 morphologically derived words matched for low surface frequency. Words varied in base frequency such that half of the words contained high frequency bases (e.g., senseless) and half had low frequency bases (e.g., ceaseless). Derived words were equally divided among three reading conditions: informative sentences (high semantic), non-informative sentences (low semantic), and isolation (control). Results: Children's performance was greater for high frequency base words in all three reading conditions (ps < .05) - an indication of their sensitivity to the base morpheme when reading equally-matched rare derived words (i.e., base frequency effect). However, the extent of the difference between high and low base words differed across conditions. Specifically, a smaller 'high-low' base discrepancy emerged when low frequency base words were read in informative sentences. Performance improved significantly when low base words were read in informative sentences compared to the non-informative and isolation conditions (ps < .001). Conclusions: The base frequency effect was reduced when derived words were read in informative sentences. It appears that children's reliance on the morphological structure of words may be modulated by the semantic nature of the context in which the words are read.
Iris Levin (); Dorit Aram; Liliana Tolchinsky; Catherine McBride-Chang - Orthographic depth and maternal mediation of writing: Children's emergent reading and spelling
* Purpose - The relationships between orthographic depth, maternal writing mediation, and children's literacy were analyzed among Israeli and Spanish mothers and their children who had not yet been exposed to formal reading and spelling instruction. Israeli kindergartners, ignorant of Hebrew's diacritics, acquire initial steps of reading and spelling in a deep orthography that deficiently and inconsistently marks vowels by letters. Spanish kindergartners acquire reading and spelling in a shallow orthography that consistently marks consonants and vowels. * Method - Eighty-three Israeli and Spanish kindergartners, from middle SES, were tested on letter naming, phonological skills, emergent reading and spelling. They were videotaped writing words jointly with their mothers, and maternal support of the encoding process and of printing letters was scored on ordinal reliable scales. * Results - The Israeli and Spanish children did not differ on alphabetic skills, except on final phoneme isolation, with Israelis moderately higher than the Spanish children. However, Israeli children's reading and spelling were substantially lower than those of the Spanish children. Maternal scaffolding of the encoding process was lower among Israeli than Spanish mothers, particularly with respect to vowels. Regression analyses showed that maternal mediation contributed to reading and spelling in Spanish, and to spelling in Hebrew, beyond alphabetic skills, suggesting that reading Hebrew at this stage rarely makes use of grapho-phonemic correspondences. * Conclusions - The study illuminates the interface between orthographic depth, maternal writing support and children's developing reading and spelling prior to formal instruction.
Jacqueline Leybaert (Faculté des Sciences psychologiques et Education, Université libre de Bruxelles); Jésus Alegria - How do deaf adults proceed when reading sentences? evidence for a key word strategy
Purpose : The aim of this study was to examine the reading mechanisms used by profoundly deaf adults who read regularly newspapers and books for pleasure and information. Specifically, our research questions were whether (i) deaf participants read using a key word strategy (i.e. identifying some/most of the content words without deeply processing the morpho-syntax) when reading sentences; (ii) the use of this strategy results from poor control of morpho-syntax; (iii) deaf participants possess a richer orthographic lexicon than that of hearing controls matched for reading ability; (iv) deaf participants performance in metaphonological tasks is related to their reading level. Method: Deaf participants were either educated with signs (n=8) or orally educated (n=10). A group of hearing teenagers (n=22) constituted the control group. Results: Findings from the sentence completion tasks confirmed the use of the key word strategy in deaf participants, with a stronger tendency in the sign language group. Results from a spelling task in which participants had to choose the correct spelling of a word from several homophonic items supports the idea that deaf participants have a richer orthographic lexicon than the hearing participants, appropriate for identification of the main words of the sentence. Finally, the performance of the deaf participants in metaphonological tasks is related to their reading scores. Conclusion: Taken together, these results suggest that an apparently good performance of deaf adults in sentence reading may be underlined by a strategy consisting in constructing a meaning from the main content words without accurate processing of morpho-syntax.
Miao Li ()John Kirby - A descriptive analysis of English-immersion students' summaries
Purpose The purpose of this study is to describe the summaries produced by Chinese English-immersion students and examine how summary quality is related to reading comprehension and other reading-related measures. Method 246 Chinese English-immersion Grade 8 students were administered measures of text-absent summary writing, reading comprehension (Gates-MacGinitie), vocabulary (Gates-MacGinitie, word definitions, multiple meanings, and morphological awareness), inferencing, strategies, and listening comprehension (Woodcock). Results Summaries were analyzed into themes, main ideas, important details, and unimportant details, and cluster analysis of these data formed the students into four groups. Students in the first cluster focused mainly on themes, main ideas, and important details, whereas those in the second included more details but fewer themes and main ideas. Students in the third cluster included an average number of units at all levels, and those in the fourth cluster a low number of units at all levels. The first cluster outperformed the other groups on every other measure. The second cluster scored lower (nonsignificantly) than the first cluster group on almost every measure. The third cluster group performed worse than the first cluster and the fourth cluster performed worst overall. Conclusion Clusters were defined by level of processing and overall quality rather than by content. Overall summary quality was related to a range of reading and reading-related variables. Discussion will focus on the potential advantages of summaries that concentrate on the higher levels of processing (themes and main ideas). Several factors that may have limited the appearance of this advantage will be discussed.
Hong Li (Beijing Normal University); Hong Li; Jie Zhang; Xiawei Rao; Xinchun Wu - Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition of Chinese children
Purpose: Previous research has shown that the presence of English word spellings facilitates children's oral vocabulary learning. Whether a similar orthographic facilitation effect may exist in Chinese is interesting but not intuitively obvious due to the less transparent orthography and pronunciation correspondence rule in Chinese. The current study aims to examine whether the presence of Chinese orthography would aid oral vocabulary learning for young children. Method: Fifty one kindergarteners and 48 second graders in China were taught to associate 9 monosyllable labels with novel-object pictures over up to three learning trials. Three monosyllables were presented only with pictures (orthography absent) and six monosyllables were presented with both pictures and pseudo-characters (orthography present). Half pseudo-characters contain known phonetics that provide the consistent sound information with monosyllables (consistent sound + orthography present) and another half pseudo-characters contain known phonetics that provide inconsistent sound information (inconsistent sound + orthography present). All children were not alerted to the orthography, nor were they instructed to use it. Children were asked to name the pictures after each learning trial. Results: Second graders performed significantly better on the consistent sound + orthography present items than on the orthography absent items, but not for kindergarteners. For both age groups, no performance difference was found between inconsistent sound + orthography present items and orthography absent items. Conclusions: The findings extend the evidence of orthographic facilitation to a logographic language where phonology is not readily inferred from orthography, and support the practice of emphasizing orthography when teaching new words.
Haiying Li (University of Memphis); Arthur C. Graesser - Predictors of ESL reading comprehension ability
PURPOSE The goals of present study were to investigate the extent to which reading ability of ESL learners were predicted by: (1) the learners' word and sentence comprehension versus discourse comprehension and (2) gender, learning ability of the students stipulated by College Entrance Exam, and the class and grade learning environments. METHOD The students were 270 freshmen enrolled from 2005 to 2009 in a China university, who voluntarily participated in 32-week study. During the first 16 weeks, the instruction focused on word meaning guessing according to the context and sentence understanding, followed by the examination measuring word meaning and sentence meaning interpretation. During the second 16 weeks, the instruction shifted into the discourse organization and development, with a test on the identification of topic, main idea, supporting evidences, and the outline and summary writing. A multivariate general linear model assessed the relations between standardized scores and these predictor variables. RESULTS The interventions through training improved word and sentence comprehension, but not discourse processes ability. Both class and grade environments partially influence learners' reading ability for word and sentence understanding, but not in discourse comprehension. Females showed better reading abilities in word-sentence and discourse comprehension than males. However, learning ability did not predict learners' subsequent reading ability. CONCLUSION According to these results, ESL reading pedagogy should be sensitive to gender differences and the class and grade atmospheres for reading achievement as well as word-sentence comprehension, but not necessarily to discourse comprehension and the learners' stereotyped ability.
Chen-Huei Liao (National Taichung University); George K. Georgiou; Jessica Hamilton - RAN components and reading in Chinese: Is it all similar to English?
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine (a) how RAN components - articulation and pause time - predict reading accuracy and fluency in Chinese (b) what cognitive processing skills (speed of processing, phonological awareness, and orthographic processing) mediate the relationship. This is important given that very little is known about the RAN-reading relationship in Chinese. Method: Eighty Grade 2 Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese children were assessed on RAN Colors and Digits, nonverbal IQ, speed of processing, phonological awareness, and orthographic processing. The performance in the RAN tasks was recorded and analyzed using a sound analysis software. In Grade 3, the same children were assessed on character recognition, word- and text-reading fluency. Results: Articulation time did not account for any unique variance in character recognition after controlling for speed of processing. Pause time continued to predict character recognition after controlling for speed of processing, but not after controlling for speed of processing and phonological awareness. When reading fluency measures were the dependent variables, both articulation and pause time accounted for unique variance after controlling for all three processing skills. The amount of unique variance explained in the reading outcomes was greater for the RAN Digits components than for the RAN Colors components. Conclusion: RAN components were more strongly related to reading fluency than to accuracy and the associations were stronger for RAN Digits than for RAN Colors. In contrast to findings in English (e.g., Georgiou, Parrila, & Kirby, 2009), pause time in RAN Digits contributed more to reading than articulation time.
Chi-Shun Lien (National Chung Cheng University)Pei-Chen Wu - Questioning and summary for understanding: A strategy-combination reading program to enhance comprehension
Summarization skill has been widely taught in reading class for improving text comprehension since 80s. Most summarization instruction programs stemmed from Kintsch and van Dijk's (1978) model, which taught students macrorules (i.e., deletion, generalization, and construction) to form a macrostructure of text. However, for most young children, they have difficulties to follow these rules when they do not have enough prior knowledge. They often have difficulties with discern between the important and unimportant message in the text. The purpose of this study was to help young children identify important message and construct macrostructures of text. The study examined the effects of providing summarization and self-question strategy instruction to improve the effectiveness of macrostructure formation. The strategy instruction program was embedded in school curriculum and focused on helping young children to identify the important message in the text. Three intact classes (i.e., 25 students in a class) were recruited from the third grade in a suburban school in Chia-Yi, Taiwan. One class was administered a summarization plus self-question strategy instruction program, and another class was administered a summarization-only strategy instruction program. The other class received non-strategy, traditional instruction, which taught students vocabulary and explain text content. All three classes were administered the Chinese Reading Comprehension Test and assessed students' summarization ability before and after instruction. The findings indicated that less-able students received summarization plus self-question strategy instruction performed significantly better than the rest classes on the summarization ability test. However, there was no comprehension difference among three classes.
Dan Lin (The Hong Kong Institute of Education)Ling-Po Shiu - Understanding one syllable mapping to one character promotes reading development in Chinese
Purpose. Extent research has demonstrated the importance of morphological awareness (e.g., McBride-Chang, et al., 2003), phonological awareness (e.g., Lin et al., 2010) and orthographic awareness (e.g., Siok, Fletcher, 2001) in Chinese reading development in young children. However, little is known about the fundamental mapping process between sound units (phonology) and visual symbols (visual-orthography) in Chinese. The present study aimed to investigate the role of syllable mapping, defined as the ability of mapping syllable (sound unit) to character (visual unit), in Chinese word reading development with the traditional well-documented reading predictors of visual skills and syllable awareness controlled. Method. Children participated in the study were 96 Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners. All children were native Cantonese speakers. In the syllable mapping task, children were asked to point out a particular character in a card with three-character word visually printed on and uttered by the examiner. Other tasks administered included syllable awareness, visual spatial relationship, and Chinese word reading. Results. Results showed that Chinese word reading was strongly associated with syllable awareness, r = .58 (p < .001), and syllable mapping, r = .75 (p < .001) Further hierarchical regression analyses found that with children's age, visual spatial relationship, and syllable awareness statistically controlled, syllable mapping explained 16% unique variance of Chinese word reading, and it emerged as a significant predictor in the final Beta weight, t = 6.40, p < .001. Conclusions. The results underscored the importance of the cross-modality ability of mapping syllable to character in Chinese reading development among preschoolers.
Candise Lin (University of Maryland, College Park);Min Wang - The Role of Lexical Knowledge and Stress Cue in Segmentation by Second Language Learners of English
Purpose This study examined the role of vocabulary knowledge and stress in segmentation by L2 learners of English with Mandarin, Korean, or Spanish L1. For native-English listeners, lexical knowledge takes precedence over stress because stress location is unpredictable in English. L2 learners with smaller lexicons may not use lexical knowledge. Korean listeners may not use stress cue because stress is not lexically contrastive in Korean. Spanish has lexical stress and it predominantly falls on the penult; stress location is not informative about word boundary. Mandarin has lexical stress and the predominant stress pattern is initial-stress. Method In a cross-modal priming lexical decision task, participants listened to an auditory phrase consisted of context (consider) and prime (remem-) and determined whether target (remember) was a real word. Context was a real word or nonword (dilicter) and initial-stressed (character) or medial-stressed (consider). Prime was congruent with target or incongruent and initial-stressed (register) or medial-stressed (remember). Ten Mandarin L2 learners and 10 native-English listeners have been tested so far. Data collection is underway for the Spanish and Korean groups, to reach 20 participants in each of the four groups. Results Mandarin listeners were more accurate for initial-stressed than medial-stressed primes. English listeners' accuracy did not differ regardless of stress location. RT was faster for medial-stressed than initial-stressed primes preceding real-word context; RT did not differ regardless stress location when preceding nonword context. Conclusions Both native and nonnative listeners could utilize lexical knowledge and stress in segmentation. Stress appears to be more important for Mandarin listeners because the predominant stress pattern is informative for word boundary in Mandarin.
Esther Lindstrom (Vanderbilt University); Nicole Davis; Jennifer Gilbert; Erika Spangler; Donald Compton; Laurie Cutting - Content-specific background knowledge and passage level comprehension: a preliminary investigation
SSSR ABSTRACT Purpose Prior research has shown a strong connection between general knowledge, general vocabulary, and passage comprehension. These relations hold, even after controlling for word reading ability. However, the effect of specific content knowledge in conjunction with the aforementioned variables has not been investigated to the same extent. The purpose of this study is to examine the validity of a novel measure of background knowledge related to passage comprehension, as compared with vocabulary and general knowledge. Methods In this exploratory study, 20 participants ages 10-13 received standardized measures of word recognition and decoding (Woodcock Johnson Letter Word Identification and Word Attack), general knowledge (WASI Similarities), and vocabulary (WASI Vocabulary). In addition, background knowledge (experimental checklist of content-specific knowledge) measures associated with specific reading comprehension passages (COMP) were administered. Checklist items were coded as representative of broad, deep, and total background knowledge (BK-B; BK-D; BK-Total). Results As expected, significant correlations were found between BK-Total and BK-B (r=.96) as well as BK-D (r=.78). BK-B, BK-D, and BK-Total were also all significantly correlated with COMP (r=.61, .51, and .61, respectively) . In contrast, the correlations between COMP and Vocabulary and Similarities were more modest (r=.42 and .54). Results of a preliminary hierarchical regression analysis showed that Word Attack, Similarities, Vocabulary, and BK-Total together predicted 48% of the variance in COMP; BK-Total added 14% unique variance after the other predictors were entered. Conclusion Exploratory findings suggest content-specific background knowledge is informative beyond general measures of verbal ability in explaining and predicting comprehension.
Brenda Linn (McGill); Ron Stringer - Chasm of incommensurability? Cognitive psychologists' and teacher-educators' differing views of the scientific study of reading
Purpose: Recent research has revealed serious gaps in teachers' and teacher-educators' linguistic knowledge, and in their knowledge of phonics-related instructional practices. The present study was designed to discover whether similar gaps might exist with respect to basic reading research findings. Method: 20 cognitive researchers and 20 teacher-educators specialising in literacy in Canada, England and the United States read ten hypothetical research scenarios, each based on an actual seminal study. For each, participants rated both the probability of a given outcome, and its potential scientific value, on a six point Likert scale. ANOVA comparisons were carried out on both sets of ratings. Constructs used by the two groups to explain their ratings were also compared. Results: Psychologists were significantly more likely than educationists to rate as probable those outcomes that were consistent with existing research. However, educationists rated the potential value of all the hypothetical studies as highly as psychologists did, even when asked to consider outcomes that disconfirmed their predictions. Psychologists and educationists referred to different constructs to explain their judgments. All psychologists, but only one educationist, explained eye-tracking and context effect studies in terms of rapid, automatic orthographic or phonological processing. Most educationists, but only one psychologist, referred to minimal cues, multiple strategies, and failure to read for meaning. Discussion: Gaps in teacher educators' knowledge of concepts and findings of cognitive research clearly existed. However, they appeared not to reflect an ideological or epistemological stance, but to stem from historical and systemic factors. Ways of improving communication are considered.
Linda Liss-Bronstein (Central Connecticut State University)Susan Brady, sbrady@uri.edu, Voting member, University of Rhode Island and Haskins Laboratories - RTI for oral language: Explicit and systematic intervention in kindergarten for narrative discourse skills
Purpose Despite growing interest in the importance of children's narrative abilities for reading and listening comprehension, many questions remain about assessment and effective intervention. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of systematic and explicit story grammar instruction on components of narrative development for kindergarten children at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties due to underdeveloped English language skills. The study also demonstrates the use of a Response to Intervention (RTI) model applied to oral language skills. Method Participants were 32 kindergarten students performing in the lowest quartile on a standardized language-screening tool. A quasi-experimental design was used with a modified-stratified random and matched-pair sampling strategy (one student was dropped later). Students in the treatment group received 30 minutes a day for 6 weeks of narrative instruction in small groups using a story grammar framework focusing on macrostructure and microstructure features of stories. Students in the control group received 30 minutes a day/6 weeks of instruction that focused on phoneme awareness and decoding. Results Preliminary analyses indicate that the treatment effect was significant (p < .001; partial eta2 = .59). The narrative treatment group made greater gains on the Test of Narrative Language Development and other instruments tapping micro- and macrostructure attributes, including an experimental progress-monitoring protocol. Conclusions The results reveal noteworthy gains in narrative skills as result of a short-term intervention for kindergarteners with underdeveloped English language skills. Likewise, the results illustrate the feasibility of an RTI approach in the oral language domain.
Robin Litt (Oxford University)Kate Nation - Is a child's PAL an indicator of his reading ability? Dissociating the role of crossmodal and verbal demands in paired associate learning
Purpose-Recent studies have proposed that visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) taps a crossmodal learning mechanism that is uniquely involved in reading development (Hulme et al., 2007; Warmington and Hulme, 2011). We present a series of experiments investigating whether crossmodal or verbal task demands can best account for the relationship between visual-verbal PAL and reading by including four mapping conditions: visual-verbal, verbal-verbal, visual-visual, and verbal-visual. The addition of verbal-visual PAL allowed us to dissociate the role of modality (crossmodal, unimodal) and output demands (verbal, nonverbal) in determining PAL performance. Method- Experiment 1 used path analysis to investigate whether crossmodal PAL is uniquely related to reading ability in typically developing children (N=64). PAL was tested across four weeks, with one mapping condition per week. Participants completed a computerized PAL task comprised of two presentation trials and five test trials with feedback. Total learning was computed as a score out of 30 (6 pairs x 5 test trials). Experiment 2 utilized the same procedure to investigate whether children with dyslexia (N=15) exhibit crossmodal PAL deficits compared with chronological-age (N=15) and reading-age controls (N=15). Scores were subjected to a mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results- Although the pattern of relationships between visual-verbal PAL and reading replicated previous findings, the same pattern did not hold for verbal-visual PAL, the additional crossmodal condition. Additionally, the results of Experiment 2 indicate that children with dyslexia exhibit deficits in visual-verbal and verbal-verbal PAL, but perform as well as their peers in verbal-visual and visual-visual PAL. Conclusions- Our results call into question the crossmodal account of the PAL-reading relationship and suggest that the verbal learning demands of the task are responsible for its predictive relationship with reading.
Duo Liu (The Hong Kong Institute of Education)Yvonne Han - The better Chinese children identify the reversed nonword the better they can read: Morphological structure sensitivity?
Purpose: In the reading research area, the research on the relationship between children's online processing of language-related stimuli and reading performance is still scant. In the present study, Chinese children's performance in the online lexical decision task, particularly their processing of the reversed nonword, was focused on. Method: 96 children in Shanghai (48 second graders and 48 third graders) participated in this study. In the lexical decision task, children were asked to judge whether the presented item is a real Chinese (compound) word or not. There are three conditions: 1. Real word; 2. Reversed, i.e. reverse the order of morphemes to make nonword; and 3. Random, i.e., combine morphemes randomly to make nonword. We thought that the only difference between the last two conditions is the incorrect morphological structure in the Reversed condition. Results: In the regression analyses, it was found that children's responses in the Reversed condition significantly predict Chinese word reading, after controlling for children's age, PA, MA, IQ, grade, and reaction time (error rate) in the Random condition, while the responses in the Random condition were not significant predictors. Conclusions: A novel but robust predictor of Chinese children's word reading performance - their processing of the reversed nonword - was found in the present study. Since we thought that in the Reversed condition children's morphological structure sensitivity may help them identify the nonword, it is possible that the current findings reflect the importance of children's automatic morphological structure sensitivity on Chinese word reading.
Muriel A. Lobier (Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition, CNRS UMR5105, France); Carole Peyrin; Sylviane Valdois - Neural Correlates of the VA Span Deficit: Evidence for a Parietal Dysfunction
Purpose: To investigate a putative parietal dysfunction of multiple-element visual processing in dyslexic adults with a visual attention span (VAS) deficit. Method: Using fMRI, the brain activity in 12 VAS-impaired dyslexic and 12 normal adults was measured, while they carried out single- and multiple-element categorization tasks with alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric stimuli. VAS was assessed outside the scanner using a six-letter whole report task. Multiple-element processing specific neural networks were assessed by contrasting multiple- and single-element conditions. Linear regression was used to assess which brain regions' activity was modulated by VAS. Group differences in neural activity were identified by contrasting activation maps between normal and dyslexic readers. Preliminary Results: The results showed the following: (1) Healthy readers activated parietal areas more strongly for multiple- than single-element processing (right-sided for alphanumeric and bilateral for non-alphanumeric), but similar stronger multiple-element right parietal activations were absent for dyslexic participants. (2) Linear regression analyses revealed that increased multiple-element processing capacity as measured by VA span is associated with increased right superior parietal activity specific to multiple-element processing. (3) Dyslexic readers showed significantly reduced right superior parietal activity, regardless of stimuli type. (4) The specificity of this superior parietal lobule dysfunction for multiple-element processing was confirmed by a-priori and data-driven ROI analyses. Conclusion: VAS impaired dyslexic readers exhibit a parietal dysfunction for multiple-element processing regardless of element type (alphanumeric or non-alphanumeric). These findings support the hypothesis of a general, visual attention based dysfunction as the underlying cause of the VA span deficit in developmental dyslexia.
Jessica Logan (Ohio State Univeristy)Steven Petrill - Genetic and Environmental Influences on Growth in Reading Skills: Ages 6-12
Purpose: The present study examined whether the genetic and environmental influences on the development of reading skills from ages 6-12 varied as a function of reading skill. Method: Participants were drawn from the Western Reserve Reading Project, a longitudinal sample of 450 twin pairs in Ohio. Children were assessed on reading skills as part of annual home visits. Reading skills assessed included Word Identification, Word Attack, and Rapid Automatized Naming of letters and digits. Results: The present study used a two-step analysis. To assess development, individual phenotypic (ignoring genetic relatedness) latent growth curves were fit to the data. The intercept, linear slope, and quadratic slope were extracted from this analysis, and examined in a genetically sensitive quantile regression model. This model was able to determine whether the genetic influences on the intercept and slope depended on the level of reading ability. Results depended on the outcome examined. Word reading suggested that the genetic influences on the intercept were stronger for the lower end of reading skill. Conclusions: These data suggest that the influences of genetics on the intercept are likely impacted by an environmental moderator. However, no such influences are present on the slopes.
Alexandra Loidl (University Vienna); Barbara M. Schmidt; Alfred Schabmann - Do 2nd and 4th year German speaking Students use syllable-structures in decoding?
This study examined the use of sublexical clusters (syllables) by students in grade 2 and 4. A segmentation paradigm was used in which two adjacent letters within words and nonwords were separated by a non-letter symbol. The hypothesis was that the effect of this distortion on reading latency times would be larger if syllable clusters were split. 35 good and 35 average readers in each grade were selected to carry out the reading tasks. As to words only positional effects were found. However, when nonwords were presented, fast readers in the second grade and slow readers in the fourth grade read nonwords faster when letters were separated at the syllable boundaries. Results will be discussed in the light of possible strategy shifts in younger and older good and poor readers.
João Lopes (João Lopes)Louise Spear-Swerling; Gabriela Velasquez; Célia Oliveira; Leandro Almeida; Elaine Cheesman - Portuguese and American teachers' perceived and actual disciplinary knowledge for reading instruction: a comparative study
Purpose - This study explored whether Portuguese reading teachers' background characteristics (e.g., teaching experience) would better predict teachers' perceived knowledge for reading instruction than disciplinary knowledge. Portuguese teachers (N=232) were also compared with a group of American educators (N=143) in self-perceptions and disciplinary knowledge. Method - Portuguese primary teachers completed Portuguese versions of the background questionnaire, self-ratings, and teacher knowledge survey developed by Spear-Swerling and Cheesman (in press). These measures were electronically completed in SurveyMonkey. Descriptive statistics and hierarchical multiple regressions were performed to analyze data. Results - Results suggested that Portuguese teachers' disciplinary knowledge about Portuguese language structure and about vocabulary/comprehension instruction was quite limited. Knowledge about assessment and intervention strategies for struggling readers was particularly low (M = 18% correct). In all areas, Portuguese teachers' self-ratings indicated low confidence in their knowledge base. Hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that actual disciplinary knowledge was the single best predictor of teachers' self-ratings but still accounted for only a small percentage of the total variance (no more than 4% ). American teachers performed somewhat better on the the knowledge survey than did the Portuguese teachers but showed similar patterns of results in relation to self-ratings. Conclusions - Results raise concerns about Portuguese and American teachers' knowledge base for teaching reading. Moreover, they suggest that not much has changed in Portuguese teachers' training in the last decades. Still, both Portuguese and American teachers did have some accurate self-perceptions of their disciplinary knowledge.
Maureen W. Lovett ((active member) The Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto)Jan C. Frijters; Maria De Palma; Léa Lacerenza; Glen McLeod - Intervention outcomes for struggling high school readers
Purpose: Many adolescents enter high school reading only at a 3rd or 4th grade level. In this study, we ask whether intensive reading remediation in 9th grade is associated with significant improvement in word identification, reading comprehension, and/or fluency scores. Method: We report on two related studies. Study 1 assessed the efficacy of 60-70 hours of a multiple component intervention teaching word identification strategies, reading comprehension strategies, and knowledge of text structure. In a quasi-experimental design, 268 intervention and 83 waiting-list control students meeting criteria for reading disability were compared on reading measures at pretest, posttest, and one-year follow-up. In Study 2, a second semester of intervention was added, including a writing component and more comprehension instruction. Before and after each semester, 133 intervention participants and 42 control students were assessed. Results: Hierarchical linear models were used to compare the outcomes of intervention and control participants in Study 1. Intervention students demonstrated a significant advantage on standardized and experimental measures of word attack, word identification, and passage comprehension relative to controls, with an average effect size of .68 across measures. Only passage comprehension demonstrated continued growth over the follow-up year. Study 2 is ongoing. Preliminary data from the first wave of intervention and control participants provides initial evidence of robust gains in reading comprehension and reading fluency with a second semester of intervention; initial effect sizes range from .35-.70. Conclusions: These results suggest that it is not too late to address basic reading skill deficits in high school struggling readers.
Ben Maassen (University of Groningen) - Auditory event-related potentials at age 17 months as predictor of reading fluency.
Purpose - In the Dutch Dyslexia Programme (DDP) 180 children with a familial risk of dyslexia (FR) and 120 control children (C) have been followed from age 2 months to 9 years, in order to study early developmental precursors of dyslexia. Aim of the here presented study was to assess early auditory processing at age 17 months, as measured by event-related potentials, as determinant of later dyslexia. Method - At age 17 months auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) elicited by Dutch CVC words (/bαk/ and /dαk/) were recorded. Sixty FR- and 46 control children participated. On the basis of reading fluency determined in grade 2 and 3, the children were divided into three groups: dyslexic FR, non-dyslexic FR, and controls (Ctrl). The relation between AERPs and reading fluency was analyzed. Results -- A significant mismatch positivity (MMP) was found in the Ctrl-group, in that P2 (mean latency 230 ms) was higher in amplitude for the deviant than for the standard stimulus. In the dyslexic FR-children, no significant MMP-effect was found; the non-dyslexic FR-children showed weak MMPs which were slightly more right-lateralized. Similar differences between groups were found for the mismatch response (MMR) in the time window 300 - 360 ms. Conclusions -- The present experiment, firstly, corroborates earlier reported differences between Ctrl- and FR-infants at age 2 and 5 months, indicating a (slightly) deviant auditory-phonological development as characteristic of the genetic liability of dyslexia. Further, AERPs significantly contribute to the prediction of reading (dys)fluency, suggesting a causal relationship between early auditory-phonetic processing and later reading.
Lucie Macchi (Ureca, Université de Lille 3 (France). IPSY, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)); Séverine Casalis; Marie-Anne Schelstraete - Reading in children with specific language impairment
Purpose : Children with a specific language impairment (SLI) often experience difficulties in literacy acquisition, more precisely, in reading, at written word identification and reading comprehension levels. However, the precise profile of SLI in reading is still unclear. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is first to analyse written word identification procedures, according to the Dual Route Cascaded Model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) and second to discuss written language abilities in light of spoken language skills. Method : Twenty children with SLI from 7 to 13 years were recruited. Their skills were compared both to those of children matched for chronological age and to those of younger children matched for written word identification level in silence. All groups completed a comprehensive assessment of spoken language, including phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic measures. Written language was assessed by written lexical decision, reading aloud and reading comprehension tasks. It was assumed that oral phonological skills predicted nonlexical route efficiency in reading. Lexical route could be as much or less affected than nonlexical procedure, depending on child ability to develop compensatory mechanisms. Finally, ability to understand written sentences was assumed to be related to written word identification and listening comprehension skills. Results : Data reveal heterogeneity in reading profiles. The heterogeneity appears in the decoding/comprehension discrepancy as well as in the word recognition processes. Conclusions : In general, our results plaid in favour of a more closed connection between studies of language impairments and reading impairments. More precise attempts to connect written skills to spoken language abilities are presented.
Kristen MacConnell (Nido de Aguilas International School of Chile) - Evaluating technical adequacy of DIBELS in the context of an international school in South America
Purpose - International schools provide a unique context for addressing cross-cultural issues in the assessment of reading proficiency. This study presents findings of a validation study examining the predictive validity of benchmark goals of DIBELS Next in the context of an international school in South America. Method - The early literacy skills of 764 students in grades K-5 enrolled in an international school in South America were assessed three times a year using DIBELS Next. Students in third through fifth grades also received the Illinois Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) assessment at the end of the year. The predictive validity of the beginning of year and middle of year benchmark goals was examined with respect to the end of year DIBELS Next Composite score and the ITBS. Results - Predictive validity correlations of beginning and middle of year assessments with respect to spring assessments will be presented. The utility of need for support decisions will be examined with ROC curve analyses and with logistic regression analyses. Conclusions - The validity and utility of benchmark goals, in different cultural contexts, is critically important for their effective use in regards to making educational decisions in these contexts. Schools need an efficient measurement to identify early students who need additional support to achieve important educational outcomes. Recommendations for adjusting goals to meet the needs of schools in different cultural contexts will be discussed.
Norbert Maïonchi-Pino (Université Clermont-Ferrand 2 - Blaise Pascal - LAPSCO - UMR CNRS 6024)Satoru Yokoyama; Yasuyuki Taki; Annie Magnan; Kei Takahashi; Hiroshi Hashizume; Jean Écalle; Ryuta Kawashima - Do reading acquisition and syllable-based segmentation depend on sonority-related markedness? Tracking the developmental changes in French children
Purpose: We examined whether the developmental course of reading acquisition, which is primarily underlain by syllable-based segmentation in French, relies on universal sonority-related phonological markedness. Method: We tested 108 typically-reading French children who were distributed into 6 skill-reading level groups for years 1-to-6 of reading acquisition. In Experiment 1, children decided whether either 2 or 3 syllables ('akfal' vs. e-inserted 'akefal') were embedded in printed pseudowords. Intervocalic clusters were designed to provide sonority-based structures distributed from phonotactically-unmarked pseudowords ('algal') to phonotactically-marked ones ('akfal'). In Experiment 2, children decided whether either 1 or 2 syllables ('kfal' vs. 'kefal') were embedded in printed pseudowords. Onset clusters were unattested in French when sonority-related markedness was inverted. Results: In Experiment 1, children were quicker to segment unmarked clusters ('algal') than marked ones ('akfal'). Interestingly, response times conformed to universally-optimal sonority-based syllable contact; response times decreased with markedness ('akfal' > 'algal'). In Experiment 2, response times exhibited reverse response patterns which progressively conformed to optimal sonority-based onset patterns ('lgal' > 'kfal'). Linear stepwise regression analyses revealed that neither statistical properties nor articulatory- or acoustic-phonetic-based cues clearly accounted for our observations. We found no developmentally-constrained segmentation strategies: From the 1st year of reading acquisition, while reading skills increased, response patterns remained similar. Conclusions: Phonological knowledge on sonority-related markedness exists before, and does not depend on, reading acquisition. Regarding the similar response patterns previously found in speech perception, we discuss our results to propose that sensitivity to sonority-related phonological markedness extends to reading and is therefore isomorphic.
Lorinda King Chi Mak (Wilfrid Laurier University)Alexandra Gottardo; Esther Geva - Basic cognitive processes and higher-level comprehension skills in Chinese-English ESL children
Purpose: Are basic cognitive processes such as working memory and processing speed related to higher reading comprehension skills? The purpose of the present study was to investigate which basic cognitive processes would predict higher-level reading comprehension abilities in Chinese-English children learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Method: Sixty-six Chinese-English bilingual third graders (mean age = 107.36 months, SD = 4.8 months) in Southwestern Ontario were recruited. Participants were tested on a battery of reading, language, and cognitive measures (rapid naming, digit span, and verbal working memory measures), as well as higher-level comprehension and writing measures (logical relations, inferencing, and writing fluency). Data were analyzed using correlational and regression analyses to identify relations between verbal working memory and reading automaticity on higher-level comprehension skills. Preliminary results and conclusion: Preliminary results revealed that 1) verbal working memory (t = 2.11, p = .04) and RAN letters (t = -2.24, p = 0.03) were related to performance on logical relations; 2) verbal working memory and RAN letters were also related to writing fluency (t = 3.19, p = .002 and t = -5.65, p < .001); and 3) only verbal working memory was related to performance on inferencing (t = 7.200, p < .001). The findings suggested that verbal working memory, rather than non-verbal working memory is related to higher-level comprehension skills in Chinese-English ESL children. Additionally, rapid naming of verbal stimuli is related to higher-level comprehension skills in Chinese-English ESL children. Theoretical and practical implications for Chinese-English ESL children are discussed.
George Manolitsis ();Ioannis Grigorakis - How specific is the role of morphological awareness in beginning reading and spelling?
Purpose: The effects of morphological awareness (MA) in later stages of reading and spelling are well documented, but the effects on early literacy skills are unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine how MA in Kindergarten (K) and Grade 1 (G1) predicts different facets of reading and spelling in Grade 1. Method: 215 Greek children were assessed at the middle of K and G1 on seven measures of MA, RAN, and phonological awareness tasks. Also, at K they were assessed on early reading, nonverbal IQ, vocabulary and working memory. At the end of G1, children were reassessed on reading decoding of morphologically complex words, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling of words with morphological diversity (inflected forms, derived forms). Results: Multiple regression analyses indicated that MA in K predicted spelling through phonological awareness and MA in G1 predicted directly the spelling of inflected morphemes in high frequency words. Morphological awareness did not predict reading accuracy in any of the morphological types of words (compound, derived, inflected) or fluency after the control of parental education and early cognitive skills. MA effects on reading comprehension were mediated by vocabulary skills in Kindergarten. Conclusion: The findings suggest that MA effects on beginning reading and spelling in Greek is important for specific aspects of literacy development. Reading decoding and fluency did not depend on morphological processes during the early phases of development, while early reading comprehension and spelling seemed to benefit from MA growth.
Souraya Mansour (Georgia State University)Nicole Patton Terry, Ph.D.-- Georgia State University - Phonological awareness among beginning readers who speak African American English
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine African American children's performance on a phonological awareness (PA) task. The task included dialect-sensitive items and dialect-neutral items that reflected differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE). We also examined the relationship between performance on this task and reading achievement. Method: Children (ages 5-7 years) were shown pictures and asked to choose which one of three matched the final sound of a MAE target (e.g., Point to the picture that ends like or rhymes with tooth). The three possible items included a MAE match (e.g., booth), a dialect-sensitive match (e.g., roof, reflecting AAE substitution of a MAE feature), and a dialect-neutral non-match (e.g., juice, reflecting an error not due to dialect differences). Children were also given standardized measures of PA, expressive vocabulary, and letter word identification, as well as a measure of spoken dialect use. Results: Data analysis is on-going. Preliminary analyses suggest significant dialect group effects (e.g., heavy AAE speakers were more likely to choose dialect-sensitive matches) and age effects (e.g., older children were more likely to choose MAE matches) on the PA task. However, heavy AAE speakers were just as likely to choose dialect-neutral non-matches. Significant negative, linear correlations were also found between AAE use, performance on the PA task, and reading achievement. Conclusions: Preliminary results suggest that young children's frequent AAE use may contribute to variation in PA ability, especially for dialect-sensitive items. The theoretical and educational implications of these findings will be discussed.
Stefka H. Marinova-Todd (University of British Columbia); Daniel Bérubé - A comparison of language and reading skills in French Immersion students from Anglophone and multilingual homes
Purpose: Increasing numbers of students who speak a language other than English or French at home (hereafter, multilingual) attend early French immersion (FI) programs. We compared the oral language and reading skills of these children to those of Anglophone children, and examined what factors predict their reading ability in each language. Method: The sample included FI students forming two language groups: 63 multilingual and 61 Anglophone children. Participants were tested at the end of Grade 4 after almost a year of English instruction and four years of French instruction in school. Standardized measures of vocabulary size, listening comprehension, word reading, and reading comprehension in English and French were administered. Results: ANOVAs revealed that both groups had better oral language and reading skills in English than in French; however, home language was not significant. Moderated regression analyses showed significant interactions between language group (the moderator) and English vocabulary on the outcomes reading comprehension and word reading in both English and French. English vocabulary accounted for a much greater proportion of variance in the multilingual group than in the Anglophone group. Moreover, SES had a stronger association with French reading proficiency in the multilingual group, despite equivalent group SES ranges. Conclusions: The results suggest that FI programs provide an academic environment in which multilingual children can develop language and reading skills in English and French equivalent to those of Anglophone children. Interestingly, SES and English vocabulary of multilingual children are better predictors of their French and English reading skills than in Anglophones.
Eva Marinus (Macquarie University/ ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD)); Saskia Kohnen; Xenia Schmalz; Anne Castles - Who are the noisiest neighbors in the hood?
Purpose: To study the developing orthographic lexicon by examining susceptibility of beginning readers to the interference of different types of higher-frequency neighbor words. Research Questions: 1) Are poor readers more susceptible to the interference of higher-frequency neighbor words than typical readers? 2) Are some neighbors noisier than others? Method: 30 Grade-3 and 31 Grade-4 children were tested on standardized reading tasks, nonverbal reasoning and passive vocabulary. Interference of neighbors was measured with an experimental naming task measuring reading speed, accuracy and actual response to: a) words with a higher-frequency substitution neighbor (e.g., kind - find), b) words with a higher-frequency transposition neighbor (e.g., form - from) and c) words with no higher-frequency neighbors. Results: 1) Poor readers were more susceptible to the interference of both types of higher-frequency words than typical readers. 2) Both poor and typical readers made significantly more transposition neighbor errors than substitution neighbor errors. Conclusions: Different types of higher-frequency neighbors cause interference in the orthographic lexicon; this effect is stronger in poor readers than in typical readers. Interestingly, for both poor and typical readers the higher-frequency transposition neighbors remain the noisiest neighbors in the hood.
Sandra Martin-Chang (Concordia University ) - What happens when they read without us? Contextual reading without corrective feedback
Purpose: This study examined whether the contextual transfer advantage (when words are trained and tested in context; Martin-Chang & Levy, 2005) would persist if children were not given feedback during training. Opposing hypotheses have been voiced regarding this issue. Specifically, Landi et al. (2005) predicted that practicing words without feedback would be more beneficial in isolation, in contrast, Martin-Chang et al. (2007) posited that the semantic constraints provided by context would result in more accurate reading, even without corrective feedback. Method: Thirty-three students in Grade 2 were trained on two sets of words. One set of 85 words was read in context, a second set of new words was read in isolation (12 trials each). Twenty-one days after training, transfer was measured by presenting the trained words in new stories. Results: On trial 1, children read more words correctly in context (compared to isolation). However, by trial 12 the children read the same number of words correctly in both context and isolation. Twenty-one days after training, children read 91.5% of contextually trained-words correctly in a new passage, compared to only 79.3% of words trained in isolation. Conclusions: After 21 days, words first trained in context are more likely to be read correctly in a new story than words first trained in isolation. This replicates the contextual transfer advantage observed in previous studies. On-going work is examining the mediating role of feedback in different types of training.
Trecy Martinez Perez (University of Liège - Belgium)Steve Majerus; Aline Mahot; Martine Poncelet - Relationship between seriel order short-term memory and reading skills : Evidence from a study with dyslexic children
Purpose - Reading has been linked to verbal short-term memory (STM) capacity. However, the nature of this relationship remains controversial, since verbal STM, like reading, depends upon the complexity of underlying phonological processes. To further our understanding of this relationship, the present study explored the nature of the STM deficits in dyslexic children by using the distinction of item and serial order information in STM. According to recent STM models (Burgess & Hitch, 1999; Majerus & D'Argembeau, 2011), retention of verbal item information depends directly upon the quality of underlying phonological and semantic representations. On the other hand, retention of serial order information appears to reflect a language-independent system. Hence, if there is a fundamental STM deficit in dyslexia which is not to be explained by the poor phonological abilities that characterize dyslexia, then difficulties in serial order STM should be observed in dyslexic children, in addition to item STM impairment. Method - We administered tasks maximizing either serial order or item retention capacities to dyslexic children and reading-age (RA) and chronological-age (CA) matched controls (22 children in each group). Results - Dyslexic children performed significantly poorer than the CA controls on the item STM measure. Furthermore, the dyslexic group obtained inferior performance than both CA and RA control groups on the serial order STM measure. Conclusions - These results highlight a severe impairment of STM for serial order information in dyslexia which is not a consequence of poor phonological processes. Implications of serial order STM capacities for reading skills are discussed.
Rachel I. Mayberry (Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego) - A meta-analysis of phonological awareness and coding in deaf readers
Purpose: The objective of this study is to investigate the relation between reading ability and phonological coding and awareness (PCA) skills in deaf individuals with a meta-analysis. Method: From an initial set of 230 relevant publications, we analyzed 48 studies that experimentally tested PCA skills in 1,836 deaf participants. Results: Half of the studies found positive evidence for PCA skills and half did not. A subset of 25 studies also tested reading ability and showed a wide range of effect sizes. Overall PCA skills predicted 11 % of the variance in reading ability in the deaf participants. Other possible modulating factors, such as task type and reading level, did not explain the remaining variance. In seven studies where it was measured, language ability predicted 35 % of the variance in reading ability. Conclusions: These meta-analytic results indicate that PCA skills are a low to moderate predictor of the reading success of deaf individuals and that other factors, most notably language ability, play a greater role in their reading achievement as has been found to be the case for hearing individuals.
Michael Mayer (); Michael Kaschak - Individual differences in processing of ambiguous text
Purpose: Prior research has indicated that ambiguous portions of text lead to impaired processing ability and subsequent incorrect semantic interpretations of the text (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Liversedge, 2005). Separate, yet related, research has produced substantial debate as to whether individual differences in cognitive abilities, particularly working memory, affect language processing (Just & Carpenter, 1992; MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002). The current study aims to combine these two avenues of research and contribute to the growing body of literature concerned with determining the relative influence of differential cognitive abilities in language processing, specifically to the disambiguation of syntactically and lexically ambiguous text. Method: Eye movement records during reading of globally ambiguous, syntactically ambiguous, and lexically ambiguous sentences (adapted from previous studies) were obtained from a sample of 48 undergraduate students during the first session of the experiment. Individual difference measures (including Raven's IQ, an automated operation span task assessing working memory, set shifting, inhibitory control, and implicit learning) were subsequently administered during session 2. Results: Preliminary results support previous findings of increased processing difficulty for ambiguous portions of text when compared to regions from nearly identical sentences that limit the ambiguity (F(1,1030) = 30.79, p <.01). Mixed model regression analysis yielded significant interactions between condition (ambiguous vs. unambiguous) and several individual difference measures. Conclusion: These results support our hypothesis that individual differences in cognitive processing ability affect the processing of ambiguities in text, and suggest influences of such differential abilities in numerous reading and language domains.
Mairéad McKendry (Department of Education, University of Oxford) - Investigating the relationship between reading comprehension and semantic skill in children with English as an additional language: a focus on idiom comprehension.
Purpose This study used an idiom comprehension measure to investigate the semantic abilities of 9-10 year old children who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) compared to those who speak English as a native language (EL1). The study investigated whether the idiom comprehension of EAL and EL1 children is differentially affected by i) idiom realness (real/novel idioms); ii) idiom transparency (transparent/opaque idioms); iii) context (idioms presented in isolation/with supportive context) and whether idiom comprehension predicts unique variance in reading comprehension over vocabulary. Method The study adhered to a 2-factor independent samples design with between-participant factors of Language Group (EAL/EL1) and Reading Group (Average Reader/Above Average Reader). 24 EAL Average Readers, 24 EL1 Average Readers, 22 EAL Above Average Readers and 23 EL1 Above Average Readers completed an idiom comprehension measure (Cain & Towse, 2008) and 6 subtests of the Test of Word Knowledge (TOWK; Wiig & Secord, 1992). Results Higher idiom transparency and the presence of supportive context have the same facilitative effects on idiom comprehension for EAL and EL1 participants. Idiom realness affects EAL and EL1 groups differently; while EAL participants do not distinguish between real and novel idioms, the EL1 Above Average group provides more correct responses for real than for novel idioms. Performance on some conditions of the idiom comprehension measure predicts unique variance in reading comprehension over vocabulary for EAL participants but not for EL1 participants. Conclusions Idiom realness is a psychologically valid construct for EL1 Above Average readers alone. Idiom comprehension predicts unique variance over vocabulary for EAL children, a finding which suggests the importance of figurative aspects of lexis for EAL children's reading comprehension.
Leigh McLean (Florida Center for Reading Research-Florida State University)Carol Connor - Differences in classroom instruction provided to first graders with problem behaviors vs. their typically/exceptionally-behaved peers
* Purpose - This study investigates the achievement gap often seen between children with problem behaviors and their peers, along with some of the potential reasons for this gap. We examined whether the amounts and types of literacy instruction first graders (n = 672) received systematically differed for students with behavior problems compared to their well-behaved peers. * Method - This study utilized first grade data that have been collected in the Individualizing Student Instruction (ISI) project (Connor, PI) which began in 2005. A battery of literacy and self-regulation assessments were used in conjunction with teacher reports of behavior problems using the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) and coded classroom video data . HLM, GLM and correlational analyses were used to address our research questions. * Results - Results revealed that children with behavior problems generally spent less time in literacy activities that were associated with higher literacy scores. This was particularly the case for instructional activities where children were expected work independently and to regulate their own learning. Notably, students who were judged to be exceptionally well-behaved spent less time interacting with their teachers the beginning of the year but this amount systematically increased through the school year. These observations may explain the additional finding that poorly behaved children generally showed weaker skills in self-regulation and literacy when compared to their typically and exceptionally well-behaved peers; they * Conclusions - These findings suggest that reduced learning opportunities may be one of the reasons that children with problematic behavior face academic failure.
Kristen McMaster (University of Minnesota); Chris Espin; Miva Wayman; Stan Deno - Monitoring elementary students' progress in writing using Curriculum-Based Measurement: Considerations and cautions
Purpose. This study examined technical features of slopes produced from Curriculum-Based Measures (CBM) of elementary students' writing. Research questions included: (1) Do scores obtained from 5-min CBM prompts have sufficient alternate-form reliability and criterion validity? (2) Does student performance level differ by grade? (3) Do the measures yield reliable, stable slopes, and how many data points are needed to obtain these slopes? (4) For each grade level, are the measures sensitive to growth? Method. Eighty-nine 2nd-5th graders completed 12 weekly CBM prompts; prompts were scored for correct word sequences and correct minus incorrect word sequences. Pre- and posttest writing samples were scored using an analytic rubric. Correlations among measures were calculated to determine alternate-form reliability and criterion validity. To determine reliability of slopes, we calculated correlations between slopes produced in odd and even weeks, as well as between slopes produced across incremental durations compared to the overall 12-week slopes. To determine stability, we examined standard errors of the slopes. For sensitivity to growth, we calculated t-values to identify slopes greater than zero. Results: Reliability and validity of CBM scores were rs > .70 and .50, respectively. Nine to 10 data points were needed to yield reliable/stable slopes. Slopes were not statistically significantly greater than zero, suggesting they were not sensitive to growth. Conclusions. It appears that CBM may be appropriate for estimating students' developing writing proficiency; however, findings suggest important considerations and cautions for using CBM to monitor student writing progress.
Danielle McNamara (Arizona State University); Art Graesser - Coh-Metrix, Text Easability Assessor and assessments of Common Core Standards
Purpose: Coh-Metrix and the Text Easability Assessor (TEA) are motivated by the principle that texts vary on multiple dimensions (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; McNamara, Louwerse, & Graesser, in press). Discourse psychologists have identified multiple levels of language and discourse in theoretical analyses of printed and oral discourse. The purpose of our work is to develop a tool to automatically analyze texts on measures associated with these levels. Method: Multilevel theoretical frameworks have differentiated the levels of surface code (words and syntax), explicit textbase, situation model, genre and rhetorical structure, and pragmatic communication. We developed a computer facility called Coh-Metrix that automatically analyzes text on measures associated with these levels, except for pragmatic communication. In a series of analyses we have examined 53 Coh-Metrix measures for nearly 40,000 texts. Results: Principal components analyses have revealed that the primary five components were closely aligned with the theoretical levels: narrativity (genre), syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion (textbase), and deep cohesion (causal situation model). Conclusions: The results support the claim that there is an objective and theoretical foundation for scaling texts on difficulty, one of the major goals in literacy research. We have developed a facility on the web, called the Text Easability Assessor (TEA), that scales texts on these five dimensions. This presentation will orient the audience to this approach and summarize how these methods have been used to analyze texts related to the Common Core Standards, with implications for assessment design, scoring and educational curriculum based on assessment results.
Chelsea Meenan (University of Denver);Janice M. Keenan; Anh Hua; Richard K. Olson; Bruce F. Pennington; Erik G. Willcut - Selection criteria for poor comprehenders affects comorbidity with ADHD
Purpose It is understood that ADHD is comorbid with reading disorders, but we do not know its prevalence among poor comprehenders (PCs). This study explores comorbidity of ADHD with PC and how it might be affected by the selection criteria used to define PC. Method We examined prevalence of ADHD for three ways of defining PCs: low comprehension (15th percentile), a discrepancy between comprehension and word decoding (decoding ≥ 1SD above comprehension), or poor comprehension with at least average word decoding (z ≥ 0). 1314 participants completed tests assessing reading and listening comprehension, ADHD (DSM-IV diagnosis based on parent or teacher ratings), and word decoding. Results When defining PC as percent of children in the low tail who met ADHD criteria, there was no difference between reading (33.5%) and listening (35%). However, modality differences emerged when defining PC as a specific deficit. Only 25% of those in the low tail of reading comprehension had ADHD when using a discrepancy with word decoding, and only 12% when decoding was average or above. In contrast, removing word decoding problems from PCs defined by listening comprehension did not change the comorbidity with PC; ADHD characterized 38% of those with a word decoding discrepancy with their listening comprehension and 33% of those with average word decoding. Conclusions ADHD affects approximately 1/3 of PCs. When specific PC is defined with reading comprehension tests, the prevalence of ADHD fluctuates with the specific criteria; however, this fluctuation does not occur if PC is defined by listening comprehension.
Monica Melby-Lervag (University of Oslo, Dep. of special needs education)Charles Hulme; - Is Working Memory Training Effective? A Meta-Analytic Review
Purpose. It has been suggested that working memory training programmes are effective as treatments for ADHD and other cognitive disorders in children and have beneficial effects on measures of cognitive ability and scholastic attainment. However, effects across studies appear to be variable. Method. A systematic meta-analytic review, designed and reported following guidelines in the PRISMA statement, was therefore undertaken. A literature search was conducted using the term "working memory training". To be included in the review studies had to be randomized controlled trials or quasi-experiments without randomisation, with a treatment, and either a treated or untreated control group. The groups had to be pre- and post-tested with measures using standardized tests of working memory and either attention, nonverbal ability, verbal ability, decoding or arithmetic. Twenty-one studies with 27 group comparisons met the criteria for inclusion. The studies included involved clinical samples as well as typically developing children and healthy adults. Results. Meta-analyses indicated that the programmes produced reliable short-term improvements in working memory skills but there was no evidence for generalization to other skills (nonverbal and verbal abilities, attention, decoding and arithmetic). Current working memory training programmes appear to produce short-term specific training effects which do not generalize. Conclusion. These findings cast doubt on the clinical relevance of working memory training programmes as a method of treatment for children with developmental cognitive disorders.
W. Einar Mencl (Haskins Laboratories); David Braze; Xuan Di; Whitney Tabor; Kenneth R. Pugh; and Donald Shankweiler - Cortical bases of individual differences in garden-path sentence processing
Purpose: Individual variation in the size of "Garden Path" (GP) effects - where the initial preferred parsing of sentence must be revised based on information coming late in the sentence - may result from differences in working memory capacity, syntactic processing skill, or other cognitive or linguistic processes. We examined the correlations between reading skill and neurobiological responses to printed GP processing in average-to-poor young adult readers. Method: While being scanned using fMRI, 52 subjects read different types of sentences in RSVP format: 1) strong GP with late resolution ("Paul had splattered the glue on the workbench on the window."); 2) weak GP with earlier resolution ("…on the workbench onto the window."); and 3) non-GP ("…on the workbench near the window."). Subjects simply read each sentence silently, responding with a yes/no button press if the sentence referred to a "time" word (before, after, etc.). Outside the scanner, subjects completed a behavioral battery including indices of word and sentence-level reading skill. Results: Initial activation results are generally commensurate with previous findings: GP sentences elicit increased activation in the anterior cingulate and left middle temporal cortices, areas broadly involved in effortful processing and sentential processing, respectively. Poorer readers tended to activate these areas less than better readers. Conclusions: GP sentences produce increased activation in areas associated with increased processing load and sentence comprehension; better readers tend to engage these systems more than poorer readers. Future analyses will attempt to further relate these effects to individual variation in component reading skills.
Alejandra Meneses (Facultad Educación Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)Alejandra Meneses; Paola Uccelli; Linda Valeri - Classroom early academic interaction and students' literacy outcomes from pre-K to 2nd in Chilean schools
Purpose This study explores academic classroom talk (ACT) -defined as instructional language during literacy activities- and its relationship to students' literacy outcomes in Spanish-speaking teachers and their pre-K-to-2nd-grade students. ACT is characterized as more abstract, dense, and precise than everyday language (Schleppegrell, 2004). So far, minimal research has explored the relationship between ACT and early literacy. Methods Sixteen classrooms from eight Chilean schools were videotaped, fully transcribed using CHAT, and coded through fine-grained analysis for interactional (teacher/student talk), discursive (academic /non-academic talk; present-academic/non-present-academic) and linguistic features (syntactic complexity, lexical diversity). Students' literacy level was measured at the beginning and end of the school year. Results Descriptive statistics and correlational analyses showed that: students had few opportunities to produce ACT (18% out of total talk); teacher participation correlated negatively with student participation (r= -0.98, p <.0001); teacher syntactic complexity and lexical diversity were positively correlated with teacher participation (r= 0.66, p <.004; r= 0.63, p <.01); teacher frequency of non-present academic talk and lexical diversity correlated negatively with literacy gains (r= -0.5, p <.04; r= -0.49, p <.05). Conclusion Students had minimal opportunities to talk and, the more teachers talked, the more syntactically complex and lexically diverse their speech was. In such contexts, more exposure to non-present academic talk (talk about abstract topics), and higher level of lexical diversity seems to lead to lower literacy outcomes. Future research needs to explore if such relationship is mediated by students' lack of opportunities to talk or a mismatch with students' level of linguistic development. References Schleppregrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: a functional linguistic perspective. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fernanda Mesquita (Fernanda Mesquita)Renata Mousinho; Jane Correa - The Influence of Phonological Skills in the Development of Written Narrative
Purpose: The production of written text is a task that requires significant cognitive resources of the child in the early years of schooling. The present study aims to examine the development of narrative complexity in children in early elementary school, attempting at the relationship between the complexity of narrative writing and ortographic domain. As well, the relationship between the levels of written narrative and phonological skills. Method: The sample comprised 25 children of the same educational institution, evaluated at 2nd and 3nd years of elementary school, on phonological awareness, working memory; rapid naming tasks, speed and accuracy of reading; text production/written spelling and complexity of structure of the narrative. Results: The results showed the presence of two groups: G1 children with high complexity in written narratives and G2 children with written elementary narratives. As writing skills, the groups differed significantly on number of written words and the occurrence of phonological errors in written. Phonological processing skills, accuracy and reading fluency differed significantly only in phonological awareness (word level and rhyme). Children who wrote more complex stories about the narrative structure were those with greater fluency of writing (as many words and a greater ability to phonological analysis), which reflected in greater accuracy in the phoneme-grapheme conversion, expressed by fewer phonological changes present in writing. Conclusions: The results show the relevance of phonological skills in the development of narrative complexity. The development of phonological skills provides greater accuracy in phoneme grapheme correspondence, enabling the fluency of writing and thus the narrative complexity
Mélissa Michaud (Université du Quebec à Montreal); Eric Dion; Anne Barrette - A randomized study testing the effectiveness of an innovative intervention combining decoding and vocabulary instruction for first-grade readers from underprivileged schools
Purpose Learning to decode words is very difficult for a minority of students, notably low-income students with a restricted oral vocabulary. The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of an innovative instructional approach that explicitly teaches both the decoding and meaning of words. Method Fifty-three first-graders at risk of reading problems were taught two lists of words either with a method that focused only on decoding (one list) or with a method that focused both on decoding and meaning (the other list). A within-person randomized design was used: chance determined which list of the two was taught with which method. Results Results indicate that 1) both methods of instruction helped students decode the words with greater ease and 2) that the method that combine instruction of decoding and word meaning helped the students learn the meaning of a greater number of words than the method focused exclusively on decoding. Contrary to expectations, however, learning the meaning of the words did not help students decode the word with greater ease. Conclusions Although it appears feasible to teach the decoding and meaning of words simultaneously to at-risk beginning readers, our results suggest that these students' lack of response to decoding (only) instruction is not the result of a lack of knowledge of word meaning.
Trelani Milburn (University of Toronto)Luigi Girolametto, Elaine Weitzman, Janice Greenberg - Enhancing preschool educators' ability to facilitate shared book reading conversations
Purpose: Preschool educators can enhance children's language learning by facilitating adult-child conversations in their classroom. This experimental study investigated whether professional development enhanced preschool educators' ability to facilitate book-related conversations during shared book reading with small groups of children from low income families. Method: 20 educators were randomly assigned to an experimental and control group. All educators were video-recorded reading two books to a small group of preschoolers at pretest and posttest. The experimental group (n=10) participated in a professional development program that included workshops in shared book reading as well as individualized classroom coaching. The video-recordings were transcribed and coded to yield the measures of the book-related talk. A novel coding system was used to identify and code conversations related to individual macrotopics. Results: Following professional development, the educators in the experimental group used more open questions, responsive statements, and different words compared to the control group educators. Further, the educators and children in the experimental group also maintained significantly longer book-related conversations and more conversations that were five turns or more in length. Conversations that included inferential talk related to the content of the text, rather than the children's personal experiences related to the text, resulted in the longest conversations. Conclusions: Professional development can yield promising short-term outcomes for enhancing preschool educators' ability to engage small groups of children in longer book-related conversations. Improving educators' responsiveness to preschool children's talk has important implications for enhancing the language learning environment in preschool programs.
Amanda Miller (Regis University); Laura M. Steacy; Donald L. Compton - Vocabulary Skills of Children with Early Emerging Reading Disability and Children with Late-Emerging Reading Disability
Purpose Children with Late Emerging Reading Disability (LERD) seem to have typically developing reading skills in the early elementary grades, but begin to express reading difficulties around grade 4. This study compares the vocabulary of children with LERD and children with Early Identified Reading Disability (ERD) at 2 times points (grades 1 and 5) to test whether vocabulary growth could be related to the delayed reading difficulties displayed by children with LERD. Method We used a longitudinal sample of 106 children and identified 3 groups (LERD, ERD, Typically Developing (TD)) using multiple measures across first through fourth grade modeled as latent classes. LERD subtypes were also identified: those with primary deficits in word reading (LERD-W), comprehension (LERD-C), or both (LERD-CW). We analyzed vocabulary z-scores (normed within this sample) from grade 1 (Woodcock Johnson Vocabulary subtest) and grade 5 (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). Results There was a significant interaction between group (ERD vs. LERD) and vocabulary (F(1, 66)=5.22, p<.05): vocabulary z-scores of children with LERD decreased from grade 1 to grade 5, while that of children with ERD increased. Next we explored the vocabulary of LERD subtypes. Children with LERD-W showed vocabulary scores similar to ERD and TD groups; however, the vocabulary of LERD-C and LERD-CW decreased. Conclusion Perhaps relatively strong grade 1 vocabulary allows children with LERD to compensate for other reading related weaknesses and be temporarily classified as TD. However, this relative strength is not enough to bolster their reading performance in grade 5 when texts become more challenging.
Brett Miller (Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) - Current funding opportunities available from the National Institutes of Health
This poster will present current funding opportunities available from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and independent researchers interested in additional training, mentorship or research funding with a specific focus on scientific topics related to literacy and related learning disabilities. A program staff member will be available to answer general questions about NIH funding or questions about funding for specific research projects or training opportunities for individuals from U.S. or non-U.S. institutions.
Jennifer Minas (Harvard Medical School/Childrens Hospital Boston); Christopher Benjamin; Nadine Gaab; - Examining neural correlates of reading fluency in children with and without developmental dyslexia
Purpose: Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition. Studies have shown deficits in left-hemispheric posterior brain regions in individuals with DD during reading-related tasks. However, little is known about the neural correlates of reading fluency in children with/without DD. Previous neuroimaging studies in adults have shown reading speed-related changes especially within fusiform gyrus. It remains unclear whether similar results can be observed in the developing reading network and in children with/without DD. Methods: Using fMRI, we investigated neural correlates of reading fluency in twenty-two children with/without DD. Children were asked to silently read a sentence, presented one word at a time, and choose a pictures that best described the meaning. The sentences were presented with three speeds: slow (fixed), comfortable, and fast. The rate of comfortable sentence speed was individually determined beforehand and fast sentences were presented 30% faster. Results: As speed increased, overall brain activation decreased in both groups. For fast>slow sentences, children with DD showed significantly lower activation in inferior-frontal, superior-temporal, and fusiform-gyrus. Children with with DD showed significantly greater activation in the inferior-parietal and middle-temporal-gyrus. Conclusion: Our preliminary results indicate that typically developing children are recruiting components of the reading network when forced to read faster than their comfortable reading speed, whereas the children with DD showed areas associated with orthographic to phonological mapping. This may suggest that intervention programs aimed to improve reading fluency should target several components of the reading network including orthographic to phonological processing.
Alison Mitchell (University of Rhode Island)Susan Brady, Voting Member, sbrady@uri.edu, University of Rhode Island and Haskins Laboratories - Studying the Development of Morphological Knowledge in Elementary School Students with Real Word and Pseudoword Tasks
Purpose Morphological skills have been associated with performance on multiple literacy outcomes. While growth in derived word knowledge has been documented during mid-elementary grades, little research has studied the development of knowledge of specific morphemes, separate from whole word knowledge. The goal here was to examine the development of knowledge of a set of affixes in real word tasks and independent of word knowledge in pseudoword tasks. Method 45 third-grade and 32 fifth-grade students participated. Students were assessed on word identification, vocabulary knowledge, reading experience, and affix knowledge. 32 affixes (16 prefixes; 16 suffixes) were studied in the affix measures. Real words selected for the study were low frequency words that included a high frequency word base and a targeted affix (e.g., warmish). Pseudowords (e.g., moxish) were created by combining an affix with a pseudobase whose meaning was provided to the students (e.g., mox means smooth). Results Preliminary analyses indicated a wide range of affix knowledge; some morpheme meanings were well known to students (e.g., ish), while others were much less familiar (e.g., ist). Overall fifth graders demonstrated greater knowledge of affixes on both morpheme tasks. However, vocabulary knowledge accounted for more variance in predicting morpheme knowledge performance than did age. Notably, the pseudoword task discerned knowledge of morphemes independent of word knowledge. Conclusions The results show that morpheme knowledge develops as grades progress, but that other language and literacy factors significantly impact this development. Use of pseudoword tasks offers a useful technique for the study of morpheme knowledge development.
Jianhong Lanny Mo ();Shingfong, Chan;Catherine McBride-Chang - Hand writing fluency as a specific Predictor for Chinese Writing Composition of Children in Hong Kong
Purpose: This study had two purposes, 1) to test the stability of a developed writing scheme and 2) to examine the association between hand writing fluency and Chinese writing composition skills among children ages 9-10 from Hong Kong. Method: There were 139 children in this study. Writing composition in Chinese was collected at ages 9 and10. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to abstract a single factor to represent children's writing composition ability. Two tasks of handwriting fluency (numbers writing and sentence writing within 1 minute) were used as predictors of writing ability at age 10, in order to test the unique predictive power of writing fluency. Both tasks were administered at ages 9 and 10. Results: The reliabilities among all seven writing coding dimensions at ages 9 and 10 were moderate (from .23 to.39). Results of CFA included 5 elements (relevance, breadth, sentence level organization, paragraph level organization and intelligibility) to form an adequate single factorial model. The total score of these elements was conceptualized as representing overall writing composition quality. Results for children at age 9 replicated those for age 10. In regression analyses, number writing fluency uniquely explained 4% additional variance in overall writing at age 10, even with gender, age, and the writing composition ability at age 9 controlled. For age 10, the sentence writing fluency task, rather than the number writing task, uniquely accounted for 8% additional variance in overall writing at age 10, with age 9 predictors statistically controlled. Conclusion: The writing composition model was stable across years and was uniquely explained partly by writing fluency skills. Writing fluency may be an important tool to use in explaining subsequent writing composition ability.
Kristina Moll (University of York); Maggie Snowling - Cognitive endophenotypes of dyslexia
Purpose: This paper presents data from the first phase of a longitudinal study of English speaking children with family-risk of dyslexia. The study investigates cognitive endophenotypes of dyslexia by comparing school-aged children with family-risk of dyslexia (literacy impaired and non-impaired) and typically developing children from homes in which there is no history of reading impairment. Method: Altogether 88 children, aged 6 to 11, have been tested on a large neurocognitive battery including phonological tasks, verbal memory, language measures and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Regression analyses have been used to analyse the impact of having a risk factor and the impact of being affected on these measures. Results: The results show that while language measures and RAN are associated with the literacy deficit only, the phonological tasks are linked to both, the risk factor and the literacy deficit factor. Conclusions: The data are interpreted in the framework of a broader phenotype of dyslexia.
Janelle Montroy (Michigan State University)Lori E. Skibbe, Ryan P. Bowles, Tricia D. Finger - The role of problem behaviors and social skills in the relation between behavioral self regulation and academic achievement in preschool
Purpose - Behavioral self regulation is an important aspect of school readiness that is predictive of academic achievement. We test two possible mechanisms through which self-regulation may relate to academic achievement: behavior problems and social skills. Method - Preschool children (n = 291) were tested in the fall and spring using a behavioral self regulation task, Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders, that required children to perform the opposite gesture of what they were instructed. They were also tested on one math (Test of Mathematics Ability) and three literacy measures capturing phonological awareness, letter knowledge and early decoding skills. Teacher reports of social skills and problem behavior were collected using the Social Skills Rating System. Results - We utilized a mediation analysis within a structural equation modeling approach. Children's fall self regulation was related to a fall literacy factor, β = 0.36, p < .05, as well as fall math, β = 0.42, p < .05. However, self regulation only predicted growth in literacy, (β = 0.17, p = .05) not math (p = .96). Both social skills and problem behaviors mediated the relationship between fall self regulation and growth in literacy, accounting for 60% and 57% of the relationship, respectively. When considered together, these measures account for 70% of the relationship. Conclusions - Both social skills and problem behaviors are important mechanisms through which self regulation predicts growth in early literacy skills. This suggests that self regulation supports school readiness through how a child behaves in the classroom.
Paul Morphy ()Steve Graham - Frederick Douglass and I: Writing to Read and Relate (W2R) personal and historical narratives for improving reading comprehension, topic knowledge, and topic interest among eighth-grade African American males attending high-poverty, urban schools
Purpose - This study tested, Writing to Read and Relate (W2R), a self-reflective, analytical writing innovation for Social Studies comprehension, to determine W2R's effectiveness for improving comprehension, knowledge, and motivation (topic interest and volition) outcomes among a group of 40 African American middle school males attending high-poverty schools. The study tested 11 directional hypotheses that stated which, generally, asserted that treatment students would demonstrate significantly better deep comprehension, knowledge, and motivation when compared to control students. Method - 40 Black middle school males attending high-poverty schools (≥76 percent free lunch), with reading and writing skills at or above 4th grade equivalence, were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. While both treatment and control condition students were individually tutored while reading and writing concerning texts, treatment students were given additional support (W2R) for explicitly comparing and contrasting their own life story with that of the historical narrative while implicitly examining the narrative's potential self-relevance. Results- Multi-level univariate multiple regressions indicated that treatment students exceeded controls in inferential comprehension, knowledge (recall of facts), situation models of text read, and motivation/interest to reengage the text (volition). Conversely, control students demonstrated increases in verbatim text representations. Conclusions - These findings indicate the potential of writing for mediating the comprehension of difficult primary text among at-risk students. Further, they indicate that writing which is structured to be self-reflective may be made a tool to multiple academic ends (i.e., comprehension, knowledge, and interest). These findings have broad implications for instructional practice and curriculum development.
Lori Morris (Université du Québec à Montréal) - Identifying at-risk pre-schoolers in a bilingual aboriginal population
Purpose Staggeringly high percentages of Canada's aboriginal children lag behind age norms in reading. In many instances the children's lags are attributable to their bilingual context and low SES, and can be addressed within regular instructional setups. In other instances, lags are indicative of a true reading disability requiring professional intervention. Separating out the two types of lags is important, but determining what is attributable to what in a population of young speakers of an endangered polysynthetic language for which no benchmarks have been established represents a significant challenge. This paper describes our efforts to develop a K to 2 bilingual assessment sequence capable of identifying truly at-risk children as of Kindergarten. Method Now in its fourth year, our study tracks the development of literacy subskills in Innu-speaking children being schooled in French. 442 French assessments have been conducted on 267 K to 2 children using tasks from the Nouvelles épreuves pour l'examen du langage (Chevrié-Muller & Plaza 2001). In addition, an Innu language instrument has been created for assessing lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge (close to 250 assessments conducted to date to determine the L1 knowledge range in the community). Results Community norms for French testing have been established by task, taking into account overall group performance and the potential effects of Innu-language dominance on each task. Conclusions Canada's aboriginal populations are the fastest growing in the country and their school success rates are the lowest. Developing assessment instruments that can help get First Nations children the type of support they need is critical.
Jack Mostow (Carnegie-Melon University ); Jessica Nelson; Martin Kantorzyk; Donna Gates; Joe Valeri - How does the amount of context in which words are practiced affect fluency growth? Experimental results
Purpose: Previous studies have shown that practice reading words in running text transfers better to reading them in new text than practicing them in isolation does. Why? I.e., which cognitive processes while reading words in connected text improve their transfer to reading them fluently in new text? What context allows these processes? Seeing a word bi-gram permits parafoveal lookahead at the next word. Seeing a complete phrase allows syntactic parsing. Seeing a complete sentence allows (intra-sentential) comprehension. Method: Project LISTEN's automated Reading Tutor administers a randomized, within-subject, within-story experiment. Before a new story, it previews the five longest story words the child has not previously encountered in the Reading Tutor. The child reads one word in isolation, one in a bi-gram, one in a phrase, one in a sentence, and one not at all, as a no-exposure control. The outcome variable for each of these 5 matched trials is the time to read the word at the first encounter in the story itself. Results: Preliminary data suggested a trend favoring the sentence condition over the no-exposure control. Data now being logged should help resolve differences among the 5 types of practice. Conclusions: The results of this experiment should clarify the relative value of practicing words in differing amounts of context, their cost effectiveness in view of the extra time for longer contexts, and the theoretical implications for the role of word context in fluency development.
Marloes Muijselaar (University of Amsterdam)Annemarie Davelaar; Peter de Jong - Does the relationship between working memory and reading comprehension depend on the type of reading comprehension measure?
Purpose. In this study we examined the relation between working memory and reading comprehension. Text comprehension concerns the construction of a coherent representation of a text, a dynamic process in which current representations are altered as new information is read. We hypothesized that this online process depends on the updating component of working memory. Updating might be particularly important in cloze measures of reading comprehension, whereas it might be less involved in measures of reading comprehension with texts followed by questions. Accordingly, we hypothesized that working memory, especially updating, is related to reading comprehension, and in particular when reading comprehension is measured with a cloze test. Method. In Study 1 participants were 102 fourth graders. Measures of reading comprehension (cloze and question-answering format) and two updating tasks were selected. In Study 2, which is more extensive and currently conducted, comprehension (cloze and question-answering format), and other updating tasks (with and without a semantic criterion) will be measured in 180 fourth graders. In addition, the use of reading strategies, word decoding and vocabulary will be administered. Data collection for Study 2 will be completed by February 2012. Results. The results of Study 1 show a relation between updating and reading comprehension, but only when the cloze task is used as a measure of comprehension. Interestingly, word identification is similarly related to both test formats. Conclusions. The relation between working memory and reading comprehension is dependent on the type of comprehension measure. Further results and conclusions will be presented at the conference.
Amy Murdoch (College of Mount St. Joseph)Richard Sparks--College of Mount St. Joseph - Early Reading Skill and Its Relationship to Reading Volume (Print Exposure) Over 10 Years
Purpose: This prospective study was designed to replicate Cunningham's and Stanovich's (1997) longitudinal investigation in which they followed 27 students over ten years to examine early reading acquisition and its relationship to reading experience and reading skills. In the present study, we followed 54 students from 1st-10th grades and asked: a) Does print exposure (reading volume) explain additional variance in 10th grade reading comprehension, language, and general knowledge skills?; b) Do print exposure and early literacy skills predict reading comprehension and general knowledge in 10th grade?; and c) Does print exposure in 10th grade predict growth in decoding and reading comprehension skills in 1st through 5th grades? Method: Fifty-four (54) students were followed over 10 years and administered: a) measures of literacy, i.e., word decoding, comprehension, spelling, phoneme awareness, cognitive ability, and vocabulary at the beginning and end of 1st grade and at the end of 2nd, 3rd, and 5th grades; and b) measures of reading comprehension, language, print exposure (ART, MRT; see Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997), and general knowledge in 10th grade (high school). Results: Hierarchical regression analyses found that: a) after controlling for IQ, print exposure accounted for substantial variance in 10th grade reading comprehension, language, and general knowledge skills; b) print exposure and early literacy skills predicted a substantial proportion of additional variance in 10th grade reading comprehension and general knowledge skills; and c) print exposure in 10th grade predicted individual differences in the growth of decoding and reading comprehension skills from 1st to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd, 3rd to 5th, and 5th to 10th grades. Conclusions: The findings replicate those of Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) and demonstrate the reciprocal influences of print exposure and early reading acquisition as determinants of later reading comprehension and other cognitive outcomes. Reading volume over time further develops reading comprehension skills and provides an explanation for long-term differences in language-related skills
Victoria Murphy (Department of Education, University of Oxford)Ernesto Macaro, Sonia Alba, Claudia Cipolla - Learning a second language can facilitate developing first language literacy skills
Purpose: a) To identify whether second language (L2) instruction delivered to monolingual 8-year old children would influence their developing first language (L1) English reading and spelling skills b) to identify whether the transparency of the Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) in the L2 acts as a contributing variable to developing L1 literacy skills. Method: 151 native-speaking English children were recruited from English primary schools and randomly allocated to one of 3 groups: L2 Italian (with transparent GPCs), L2 French (with opaque GPCs) or Control. All children were pre-tested on a range of standardized measures assessing their English reading and spelling skills: The Single Word Spelling test (SWST), Neal Assessment of Reading Ability (NARA), Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB). The children in the two L2 groups received 15 weeks (at one hour / week) of the relevant L2 instruction (either Italian or French). All children were then post-tested on the same standardized assessments of English reading and spelling. Results: Children who participated in the taught L2 groups outperformed children in the control groups on the SWST, the NARA accuracy sub-test and a number of sub-tests of the PhAB. Children in the L2 Italian group scored higher than the L2 French on the NARA accuracy, and PhAB Alliteration, Rhyme, Spoonerisms and nonword reading sub-tests. Conclusions: Knowledge of L2s with more transparent GPCs has a greater influence on developing L1 literacy than with more opaque GPCs. Introducing a taught L2 in primary schools can facilitate developing L1 literacy skills
Sonali Nag (University of York, UK); Charles Hulme; Maggie Snowling - Learning the Kannada akshara: the role of child and symbol characteristics
Purpose Kannada has 400 odd akshara symbols. The processes that support their learning are not fully understood though we know that poor readers make errors with akshara recognition well into middle school, with some akshara more problematic than others. We therefore examined the unique role of symbol features and of multiple child variables in explaining individual differences in akshara learning. Method 136 children in pre-school-Grade 1 ((Mean age = 71.67 months, SD = 8.52) were tested at t1 and again eight months later. All children were given the tasks of akshara recognition, Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, visual memory, phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge, RAN for objects and visual search. Results Multi-level modeling showed that the less a symbol appeared in books and the more the visual features in the symbols were confusable, the harder it was for children to recognise them. Further, differences in phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge and visual processing explained individual differences in symbol knowledge. Conclusions These findings imply that in the visuo-spatially complex Kannada alphasyllabary, in addition to the child's phonological skills, vocabulary knowledge and visual processing skills, both frequency and visuo-spatial confusability also matter for symbol learning.
Hannah Nash (The University of York); Debbie Gooch; Maggie Snowling; Charles Hulme - Early language and literacy skills in children at family risk of dyslexia: a comparison with SLI
Purpose: This paper reports findings from a 5 year longitudinal study investigating the overlap between dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI). We know that there is considerable overlap between the two disorders in the school years and that dyslexic children experience early language difficulties. However, it is not clear whether these difficulties resemble those seen in SLI. Method: We recruited 205 children aged 3-4 years and assessed their language and early literacy skills then (T1) and again 1 year later, age 4-5 (T2). These children were divided into 4 groups; family risk for dyslexia (FR, N=59), language impaired (LI, N=40), FR+LI (N=24), or typically developing (TD, N=82). Results: At T1 the FRLI children's language profiles resembled those of the LI children in both nature and severity. The remaining FR children showed weaknesses in phonology. At T2, the LI children showed severe and pervasive language difficulties and the FRLI children were similar except that they had better semantic knowledge, were better able to inflect verbs but had poorer rapid naming speed (RAN). As a group the remaining FR children showed phonological weaknesses and had poorer RAN, but there was variability within the group. Many of the LI and FRLI children and some of the FR children had poor letter knowledge; which was predicted by age, T1 letter knowledge, phonological awareness and RAN. Conclusions: Approximately 1/3 of FR children meet criteria for SLI in the preschool years. Those FR children who do not meet criteria for SLI show phonological weaknesses and slower RAN. Both poor phonological awareness and slow RAN appear to be risk factors for early literacy difficulties.
Kate Nation (University of Oxford); Elizabeth Wonnacott; Holly Joseph; - Is children's reading comprehension "good enough": using eye movements to investigate on-line processing in developing readers
Purpose When reading sentences such as "While Anna dressed the baby played in its crib", followed by a comprehension question probing the temporary misinterpretation, e.g. "Did Anna dress the baby?, adults incorrectly answer "yes" the majority of the time, suggesting that temporary ambiguities are not necessarily fully resolved during on-line processing (processing is "good-enough") and that alternative interpretations may linger. However little is currently known about how comprehension is related to the earlier processing of the sentence, or about children's behaviour. We asked children to read garden-paths while we monitored their eye-movements, allowing us to investigate the relationship between online processing and offline comprehension. Method 86 children (9-10 years) read sentences and responded to questions after each in three conditions as we monitored eye-movements: garden-path (While Anna dressed the baby played in its crib); comma control (While Anna dressed, the baby played in its crib) and reversed control (The baby played in its crib while Anna dressed). Results Children made significantly more errors on questions following garden-path. The eye movement record showed effects in the region following the disambiguating word, with more regressions for garden-path sentences. For these sentences only, the probability of a correct response was significantly higher if the child had made a regression during reading. Conclusions Difficulties in on-line processing linger, influencing off-line comprehension. On-going work is relating children's eye-movement data to their performance on various measures of reading and verbal working memory, with a view to further elucidating the nature of individual differences in reading comprehension.
Jessica Nelson (University of Pittsburgh); Charles Perfetti; David Liben; Meredith Liben - An empirical examination of text complexity metrics
Purpose: Many groups are actively working on developing quantitative metrics for measuring text complexity. In cooperation with these groups, including MetaMetrics (Lexiles), Questar Assessment, Inc. (DRP), Renaissance Learning (ATOS), ETS (SourceRater), Pearson Knowledge Technologies (Reading Maturity), and Coh-metrix, we sought to characterize how the wide range of metrics correlated with other measures of text difficulty, including student comprehension performance and grade level. Method: We correlated each of the text complexity metrics with comparison measures of text difficulty, including expert ratings of passage grade level, passage grade level from standardized tests, and Rasch scores based on student performance on comprehension questions or cloze questions. When possible, we also divided the texts into lower vs. upper grades and informational vs. narrative genres. Results: All of the measures were highly correlated with measures of student comprehension of passages (estimated through Rasch scores from comprehension tests and cloze scores). Word Maturity and SourceRater measures, which incorporate a wider variety of text features into their computations than more traditional readability metrics, were more highly correlated with estimated grade levels of texts, especially as determined by human experts, than other metrics. Differences in correlations also occurred between different text genres (narrative vs. informational) and grade bands (lower vs. upper grades). Conclusion: Using measures of vocabulary difficulty and syntactic complexity to estimate text complexity accounts for a large amount of variance in students' ability to answer comprehension questions about texts. Incorporating additional measures of text features into text complexity estimates may enable closer approximations of human judgements of text complexity.
Sabina Neugebauer (Loyola University Chicago)John Madura;Michael Coyne;Betsy McCoach;Sharon Ware;Ashley Capozzoli - Examining Instrumentalist and Metalinguistic Hypotheses: What mechanisms explain the relationships among general vocabulary knowledge, response to an intensive vocabulary intervention, and literacy related outcomes?
Purpose The positive relationship between vocabulary and literacy-related outcomes is well documented. Multiple hypotheses regarding the mechanisms that explain these relationships have been posited; the instrumentalist and metalinguistic hypotheses receiving the most attention. Yet, scant research has empirically tested these hypotheses or explored how these mechanisms may be moderated by intensive vocabulary instruction. The present study examines the mechanisms that explain relationships among general vocabulary knowledge, response to vocabulary instruction, and listening comprehension and distal vocabulary knowledge performance. Methods 204 kindergarteners from 19 classrooms participated in a quasi-experimental study. All students received classroom vocabulary instruction and 57 "at-risk" students received a supplemental 20-week intervention. Measures included general vocabulary knowledge assessed pre- and post-intervention (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV) and researcher-developed post-test target word measures of expressive vocabulary and listening comprehension. Structural equation modeling explored structural paths among these measures and whether the relationships were moderated by intervention participation. Results Findings indicate that for intervention students the relationship between pre-general vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension was fully mediated by post-test target word knowledge. Comparison students exhibited partial mediation only. The relationship between pre-general and post-general vocabulary knowledge for intervention students was partially mediated by target word performance. For those not receiving the intervention pre-general vocabulary knowledge exhibited a direct relationship with post-general vocabulary knowledge, and target word knowledge exhibited no mediation. Conclusions Results of SEM models support both the instrumental and metalinguistic hypothesis, with student responsiveness to the intervention moderating the mediational relationship between pre-vocabulary scores on near transfer and distal outcomes.
Damaris Ngorosho (Agency for the Development of Educational Management)Prof. Ulla Lahtinen - The role of the home environment in phonological awareness and reading and writing ability in Tanzanian primary schoolchildren
The role of the home environment in phonological awareness and reading and writing ability in Tanzanian primary schoolchildren Abstract In developing countries, the role of home environment in children's development of literacy skills is largely unknown. This study examines the relationship in a sample of 75 grade two children from rural Tanzania. It also discusses the role of house building material and domestic facilities, in addition to parents' education and occupation, in describing socioeconomic status in developing countries in general, and in the current study. Most of the factors were significantly (ANOVA) related to phonological awareness and reading and writing. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis identified fathers' education and mothers' occupation as strong predictors. The home environment variables accounted for 25% of the variance in phonological awareness and 19% in reading and writing ability. Early screening and support of children in the risk zone of becoming poor readers are proposed. Activities like children's book projects and school library facilities are suggested aiming at supporting literacy-related activities in low capacity homes. Key words: home environment, phonological awareness, reading and writing ability, Kiswahili, transparent orthography, Tanzania.
Tom Nicholson (Centre of Excellence for Research on Children's Literacy, Massey University)Louise Turner; Laura Tse; Margaret Bryan - Can books and vocabulary quizzes stop the summer slide in reading?
Researchers have found that students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds lose ground in reading achievement over the summer holidays (Cooper et al., 1996; Downey et al., 2004; Alexander and Entwisle, 1996; Alexander et al., 2007). This is the summer slide. Reading books can have a positive effect on the summer slide, especially for children from middle class backgrounds but the studies are far from conclusive and tend to be unsuccessful with low-income pupils (e.g., Kim, 2006, 2007; Kim & White, 2008; Kim and Guryan, 2010; Allington, McGill-Franzen, Camilli, Williams, Graff, Zeig, et al., 2010). The purpose of this study was to give free books to Year 3 pupils to read over the summer holidays, as a way to stop the summer slide. The method was that nearly 600 children, in random groups, from 10 primary schools ranging from low to high income, either: a) read 25 self-selected books at their level, b) read 25 self-selected books and completed vocabulary quizzes, c) completed two math activity books at their level that their school selected for them - this was a treatment control group, or d) did what they normally did in summer - this group got books after the summer holidays - this was a no-treatment control group Children in the book groups selected, in total, around 11,000 books to read over the summer. The project involved the cooperation of schools and parents as partners, to motivate children to meet this reading challenge during their holiday break. The data are under analysis.
Mark Noordenbos (Radboud University Nijmegen); Eliane Segers; Ludo Verhoeven - Global similarity effect in children at risk for dyslexia: an EEG study
Purpose: Accurate phonological representations are crucial for the development of efficient reading skills. It is well established that phonological awareness is strongly related to reading acquisition. Most children have developed rhyming skills before they start learning to read. However, studies have shown that preschool children often judged overlapping word pairs (bell - ball) incorrectly as rhyming pairs (e.g., Cardoso-Martins, 1994; Carrol & Snowling, 2001). This suggests the use of global, rather than well-specified phonological representations which are necessary to develop efficient reading skills. We examined if beginning first-grade readers at-risk for dyslexia and controls showed a global similarity effect, using ERPs. The hypothesis is that children at-risk for dyslexia will show a global similarity effect, whereas controls will be less affected, because of their better phonological representations. Method: Children at-risk for dyslexia (n=33) and chronological-age controls children (n=32) participated. Neurological data and reaction times were recorded as participants took part in a rhyme judgement task. Each target word was linked to three different primes (rhyming, overlap, or unrelated). Results: Preliminary results show that both control and at-risk children showed a rhyme effect for the rhyming primes compared to the unrelated primes. In contrast to control children, at risk children showed a global similarity effect, indicating that they misjudged the overlapping pairs as rhyming pairs. Conclusion: Children at risk for dyslexia used a global phonological similarity strategy to solve the rhyme judgement task. Implications for reading acquisition by these children, as well as future research directions, will be discussed.
Elizabeth Norton (MIT); Sara D. Beach; Abigail B. Cyr; Ola Ozernov-Palchik; Keri-Lee A. Garel; Tyler K. Perrachione; Maryanne Wolf; John D. E. Gabrieli; Nadine Gaab - Brain differences in kindergarten children with and without behavioral risk for dyslexia: Toward finding fMRI and EEG predictors of reading difficulties
Purpose - Despite the importance of early identification for remediating reading difficulties, behavioral assessments alone have yet to successfully predict which children will develop dyslexia. However, recent studies have utilized neuroimaging measures to predict later reading ability in struggling school-age readers and in children at familial risk for dyslexia. Two brain measurements have been shown to predict later reading: 1) fMRI activation for phonological awareness (PA) and 2) EEG/ERP mismatch negativity (MMN). We examined whether these brain measures differed in kindergartners who demonstrated risk for dyslexia based on commonly used behavioral measures. Method - Kindergartners were identified as typical (n=11) or at-risk (n=12) based on measures of PA, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and letter knowledge. During 3T fMRI, children performed phonological first-sound matching and control voice matching auditory tasks. During EEG, children passively listened to natural speech syllables (90% standards/10% deviants) in an auditory oddball MMN paradigm. Results - fMRI: Typical children exhibited significantly greater activation in left IFG and left DLPFC than those at risk for dyslexia (p<0.001, cluster-level corrected). Children at risk for dyslexia exhibited significantly greater activation than typical children in several frontal areas as well as in left supramarginal/precentral gyrus. ERP: At-risk children had significantly attenuated MMN difference wave amplitude at frontal electrode sites compared to typical children. Conclusions - We observed differences between groups of kindergarteners based on behavioral risk of dyslexia in reading-related brain areas and ERP components. These findings provide a step toward using neuroimaging in order to more accurately predict dyslexia in kindergarten.
Sarah Nowak ()Mary Ann Evans - Parent's goals for alphabet books
Purpose: This study examined parents' goals for reading ABC books with their young children. Method: Factor analysis was performed on a questionnaire answered by 225 parents of junior and senior kindergarten students. One-way analysis of variance examined demographic and reading behaviours in relation to parental goals. Results: Four goals for reading alphabet books were found. In order of importance as rated by parents the goals were: Learning to Read, Enjoyment and Bonding, Learning from Books, and Soothe the Child. Maternal education, number of ABC books owned and ABC book reading frequency were found to be related to parents' goals. Conclusion: The different goals which emerged in this study in comparison to previous research on parental goals for reading storybooks with their children may reflect parent perceptions that alphabet books are a unique form of children's literature to be used differently than storybooks.
Tenaha O'Reilly (ETS)John Sabatini; Kelly Bruce; Laura Halderman - Does length matter? The relative contribution of local and global understanding on students' ability to write summaries.
Purpose - to develop a reading comprehension assessment for middle school students that assess students' ability to write summaries and comprehend text at both local and global levels of understanding. We hypothesized that global understanding would predict unique variance in summary scores above and over the effect of local understanding and summary length and that performance would vary as a function of grade level. Method - 134 6th, 7th 8th grade students were administered a 26-item reading comprehension assessment. The measure captured students' ability to understand local concepts; identify global relationships; complete a graphic organizer; evaluate elements of a summary, and the ability to write and revise summaries. Regression analyses were run to determine the relative contribution of local, global and summary length on the quality of summary scores. Results -Cronbach's alpha for the assessment was =.87 indicating the assessment had an acceptable level of reliability for making decisions about student ability. Mean performance on the items varied as a function of grade level in expected ways. While most students displayed adequate local understanding of the passages (M=.71), global understanding (M=.42) was lacking in many students. Global understanding predicted unique variance in the summary scores above and over local understanding, summary length and grade level (R2=.67). Conclusions - Reading comprehension is a complex process that contains many elements. While length does predict summary scores, independent measures of local and global comprehension also contribute to understanding. These results demonstrate the potential for creating reading comprehension assessments that are more informative for learning and instruction.
o Natalie Olinghouse (University of Connecticut) - Stability and predictors of writing classifications
Purpose -Research Questions: 1) Are classifications of students (Basic, Proficient, Advanced) consistent across written genres? 2) What are the predictors of these classifications? 3) What are the profiles of students who are consistently rated as Basic? Method - Students wrote three compositions: story, persuasive, informative. Each focused on the topic of outer space, assessed through a topic knowledge test. Compositions were scored for holistic quality to classify students as Basic, Proficient, or Advanced writers (using cut points similar to large-scale assessment programs). Additional measures included genre-specific elements, paragraph composition, grammatical accuracy, vocabulary diversity, and spelling. These measures were used as predictors of classification. Results - RQ1: Only 25% of students received the same classification across the three genres. Over half (55%) moved between Basic/Proficient, depending on the genre. RQ2: Predictors explained 61% of the variance in classifications. Unique predictors were genre elements, spelling, vocabulary, and topic knowledge. RQ3: Ten students were classified as Basic writers in all genres. Each student was consistently below average in inclusion and quality of genre elements. In the other measures, there was considerable variability within measure and student in performance. Conclusions - Inferences made about students' writing abilities appear to be limited to the specific task being assessed. The writing components deemed important to overall writing ability predicted significant variance in classification, indicating the need to more fully understand writing components. Although some students demonstrated consistently low writing ability based on holistic scores, their writing abilities were quite varied across different writing components.
Richard Olson (University of Colorado) - Discussion of the four papers on biometric growth curve modeling of reading development
The purpose of this session is to allow an in-depth discussion of the complex modeling and measurement issues that are raised across the four symposium papers, and of the broader implications of their results for our understanding of early reading development. Richard Olson will moderate the discussion.
Eduardo Onochie-Quintanilla (); Eduardo Onochie-Quintanilla; Ian Simpson; Sylvia Defior - The role of naming speed, phonological awareness and visual attention in sequential decoding and orthographic processing
Purpose: Many Theories which attempt to explain the underlying mechanisms in reading propose that written words can be processed in one of two ways: orthographically (sight word reading) or through grapheme to phoneme conversion. It is reasonable to think that if two different methods are being used, the reader is also likely to rely on different cognitive processes when using each of these methods for processing text. We explored this hypothesis by observing the contribution of key literacy predictors to reading and spelling. Method: 171 native Spanish children (mean age 7;4) were assessed in naming speed (RAN), phonological awareness (PA) and visual attention (VA) at the beginning of second grade. Their performance on orthographic and sequential grapheme processing was assessed six months later (mean age 7;10) through reading, writing and orthographic choice tasks. Results: While PA contributed independently to all measures of reading and writing, VA proved to be an independent predictor of the reading fluency and orthographic choice measures, but not of non-word (NW) reading accuracy and NW spelling. RAN also predicted a unique amount of variance in all measures, including NW reading accuracy and NW spelling. Conclusions: We interpret the results as evidence that PA is involved in the processing of correspondences between graphemes and phonemes, while VA seems to be a crucial ability in processing familiar orthographic patterns, particularly in words with inconsistent spellings. Furthermore, our results suggest RAN's predictive power might be indicative of the strength of the link between orthographic and phonological information.
Eric Oslund (Texas A&M University)Deborah Simmons; Shanna Hagan-Burke; Aaron Taylor; Oi-man Kwok - Kindergarten progress-monitoring predictors of end-of-first grade reading outcomes
Purpose. In this study, we investigated the longitudinal predictive validity of individual skills (e.g., letter name knowledge, phonemic segmentation) in curriculum-embedded mastery assessments administered at three points in kindergarten on children's end-of-first-grade reading outcomes. Method. Participants were 232 children who participated in a tier-two kindergarten reading intervention. They received approximately 115 lessons of explicit and systematic code-based instruction in groups of 3-5 students, 30 minutes per day. CEMs were collected at the end of each program component (i.e., approximately every 8 weeks) and used to predict phonemic and decoding latent outcomes. Results. Structural equation modeling indicated that multi-skill progress monitoring assessments explained between 57% (by early December) and 83% (by late April) of the variance on the phonemic latent outcome and between 40% and 43% on the decoding outcome. Predictors differed across time points. The strongest predictors for both phonemic and decoding outcomes at the respective three measurement points were (a) identifying the first sound of a word presented orally, (b) producing letter-sound correspondences, and (c) whole word phonemic segmentation and word reading. Conclusions. Findings indicate that end-of-first-grade outcomes of children who participated in supplemental intervention can be reliably predicted by multi-skill mastery checks taken in kindergarten. A parsimonious set of measures that changed over time reliably predicted both phonemic and decoding outcomes. Predictors reflect the developmental progression of reading skills with earlier predictors involving letter sound knowledge and later predictors involving segmenting and word reading.
Chantal Ouellet (Département d'éducation et formation spécialisées)Élisabeth Boily; Anne Wagner; Catherine Turcotte; Isabelle Gauvin; France Dubé; Nathalie Prévost - The relations between Quebec students performances in spelling and grammar, their metagraphical comments and their teachers' pedagogical practices
For Quebec students, spelling and grammar are a pet peeve, due to the forbidding nature of teaching methods, the multiple dimensions of French orthography (Catach, 1978) and a relationship between an insufficient mastery of written French and academic failure. This project has three objectives: 1) to establish spelling and metagraphical profiles of grade six elementary school students, first year high school students, and students in difficulty; 2) to document their teachers' pedagogical practices; and 3) to establish links between teachers' practices and students' spelling and metagraphical profiles. Dictation was administered to 209 students at the beginning and end of the 2010-2011 school year. Following a second dictation, 72 of them were interviewed to collect their metagraphical comments on 12 words requiring grammatical agreement. Teachers' pedagogical practices were recorded by means of a log. Statistically significant results based on the entire sample indicate: very little difference between the performances of sixth grade students and those in the first year of high school; greater progress for students in sixth grade; no difference between boys and girls; and a relationship between these results and teaching practices. Results from the metagraphical interviews indicate that the weakest students use semantic procedures more than syntactic strategies. Mistakes in spelling and grammar being the most frequent in French, these results will contribute to the body of knowledge on the question and will have an effect on the plan of action to improve the quality of French.
Gene Ouellette (Mount Allison University); Ally Haley - Semantics and early literacy: Oral vocabulary matters in the first year of reading instruction too
Purpose: To elucidate the contributions of oral vocabulary and alphabetic knowledge to phonological awareness growth across the first year of schooling, and to explore whether vocabulary influences early reading and spelling skills, beyond any relation with phonological awareness. Method: We examined the connections between oral vocabulary breadth (PPVT-4) and alphabetic knowledge (letter names/sounds) measured early in kindergarten, and phonological awareness (CTOPP), reading (WRMT/word lists), and spelling (dictation of words varying in orthography-phonology consistency) evaluated one year later in grade 1. Results. The relations between oral vocabulary and phonological awareness varied with the type of phonological awareness evaluated. There were moderate associations with concurrent larger-segment awareness and phonemic blending in kindergarten, and a longitudinal correlation with phonemic segmentation in grade 1. This latter pattern of influence remained even when controlling for alphabetic knowledge and any autoregressive effects of kindergarten phonological awareness. Regression analysis also revealed that vocabulary did not appear to influence grade 1 reading beyond its association with phonological awareness, but did contribute to early spelling skills beyond alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. Conclusions: These results suggest that the role of oral vocabulary in literacy skill acquisition begins during early literacy instruction through its influence on phonological awareness and early spelling. Results are discussed with reference to explanatory theory that links phonological awareness to expansion of the oral lexicon, as well as to proposals that early spelling offers an important window into early literacy.
Stephanie Pagan (Carleton University & Ottawa-Carleton District School Board)Stephanie Pagan; Monique Senechal - Fostering Aboriginal Children's Reading Motivation and Achievement with a 4-week Paired-Reading Intervention with Parents.
Purpose: There is great disparity in literacy ability among Canadians with the greatest risk of low literacy being among Aboriginal populations. As a result, the present study worked in collaboration with a First Nations community to foster Aboriginal children's reading motivation and achievement with a 4-week Paired-Reading summer intervention with parents. Method: A total of 21 children in grades 3 through 6 and one of their parents were randomly assigned to one of two staggered intervention groups. Parents were trained prior to the start of the intervention and were instructed to participate in paired-reading with their child for 5 to 15 minutes each day, for five days of the week using matched books from their community library. During these interactive reading sessions, parents used specific strategies to improve reading comprehension, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and engagement in reading. Results: All children showed marked improvement across all achievement measures (i.e., vocabulary, reading ability, spelling, and oral reading fluency). Greater effects were associated with increased program participation. Contrary to expectation, all children exhibited declining scores for reading motivation, reading self-concept, and attitudes towards reading for pleasure. Parents showed marked improvement in their word identification skills. Conclusions: There is much research examining children's literacy and their home literacy environments, but nearly all investigations are limited to non-Native samples of children. This study corroborates and supports the involvement of parents in interventions designed to enhance their children's literacy through voluntary reading during the summer months.
Timothy Papadopoulos (University of Cyprus, Cyprus); Panayiota Kendeou - Cognitive and linguistic predictors of fluency and reading comprehension in adolescence
Purpose This study aimed to (a) identify the cognitive and linguistic predictors of fluency and reading comprehension and (b) examine the profiles of fluent and non-fluent readers in grades 7th through 12th. Method 462 students from 7th (n=89), 8th (n=79), 9th (n=57), 10th (n=77), 11th (n=79), and 12th (n=81) grades each were administered a battery of cognitive and linguistic measures, including working memory, speed of processing, planning, non-verbal ability, vocabulary, orthographic processing, RAN, and spoonerism. Students' fluency was assessed using measures of word and pseudoword reading fluency, whereas students' reading comprehension was assessed using CBM-Maze test. Results Multiple Regression Analyses controlling for age and non-verbal ability have shown that significant predictors for word reading fluency were orthographic processing, vocabulary, RAN, spoonerism, working memory, and planning. Significant predictors for nonword fluency were those of word fluency with the exception of planning. In turn, significant predictors of reading comprehension were orthographic processing, vocabulary, and word reading fluency. Fluent and non-fluent readers differed on almost all cognitive and linguistic measures in grades 7 and 8. However, in the upper grades, group differences were found to be specific only to working memory, spoonerism, spelling, and silent word reading. Conclusions The underlying skills that support reading performance in adolescence are relatively stable and seem to center around the quality of students' lexical representations (Perfetti & Hart, 2001), working memory and partly planning, depending on task demands. Difficulties in spelling and silent word reading reflect that these processes are developmentally delayed in non-fluent readers.
Johanne Paradis Paradis (University of Alberta) - Identifying language impairment in children learning English as a second language
Purpose: Accurate identification of language impairment (LI) in children learning English as a second language (ESL) is a persistent problem. One reason is the paucity of research on ESL children with LI and how they compare to their typically-developing (TD) ESL peers. This study compares ESL TD and LI children on a range of language measures in order to reveal which measures best discriminate the children with LI. Method: Participants were 152 TD ESL children and 26 ESL children with LI, matched for age (mean = 5 ½) and exposure to English in preschool/school (mean = 2 years). Children were given English standardized tests measuring phonological memory, vocabulary size, grammar and narrative skills. Parents were given a questionnaire on children's developmental history and current abilities in their first language. Results: Between-group t-test analyses followed by linear discriminant function analyses were conducted. Results showed that (1) ESL children with LI had lower scores on the first language questionnaire and all the language measures except for vocabulary size, and (2) Good discrimination between the TD and LI groups could be achieved by combining these measures, with both specificity and sensitivity over 90%. Conclusion: This study suggests it is possible to identify ESL children with LI when they are compared to their TD ESL peers, rather than to monolinguals. This study also showed that the domains of language most difficult for children with LI are the same regardless of whether English is children's first or second language.
Chae Hyeong Park (Florida State University and Florida Center for Reading Research)Young-Suk Kim - Academic language skill and writing in Korean
Purpose Although children's oral language skills have been assumed to be related to their writing, empirical studies have been relatively limited. Furthermore, the previous investigations (e.g., Author, 2011; Berninger & Swanson, 1994) have been limited to English-speaking children, and did not include discourse level oral language measures. In the present study, we examined a unique relation of academic language to written composition after accounting for reading, spelling and letter writing automaticity for first grade children in Korea. Method Writing samples were collected from 180 first grade students in South Korea. Written composition. Students were asked to compose texts upon two researcher-created story prompts. Oral language. Two listening comprehension tasks were administered. In addition, oral language sample using two retell and two production tasks was collected. Children's academic language use was coded using the language sample data. Reading. Children's reading skills were assessed by oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. Spelling. A spelling dictation task was used to assess children's spelling skills. Letter writing automaticity. Students' letter writing automaticity was assessed by asking children to write as many Korean alphabet letters as possible in one minute with accuracy. Results Listening comprehension, reading, spelling, and letter writing automaticity were all related to the four dimensions of writing. When academic language use was added to the structural equation model, it was uniquely related to the writing quality. Conclusions The results suggest that children's oral language skill is an important component skill for writing, and thus, deserves attention in writing instruction in Korean context.
Rauno K. Parrila (University of Alberta); Krystle-Lee Turgeon - Intact orthographic learning in dyslexia: More evidence from an eye movement study with continuous text
Purpose: Last year, we presented evidence of intact orthographic learning in high-functioning adult dyslexics whose phonological skills remained compromised. The current study extends those findings by examining (a) whether orthographic (bigram and trigram frequency) and phonological (neighborhood) properties of novel words affect orthographic learning, and (b) what kinds of orthographic representations are developed during silent reading. Method: We presented normally reading adult university students (n = 20) and high-functioning adult dyslexics (university students with a significant history of reading acquisition problems; n = 20) novel four-letter words embedded in continuous text while recording their eye movements. Each word was repeated six times, and orthographic learning was operationalized as the reduction in target word gaze durations across repeated presentations. Three days later the participants completed three traditional orthographic learning tasks (orthographic choice, word naming, and spelling to dictation) and one novel task (eye tracking while reading sentences). Results: Data from typically reading participants is collected and data collection from university students with dyslexia has started. The initial results indicate that our previous results will replicate, and that there is reliable evidence of orthographic learning three days later. Conclusion: Conclusions are premature at the moment.
Adrian Pasquarella (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education UofT); Gloria Ramirez; Xi Chen-Bumgardner - What is in the reading comprehension toolbox of Spanish-speaking ELLs? An exploration of morphological and cognate awareness crosslinguistic skill transfer
Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to identify first language predictors of English vocabulary and reading comprehension. Moreover, we intend to identify the mechanisms of cross-linguistic skill transfer by identifying direct and indirect contributions of Spanish morphological awareness to English vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension and the skills that mediate such cross-linguistic contributions. Method: Participants were 90 Spanish-speaking ELLs (39 fourth graders and 51 seventh graders), from public schools in a large multicultural Canadian city. Students were assessed on nonverbal reasoning, phonological awareness and reading comprehension in English and on morphological awareness, word reading, and vocabulary knowledge in both English and Spanish. The unique contribution of Spanish morphological awareness to English reading comprehension and vocabulary was examined through regressions, and direct and indirect effects, as well as mediators, were examined through path analyses. Results: Nonverbal reasoning, cognate vocabulary and English morphological awareness were the only predictors that directly contributed to reading comprehension, while the contribution of Spanish morphological awareness to English reading comprehension was mediated through English morphological awareness. Phonological awareness and English morphological awareness were unique predictors of both cognate and non-cognate word reading and vocabulary, while Spanish morphological awareness was a unique predictor for cognate word reading and vocabulary only. Conclusions: Our results provide unique and novel data showing that some L1 skills play an important role in English L2 vocabulary and reading comprehension and unveil the complexities of such cross-linguistic skill transfer. These results have both theoretical and practical implications.
Nicole Patton-Terry (Georgia State University)Carol M. Connor; Meghan Pendergast; Gary E. Bingham - Relations between change in Nonmainstream American English use, early language and literacy achievement, and classroom language environment in pre-kindergarten
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of the relationship between African American pre-kindergartener's spoken nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use and early language and literacy achievement. Specifically, we questioned (1) whether NMAE production changes during the year, (2) whether changes in NMAE production are associated with oral language, print and alphabet knowledge, and classroom language environment, and (3) whether the relationship between NMAE production and early language and literacy achievement at end of the year differs by classroom language environment. Method: This longitudinal study included 322 children who attended one of 22 pre-kindergarten classrooms serving significant numbers of low-income families. At the beginning and end of the year, children were given the several standardized measures of early language and literacy achievement and spoken dialect use. Classroom language and literacy practices were also observed at the beginning and end of the year with the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation. Results: Data analysis is on-going. Preliminary analyses indicate that children significantly decreased their NMAE production during the year. Decreasing NMAE production was related to and predicted by expressive and receptive vocabulary and print and alphabet knowledge. While classroom language environment was related to vocabulary skills, it was not associated directly with changes in NMAE production. Conclusion: Preliminary results suggest that changes in young African American children's NMAE production during the pre-kindergarten year may be important to consider as they develop early language and literacy skills. The theoretical and educational implications of these findings will be discussed.
Kathleen Peets (Ryerson University, Toronto)Trelani Milburn - Emergent literacy in preschoolers: processes underlying listening comprehension
Purpose: This study investigated the unique and combined contributions that oral fictional narrative ability, core language (i.e., grammar and vocabulary), and memory (i.e., verbal and visual-spatial) make toward preschool-aged children's listening comprehension. Method: This study used a regression model to investigate the contributions of narrative, language and memory variables to listening comprehension. Participants were preschool children aged 4-6 years (N=31). They were tested in two half-hour sessions on narrative (Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument), core language (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool [CELF-P] subtests: Sentence Structure, Word Structure and Expressive Vocabulary), listening comprehension (Assessment of Literacy and Language), visual-spatial short-term and working memory (Corsi blocks, forwards and backwards), and verbal short-term and working memory (word span, forwards and backwards), while controlling for IQ (K-BIT). Correlations were run on all predictors and hierarchical regression analyses were run on significant relationships. Results: Preschool children's narrative ability accounts for 29% of unique variance in listening comprehension. The other two significant predictors were Corsi forward blocks (visual-spatial short-term memory), explaining 12% of the variance, and the Sentence Structure sub-test of the CELF-P, explaining 8% of the variance. Conclusions: Although previous studies have investigated the processes involved in reading comprehension, less attention has been given to those involved in listening comprehension in the early years. This study is the first to demonstrate not only a unique role for narrative, but also a role for syntax. Implications for reading comprehension development, as well as literacy instruction, will be discussed.
Peng Peng ()Peng Peng, Doug Fuchs, Devin Kearns,Amy Elleman, Lynn Fuchs, Don Compton, Sam Patton, and Amanda Miller - Exploring Cognitive and Academic Moderators of a First-Grade Tutoring Program to Strengthen Word Reading and Reading Comprehension
Purpose: The study investigated effects of a tutoring program on at-risk (AR) first graders' word reading and reading comprehension. It also explored pre-tutoring reading and cognitive skills as possible moderators of intervention effects. Our two questions were: (a) Does the tutoring program improve word reading and reading comprehension for AR first graders?, and (b) Do pretreatment reading and cognitive skills moderate tutoring effects? Method: Participants were 892 first graders, 302 of whom were AR and assigned randomly to a decoding plus fluency-building treatment (DF), DF plus reading comprehension treatment (DF+Comp) or controls. One-to-one tutoring sessions of 30-45 minutes took place three times per/week over 20 weeks. Participants were assessed on reading and cognitive measures at pre- and post-intervention. Treatment fidelity data were collected throughout the intervention. Results: HLM was used to control for school-level variance. Results showed no significant main effects of treatment on reading outcomes. However, pretreatment sight word reading, listening comprehension, and working memory moderated treatment effects such that students with lower sight word reading and listening comprehension in DF+Comp showed more improvement on reading comprehension than controls. Students with lower working memory in DF+Comp made more improvement on word identification than those in control and DF groups. Conclusions: Findings suggest individual differences may be critical to understand students' response to early reading intervention. First graders who began with lower word reading, comprehension, and working memory seemed to benefit most from DF+Comp treatments. This finding suggests that our tutoring program was differentially effective for the lowest of low first-grade readers, perhaps because only they were not benefiting from mainstream instruction and required the tutoring more than higher-performing AR children. Implications for revising the tutoring program will be discussed.
Jill Pentimonti (The Ohio State University);Laura Justice; Ann O'Connell; Anita McGinty; Mary Beth Schmitt - Behavior Regulation and Language Profiles of Young Children and the Relation to Early Literacy Skills
Purpose Some studies suggest that children's ability to regulate their own behavior might be associated with their early literacy and language skills. We speculate that there may be distinct profiles among young children in the relations among these skills. In this study, we asked whether preschool-aged children exhibited reliable classes (profiles) with respect to behavior regulation and language skills and, if so, whether these groups differed in their early literacy skills. Method Participants were 292 4-and 5-year old children within 61 preschool classrooms located in Appalachian regions of three states. Children were assessed on measures of language and literacy skills and behavior regulation. Results Results from a latent class analysis indicated that children could be classified into four distinct groups based upon their performance on measures of language skill and behavior regulation. Preliminary discriminatory analyses using extracted groups resulted in significant discriminant functions, indicating that the four groups could be distinguished from each other based upon a linear combination of the literacy measures. Importantly, those children whose profile was characterized by the lowest language and behavior regulation skills also had very low scores on literacy measures. Conclusions These findings show there to be compelling patterns among children in their behavior regulation and language skills, and that these profiles discriminate among children in their early literacy skills. Results from this work highlight the importance of understanding differential patterns in young children's development, as the identified profiles might provide an important lens for guiding early education activities.
Charles Perfetti () - Discussant
Discussant
Charles Perfetti (University of Pittsburgh & Fan Cao, Nanyang Technological University) - Write to read: Neurocognitive evidence from Chinese
Purpose: Orthographic representations allow readers to access printed words. Although these representations are established and refined through reading experience, writing is an active encoding mechanism that can accelerate this process. We show such acceleration in recent studies of learning to read Chinese as a second language. Because it is non-alphabetic, Chinese orthographic representations are especially likely to benefit from the active encoding that writing provides. Method: We review a recent study and report a new study, one using fMRI and the other ERPs. In both studies, samples of students enrolled in Chinese participated in training studies that varied the instructional conditions in which new characters were learned. Among several conditions (e.g., read-only, pinyin writing) across the studies, requiring the subjects to write the characters following a brief exposure was the key condition. Following instruction, both behavioral and imaging results (fMRI in one, ERP in another) were obtained. Comparisons among instructional conditions are the key results. The ERP study allowed also a comparison of two retention intervals. Results: fMRI results show that learning to write characters has specific effects on the extent to which brain's reading network engages spatial and perceptual motor areas beyond that produced by reading only or writing pinyin. The ERP results show long lasting recognition effects (N170) from writing practice and a surprising pre-cognitive perceptual effect (P100) that also persists across retention intervals. Discussion: We point out the theoretical and instructional implications of these results and related findings on the role of writing in learning to read.
Yaacov Petscher (Florida Center for Reading Research);Barbara Foorman - Increasing the precision of student's ability in tests of reading comprehension: Evidence from a randomized control trial
Purpose: Models associated with testlet theory account for instances where subjects read a reading comprehension passage, and are required to respond to questions. Because content in the stimulus is fixed, questions share content that can lead to item dependency. In an item response theory framework, this leads to bias in item parameters, which directly affects the reliability, or precision, of an ability score. Preliminary work on testlet models have suggested one class of models (Wainer et al., 2000), but Petscher and Zhou (2010) demonstrated that differential specification of the testlet model can yield more precise estimates of ability in reading comprehension. To date, no experimental study has assessed the impact of model selection on the precision of ability scores in reading comprehension. Method: Eight hundred students in grades 3-10 were randomly assigned to a computer adaptive test of reading comprehension (Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading), where scoring was based on 2pl IRT model (control) or an unrestricted bifactor model (experimental). Results: Students in the experimental condition took significantly fewer passages than the control (p < .05; Cohen's d = 0.82), and the precision was significantly better (p < .05; Cohen's d = 0.27). Conclusions: Both simulation and randomized experimental studies have provided evidence that differential specification of testlet models provide greater precision in the estimation of ability scores in reading comprehension according to the FAIR assessments. Developers of reading comprehension assessments should consider the unrestricted bifactor model as efficient method for estimating and scoring student performance on such tests.
Anne Plisson (Université de Montréal)Daniel Daigle - Orthographic development: the case of dyslexic children
Learning to read and write constitutes a great challenge for dyslexic children (Snowling, 2006). The delay observed in their skills is usually explained by a phonological deficit (Ramus et al., 2003; Sprenger-Charolles & Colé, 2003). In an alphabetic language like French, phonological processing is required but alone is insufficient to spell correctly: visuo-orthographical and morphological knowledge is also essential to spell in a way that conforms to the orthographic system. The main goal of this longitudinal research is to describe the spelling development of 20 dyslexic children by comparing their spelling performance to 24 normal-readers of the same age (CA; mean age: 11.19) and to 26 younger normo-readers of the same reading level (RA). All participants were asked to write a text at two different testing times, which were then analysed at the graphemic level.Results indicate that at both times of testing a) dyslexic participants wrote shorter texts and used shorter words than the CA and the RA groups, b) dyslexic children's success rate was not only lower than the CA group's, but also lower than the RA group, and c) all groups produced similar error patterns (their errors were mostly phonologically plausible). In addition, the control participants did not seem to progress from time 1 to time 2 while the dyslexics' performances seemed to regress. The results are discussed in terms of spelling tasks and spelling processes used by the different populations. The question of the relative importance of non phonological processes is raised.
Tatiana Cury Pollo (Universidade Federal de São João Del Rei)Cláudia Cardoso-Martins; Brett Kessler; Rebecca Treiman - The Structure of Prephonological Writing as an Indicator of Later Spelling Success
Introduction: Young children's prephonological spellings (e.g., the spelling ORP for the Portuguese word bicicleta 'bicycle') often bear similarities to conventional texts. For example, beginning writers show a strong tendency to draw on the letters in their own names to spell words, and their invented spellings often contain patterns (e.g., letter combinations) present in the texts they see in their environments (Pollo et al., 2009). In the present study we investigated whether young children's sensitivity to regularities they see in the texts they are exposed to predicts their ability to learn to spell in primary school. Method: Portuguese-speaking preschoolers in Brazil (M = 4 years, 3 months) were asked to spell 12 words. Monte Carlo tests were used to select the 31 children who had not started to spell phonologically. Their spellings were coded for the frequencies of individual letters (monograms) and pairs of letters (digrams), and correlated with their performance on a standardized spelling test they took 2 ½ years later, at the end of 1st grade. Results: The more closely the digram (2-letter sequence) frequencies in the preschool spellings correlated with those in children's books, the better the children performed in conventional spelling in early primary school; on the other hand, the more preschoolers used letters from their own name, the lower their subsequent scores. Conclusions: Statistical learning is an important component of spelling acquisition. Analytic techniques that draw on this capacity may, therefore, help in the early identification of children at risk for spelling difficulties.
Nicola Pooley (Lancaster University)Kate Cain - Development of inference generation: the role of working memory and vocabulary knowledge.
Purpose We assessed the relative contributions of memory and vocabulary to inference making in children aged 6, 8, and 10 years. Method One hundred and twenty children aged 6 (n=41), 8 (n=39) and 10 (n=40) years listened to four short stories and answered questions after each. The questions assessed the ability to make two types of inference: intratextual inferences, which involved connecting premises within the text; extratextual inferences, which involved integrating text information with background knowledge. Children also completed measures of vocabulary (BPVS, Word Associations), semantic memory (word span, listening span) and numerical memory (digit span, counting span). To investigate developmental differences in inference performance ANOVA was conducted with age as a between-participants factor and inference type as a within-participants factor. Hierarchical multiple regression was conducted to determine the relative contributions of vocabulary and memory to inference performance in each age group. Results ANOVA Children answered a significantly greater number of extratextual inference questions than intratextual, and for each type of inference significant differences were found between each successive age group. Multiple Regression Intratextual Inferences -vocabulary predicted unique variance for the 6- and 8 - year olds and semantic memory predicted additional unique variance for the 6-year olds. None of the factors predicted unique variance for the 10 year olds. Extratextual Inferences -vocabulary predicted unique variance in each age group, memory did not. Conclusions These findings suggest that vocabulary and memory make different contributions to inference making at different ages. However, the role of memory was largely mediated by vocabulary.
Maria Elsa Porta () - Beginning literacy: the effects of a classroom-based linguistic training program enriched with home storybook reading.
Purpose: This 20-week study assessed the effects of a classroom-based linguistic training program, which included parent participation, on literacy outcomes. Method: Participants were 153 low-income kindergarten Argentinean children from six classrooms randomly assigned to three treatment conditions (n=2): Control (C) (n=51), Phonological Awareness/Letter Training Program (PALTP) (n=50), and PALTP + Home Storybook Reading Program (HSRP) (n=52). A pretest-posttest comparison-group design was used. One pre-test and two post-test measures of phonological awareness (PA), writing, and word reading were obtained, as well as a measure of reading comprehension. The PALTP focused on phoneme segmentation; sound blending; and letter-sound knowledge. Teachers administered 34 thrice-weekly sessions to the classrooms. The HSRP consisted of parent education workshops focused on how to read stories in rhymes to their children at home to increase vocabulary, PA and letter-sound knowledge. Parents took material with instructions to their homes. Mp3 recordings were coded for fidelity of implementation. Results: Significant interaction effects between time and intervention on word reading were found (p<0.006). There was a significant effect of time (p<0.001) and intervention (p<0.02). For the three conditions, the word reading level was greater on the second post-test (first grade) than that of the pretest and the first posttest (kindergarten). During the second post-test, the word reading and reading comprehension levels for the PALTP group were greater than those of the other groups. No difference was observed between Control and PALTP+HSRP groups. Conclusions: Parents´ability level to exercise PA activities with their children may interfere with their responsiveness to the PALTP.
Mads Poulsen (University of Copenhagen)Amalie Gravgaard - The role of sentence processing efficiency in text comprehension
Purpose: In text comprehension, knowledge of syntax is crucial to establishing who did what to whom. Furthermore, efficiency in applying this knowledge may help accurate text comprehension because efficiency releases resources for higher cognitive processes, such as inference generation. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate to what extent sentence processing efficiency explains variance in text comprehension beyond reading fluency, vocabulary and working memory. A secondary purpose was to investigate whether knowledge and processing of infrequent syntactic constructions (e.g. passive and object relative clauses) pose special barriers for comprehension and/or is a better predictor of reading comprehension than knowledge of parallel frequent constructions (e.g. active and subject relative clauses). Method: Eighty Danish Grade 5 students completed tests of reading comprehension, word reading fluency, vocabulary, working memory, and sentence processing. In the sentence-processing task, students read one sentence at time and answered comprehension questions to the contents of the immediately preceding sentence. We measured accuracy and response times on the answers. The sentence materials consisted of a balanced number of frequent and infrequent constructions. Results: Both sentence question answering accuracy and response time on correct answers explained unique variance in reading comprehension beyond control measures. Accuracy, but not speed, on infrequent constructions explained unique variance in comprehension beyond frequent constructions. Conclusion: Text reading comprehension appears to rely on both accuracy and efficiency of sentence processing. There was some, but limited, evidence that the effect stemmed from the ability to process infrequent syntax.
Daisy Powell (Institute of Education, University of Reading); Lynette Chesson; Rhona Stainthorp - What does the RAN task measure?
Purpose: RAN has been described variously as a measure of phonological processing, speed of processing, visual attention and of visual temporal processing. Questions of causality are complicated by the surface similarities between tasks: RAN skill may benefit reading, but reading certainly also benefits RAN. To address these issues RAN was related to core cognitive abilities in a group of very young non-readers. Method: 98 3 - 4 year old children were tested on RAN, phonological awareness (PA), speed of processing (SRT: simple reaction time), executive function (EF) and visual processing (accuracy and speed). Single word reading was assessed at Time 1, to exclude children already reading, and again one year later. Results: RAN was concurrently related to PA, language, EF and SRT, and to visual processing accuracy but not latency. PA, EF, SRT and visual processing (accuracy), were then regressed on RAN. Only SRT and visual processing accounted for unique variance in RAN after controlling for general abilities. RAN and the other cognitive variables were then regressed on word reading one year later. Reading was predicted by RAN, PA and SRT but not visual processing or EF. Conclusions: RAN is not simply a measure of phonological processing: PA did not predict unique variance in RAN, and RAN predicted later reading independent of PA. Partial support for the view of RAN as a measure of visual temporal processing was found, though accuracy not speed of visual processing was related to RAN. Results suggested RAN may mediate the link between visual processing and reading.
Sarah Priebe (University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston)Marcia Barnes; Mary York - The relation of world knowledge and reading comprehension in skilled and less skilled adolescent comprehenders
Purpose World knowledge is important for comprehension, but relatively little is known about its contributions to performance on different comprehension measures, and to comprehension in readers of different skill levels. Study goals were to: 1) investigate grade- and skill-related differences in knowledge; 2) predict performance on three standardized comprehension measures, using assessments tapping background knowledge tied to the content of Gates-McGinitie (GMRT) passages; and 3) investigate these relations in adequate and poor comprehenders. Method 371 adolescents from 7th-12th grades participated. Half were adequate decoders/comprehenders and half were adequate decoders/poor comprehenders. Two tests of knowledge were constructed by determining the background information necessary to understand passages and answer questions on the GMRT (7-9th grade and 10th-12th grade forms). Reading comprehension was assessed using the GMRT, TOSREC, and TAKS. Results Grade-related increases in world knowledge were observed on both knowledge measures with greater accuracy on the 7th-9th grade form. Poor comprehenders had lower knowledge scores overall than adequate comprehenders. Though the knowledge measures were constructed for specific levels of the GMRT, similar correlations were observed between both knowledge measures and the three comprehension tests (average r =.48). The relations of knowledge and comprehension varied with grade and skill level. Conclusions Although the knowledge measure tapping concepts on GMRT passages captured increases in knowledge with age, it lacked specificity, and instead served as a proxy for general world knowledge. The findings for readers of different skill levels are discussed in relation to hypotheses about how background knowledge and reading comprehension are linked.
Athanassios Protopapas (University of Athens); Panagiotis Simos - In search of Matthew effects
Purpose: Matthew effects in reading development refer to a longitudinally widening gap between high and low achievers, whereby the latter fall increasingly behind as a consequence of diminished practice. Although decreased short-term benefit from experience has been documented for poor readers, longitudinal divergence has been difficult to establish. Here it is argued that there are significant theoretical and psychometric impediments to the empirical elucidation of Matthew effects. Method: Longitudinal analyses of reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension were conducted on data from 587 children in Grades 2-4 followed over 2 years in 5 measurement waves approximately 6 months apart. Highly correlated pairs of measures were used to cross-select 1st-wave high- and low-performing children. Growth curves were modeled with linear mixed-effects models contrasting high-low groups. Results: Weak patterns of divergence were seen in spelling and fluency, whereas convergence was observed in vocabulary and comprehension. However, the interpretability of these interactions is compromised by lack of metric equivalence between the "low" and "high" performance levels. Moreover, the decelerating slopes indicate lack of growth equivalence across age groups, rendering comparisons of different grade and ability levels difficult to interpret. Conclusions: Converging and diverging patterns of performance cannot be taken at face value as either supporting or contradicting the Matthew effects framework, in the absence of properly calibrated psychometric scales. Better understanding of growth patterns is a prerequisite to the definition of age-appropriate performance and expected rates of development. The longitudinal Matthew effects may not be possible to establish conclusively.
Kenneth Pugh (Haskins Laboratories, New Haven) - The relationship between early language development and the emergent neurocircuitry for children learning to read
Purpose: We report on recent findings from an ongoing longitudinal study of typically and atypically developing readers, examining concurrent and predictive gene-brain-behavior relationships. Method: We tested a cohort of beginning readers (mean age 7.7) ranging along a continuum from conventionally RD to superior readers. Prior to functional imaging, participants completed a behavioral battery to characterize their reading, language, and cognitive skills. We employed a cue-target identity task with an event-related protocol that required a match/mismatch judgment on each trial via a button press. Participants viewed a picture of an animal or common object (e.g., a picture of a dress) in the upper central portion of the display with an empty box beneath, followed by a series of trials on which word and pseudowords were presented to eye or ear. Results and conclusion: We examined relationships between phonological processing, decoding, and sensorimotor skills and brain organization for print and speech and identified a distributed set of skill-correlated regions, including well-documented left hemisphere temporoparietal, occipitotemporal, and inferior frontal networks, along with visual attention, visual, and subcortical (thalamus) networks that form the learning circuitry in beginning readers. For speech-related activation, variance among reading skill measures was most prominently correlated with activation in left hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus. Finally, our findings also indicate that diverse language and sensorimotor skills appear to influence reading via common brain pathways. Predictive relationships between early circuitry and reading outcomes after 24 months of tracking are currently being analysed.
Cynthia Puranik (University of Pittsburgh); Feifei Ye; Christopher Lonigan - The contribution of emergent literacy skills in predicting word and sentence level writing in emergent writers
Research indicates that individual differences in emergent reading skills are present early, are relatively stable and predict later reading difficulties. Similar to emergent reading skills, individual differences in writing might be present early, be relatively stable and predictive of later writing performance. Hence, the specific aims of this study were to examine the relationship and stability between early writing skills, and explore the potential early correlates of emergent writing skills. In this longitudinal study, 367 preschool children ranging in age from 3- to 5-years were given an extensive battery of emergent reading and writing tasks. A year later, 301 of these children were reassessed. Emergent reading tasks included phonological awareness, print concepts, and alphabet knowledge whereas the writing assessment included letter writing, name writing, spelling, and spontaneous writing. Data collection and coding have been completed. Concurrent and cross-time correlations between and within writing and writing-related skills will be conducted to investigate the relationship and stability of early writing skills. HLM will be used to examine if specific spelling/writing skills at Time 1 predicted spelling/writing skills at Time 2.
Pauline Quemart (Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition et l'Apprentissage)Séverine Casalis - Examining the development of morphological representations in developing readers: a self-teaching study
Purpose - Vocabulary growth is highly related to print exposure, and the relationship between vocabulary and reading has received increasing interest recently (see for example the special issue of Scientific of Reading, 2011). Most of the studies conducted so far have established relationships between exposure to simple words and lexical development. However, a large part of the new words encountered in print are morphologically complex (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Thus, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether exposure to morphologically complex items fosters the development of morphological representations. Method - Thirty third graders and 30 fifth graders participated in this study. We created four short texts and each story contained one pseudoword target presented five times. In half of the texts, we added a derivational suffix-ending to the targets, whereas in the other half the targets were presented alone. Furthermore, in half of the texts the participants could easily infer the meaning of the target items from the context, whereas in the other half targets' meaning was less obvious. The children read one time each text and were asked to perform different tasks (reading comprehension, target spelling and morphological awareness) immediately after their reading. Results - The preliminary results indicate reliable learning of the orthographic and semantic aspects of the target items, and this ability is correlated with morphological awareness. Conclusion - Our findings suggest that the decoding of new morphologically complex items in the context of text reading increases the development of orthographic and semantic representations of derivational morphology.
Jamie Quinn (Florida State University)Richard Wagner; Yaacov Petscher - Latent Change Score Modeling of Developmental Relationships Between Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to observe the longitudinal relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension using latent change score modeling. Method: A sample of 316 first grade students was tested each year until fourth grade. Measures included the Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales Vocabulary subtest. A bivariate latent change score model was utilized to assess growth within and between variables across the four times points. Results: The variables at all time points were significantly correlated. The bivariate model fit the data very well (χ2(25)=103, p<.001; RMSEA=.09; CFI/TLI: 0.956/0.951). Proportional change parameters for vocabulary (β=-0.232) and reading comprehension (β=0.159) were significant (p<.001). The coupling parameter for reading comprehension to changes in vocabulary was significant (λ=0.033, p<.001), and the coupling parameter for vocabulary to changes in reading comprehension was also significant (λ=0.624, p<.001). Discussion: A negative beta for vocabulary indicates that growth slowed over time, but a positive beta for reading comprehension indicates acceleration, such that children who had higher levels of reading comprehension ability increased more positively. A significant and positive lambda from reading comprehension to changes in vocabulary indicates that children who had higher levels of reading comprehension tend to change more positively in vocabulary, but this change was very small. However, the large, positive, and significant lambda from vocabulary to changes in reading comprehension indicated children who had higher levels of vocabulary previously tend to change more positively in reading comprehension. This growth accelerates from first to fourth grade. Conclusion: vocabulary acquisition has an effect on future reading comprehension abilities.
Ralph Radach (University of Wuppertal)Michael Mayer; Christian Vorstius; Chris Lonigan - Comprehension monitoring during sentence reading: evidence from eye movements
Purpose: The monitoring of semantic consistency is a core element of comprehension on the local level of clauses and sentences. Our present research is focused on the ability to establish and maintain coherence between statements that are connected via complex semantic relations such as cause, condition, or consequence. Methods: The experimental design uses correct vs. contradictive causal relations in combination with a conjunction of positive of negative polarity, creating four well-defined levels of comprehension monitoring difficulty within a single sentence frame. Students in grade 3 and 5 were asked to read sentences of the form "The ice cream melted because/although it was hot/cold", while their eye movements were being monitored. Analyses included times for initial fixations, refixations and re-reading within sentence initial, conjunction and sentence final regions. Results: Causal inconsistencies were often detected as soon as readers arrived at the sentence final region, giving rise to increased refixation durations. However, this effect was modulated by polarity, with a larger inconsistency effect for positive polarity. Participants' sensitivity to the polarity conditions was further evident in differentially inflated re-reading times between sentence initial and final regions. Specifically, the inconsistency effect is more pronounced in the sentence initial region in negative polarity trials but more pronounced in the sentence final region for positive polarity. Conclusions: This present paradigm allows detailed examination of comprehension monitoring within a single sentence. Analyses of individual differences in local eye movement patterns reveal the development of strategies employed by successful vs. struggling readers to overcome local comprehension difficulties.
Marina Rain (York University); Raymond A. Mar - Reading behaviour and print-exposure: A validation study of the Author Recognition Test-Revised (ART-R).
Purpose: Self-report measures of reading habits often display low reliability and are prone to social-desirability bias (West, Stanovich, & Mitchell, 1993). The Author Recognition Test (ART; Stanovich & West, 1989) attempts to overcome these problems by using familiarity with- and exposure to print as a proxy for reading behaviour and preferences. The validity of a revised version of the ART (ART-R; Mar et al., 2006), assessing exposure to both narrative fiction and expository nonfiction, was examined in this study. Specifically, we explored whether fiction and nonfiction print-exposure can predict on-line shopping behaviors. Method: 121 university students (84 female) completed the ART-R by indicating names that they recognized as authors from a list that explicitly included foils. Participants also completed an online shopping task on Amazon.com, creating a 'wishlist.' The items selected were later coded and grouped into categories (e.g., nonfiction books). A Mann-Whitney U test was used to determine if participants' print-exposure predicts their shopping preferences. Results: Individuals who purchased fiction books scored higher on fiction print-exposure than those who did not purchase fiction books (U = 1310, p < .05, r = .23). There were no differences in nonfiction print-exposure between those who purchased nonfiction books and those who did not (U = 1234, p > .05, r = .10). Conclusion: The study's attempt to validate the ART-R shows mixed results. Fiction print-exposure successfully predicted a preference towards purchasing prose. Conversely, nonfiction print-exposure did not predict a preference towards purchasing nonfiction print. Possible explanations for this disparity are discussed.
Natalia Rakhlin (Yale University)Natalia Rakhlin; Claudia Cardoso-Martins; Elena Grigorenko - The relationship between language impairment and reading disability in Russian-speaking children: the role of phoneme awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming
Purpose: Language impairment (LI) and reading disability (RD) are comorbid disorders (Pennington & Bishop, 2009) without a perfect overlap. Bishop et al. (2009) suggested that unless accompanied by deficits in rapid automatized naming (RAN), deficits in phoneme awareness (PA) are not sufficient for causing word-level literacy difficulties among children with LI. The present study investigates the respective roles of RAN and PA in the development of word-level literacy skills of Russian-speaking children with LI. Method: 29 LI and 42 non-LI children (M=12.14 years, MIQ=96.45) from a rural population with a high prevalence of LI (experimental group), and 78 children (M=12.61 years, MIQ=110.82) from a control population (control group) were administered tests of word reading and spelling, and tests of PA and RAN. Results: Children in the experimental group who scored one or more SDs below the mean of the control group on the spelling test were classified as RD, resulting in the following groups: LI and RD, LI-only; RD-only; and TD (typically developing). All three clinical groups underperformed on PA and RAN letters, but only the groups with a RD underperformed on RAN objects and numbers (with the LI-only group not differing from either the TD or the control group on these measures). On the other hand, RAN colors differentiated between children with and without LI, regardless of literacy status. Conclusions: Results confirm a special role of RAN as a protective factor against RD in children with LI. However, different subtests of RAN differentiated distinct groups of children.
Gloria Ramirez (Thompson Rivers University); Esther Geva; Alister Cumming - Bridging lexical knowledge and literacy
Purpose: Recognizing lexical knowledge to be a pivotal component of both reading and writing development, this study investigated the impact of lexical knowledge one-on-one tutoring for vocabulary, reading, and writing skills of adolescent disadvantaged learners. Method: The study was conducted at an after-school tutoring program in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Toronto. Participants included 21 ninth graders who participated in weekly one-on-one tutoring sessions for five months. Participants were assessed on vocabulary, morphological awareness, reading and writing using the TTC tasks. The study examined the relationship between vocabulary, morphological awareness, reading, and writing, the effect of the intervention on each of these skills, and effective tutoring components. Spearman correlations, two-way repeated measures ANOVAs---followed by item analyses, and close examination of several case studies were conducted. Results: Vocabulary strongly correlated with morphological awareness, reading comprehension, and composing written texts in a variety of genres both before and after the tutoring treatment. Overall gains on vocabulary and on one aspect of morphological awareness were observed after six months of tutoring. Both the amount of tutoring provided to each student, as well as the nature of the activities, varied greatly across tutors and tutees and produced differing effects for individual tutees. Conclusions: Our findings provide rarely seen data from multilingual, multicultural adolescents, and complement previous research indicating that vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness are positively and significantly related to literacy outcomes. Importantly, even with a small sample size we were able to detect significant improvements in vocabulary knowledge and morphological skills.
Dorit Ravid (Tel Aviv University)Rachel Schiff; Yehudit Ashani - Morphological abilities in intellectually gifted children: An experimental study in Hebrew
Purpose. "Giftedness" refers to high-level potential and achievements in a variety of domains such as the humanities, sciences, music, the arts, and athletics (Renzulli, 2005). Gifted children are characterized by precocity, independence, and what is termed "a rage to master" a domain in which they are especially talented (Winner, 1996). Few studies have investigated intellectually gifted children, and even fewer have examined their language proficiency (Little, 2001; Hoh, 2005). Those that have could not reach unequivocal conclusions regarding linguistic abilities in gifted children compared with their peers (Flaitz et al; Rosso, 2004). Method. The current study tested the prediction that intellectually gifted gradeschool children would have better morphological processing abilities than their peers (Reina et al, 2006). For that end, we compared the performance of 26 gifted 6th graders with 30 age-matched peers and 30 8th graders matched by reading level on judging adjective agreement with plural nouns. All participants were monolingual Hebrew speakers of mid-high SES with no developmental disorders. The adjective agreement task was selected for this study since it requires processing of irregular inflectional morphology as well as complex syntactic environments, which could point at higher Nerve Conduction Velocity (Jensen, 1993). Results. The gifted 6th grade group had significantly better Accuracy results and lower Reaction Times than both their age-matched and older reading-matched peers. Their performance was also less vulnerable to irregular morphology and syntactic complexity than that of their peers. Conclusions. These results point at precocious language knowledge and language processing abilities in intellectually gifted children.
Pooja Reddy () - Facilitative Transfer in Middle-School Reading Comprehension Skills in Indian Students
Purpose: This study examined biliteracy acquisition in primary literacy Kannada and secondary literacy English in middle-schools students from urban poor communities in India. Specifically, we examined the relative role of Print Vocabulary Knowledge (PVK) (oral vocabulary knowledge and decoding) and Language Comprehension (LC) within and across Kannada and English reading comprehension. Method: Participants were 43 14-16 year old grade 6-8 students. PVK was measured by showing a word with four images and the participants chose the corresponding word, LC was assessed with a listening comprehension test. Researcher-created passages were used as the reading comprehension measure. All tests were administered in both languages. Results: Hierarchical step-wise regression analyses revealed that Kannada reading comprehension scores were explained by both Kannada PVK and Kannada LC; however, for English reading comprehension scores, English PVK was subsumed within English LC's predictive power. Interestingly, in addition to English LC, Kannada reading comprehension also explained unique variance in English reading comprehension. Conclusions: These findings extend the Transfer Facilitation Model (Koda, 2008) to middle-school reading comprehension biliteracy acquisition in learners from low-income communities, by showing that reading comprehension skills in English are jointly predicted by English LC and Kannada reading comprehension.
Fanny Reder (Laboratoire de psychologie des cognitions, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France); Élisabeth Demont - Does second-language learner's advantage in reading abilities rely on better morphological awareness?
Purpose. Previous studies have shown the importance of metalinguistic awareness in reading acquisition within monolinguals on the one hand and a bilingual advantage in metalinguistic awareness on the other hand. Thus, we hypothesized a bilingual advantage in reading abilities relying on metalinguistic awareness. Method. We conducted a longitudinal study (3 measures during first and second grade) in which performances of French monolinguals (n = 43) and second language learners of German (GSLL, n = 33) were compared on metalinguistic and reading tasks (decoding and comprehension). Concerning metalinguistic awareness, the main focus of our research was about morphological development (4 tasks measuring affixes and compounds), but we also evaluated phonological (2 tasks) and syntactic awareness (1 task) to obtain a more complete profile of early second language learning. Results. Inferential analyses confirmed a bilingual advantage in metalinguistic awareness and reading tasks as early as Grade 1 and revealed that the gap between each group widened over time. Correlation and regression analysis showed that bilingualism's contribution to reading was relying on metalinguistic awareness in Grade 1 but became direct in second grade. Conclusions. Results of the present study provided support to our hypothesis of a bilingual advantage in reading abilities relying on metalinguistic awareness. We discuss future studies designed to confirm these first results (by starting a longitudinal study in kindergarten) and explain why the contribution of bilingualism is indirect at first and then becomes direct over time.
Deborah Reed (Florida State University, Florida Center for Reading Research);Yaacov Petscher; Wes Hoover - The Contribution of Spelling and Word Knowledge to the Reading Comprehension of Limited English Proficient and English Dominant Students
Purpose: This study examined the reading comprehension of English language learners (ELLs) and native English speakers in grades 6-10 by assessing word identification and language comprehension with measures reflective of more advanced reading - spelling and written vocabulary, respectively. We asked: (a) How much unique variance in comprehension is explained by measures of spelling and written vocabulary for ELL and English dominant students? and (b) How do the relative contributions of spelling and vocabulary differ for students with higher and lower comprehension ability? Method: A total of 3,189 6-10th graders participated in the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) and Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). Data were analyzed using multiple group path analysis to evaluate direct and indirect effects of vocabulary on reading comprehension and spelling. Results: Both spelling and vocabulary (FAIR) had direct effects on students' comprehension (FCAT), with stronger associations for vocabulary and comprehension compared to spelling and comprehension. In addition, vocabulary had a consistent, small, indirect effect through spelling. R2 values differed by subgroup, but few differences were statistically significant. Conclusions: The direct effects were similar to those previously reported for fourth-grade ELLs when examining the Simple View ([SV]; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) using oral measures (Proctor et al., 2005). Thus, findings of the present study indicate the SV can be modeled with written measures for older ELLs and monolinguals. The indirect effects support the lexical quality hypothesis which holds the representation of a word draws on its orthographic, phonological, and semantic features (Perfetti & Hart, 2002).
Andrea M. Regina (Hospital for Sick Children / University of Toronto) (The Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto - andrea.regina@sickkids.ca); Jennifer Goudey; Jan C. Frijters; Maria De Palma; Lea Lacerenza; Maureen W. Lovett - On the WRITE track: Writing outcomes for adolescent struggling readers following intensive literacy intervention
Purpose: Despite high rates of writing difficulties, there is a paucity of research on how to address writing deficits in adolescents with learning difficulties (Graham & Perin, 2007; Mason & Graham, 2008). The present study reports outcomes from an intensive literacy intervention (PHAST PACES, Lovett et al., 2005) for 9th grade struggling readers. Method: The small-group intervention included phonological and strategy-based word identification and text comprehension instruction (Lovett et al., in press). Following 70 hours of reading intervention, a second 70-hour intervention in reading comprehension, text knowledge, and expressive writing was provided. In a quasi-experimental design, 40 intervention and 18 waiting-list control students meeting criteria for reading disability were compared on writing measures at 3 time points (September, January, June). Writing outcomes were evaluated using standardized (Wechsler Individual Achievement Test - Third Edition, Expressive Writing) and Curriculum-Based Writing measures (CBM-W). Results: Preliminary analysis of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed significant reductions in spelling errors over time (p = .011, d = 1.09) for the first 20 intervention participants compared to 10 initial controls. Linear trend analyses further highlighted substantial effects in writing achievement for intervention participants across the 3 time points, including increases to correct word sequencing (p = .027, d = 1.10) and thematic development (p = .024, d = 1.13), and decreases in incorrect word sequencing (p = .013, d = 1.26). Conclusions: Results provide initial evidence that writing deficits in secondary school struggling readers can be improved with remediation.
Jennifer Renn (Jennifer Renn)Catherine Darrow; David Dickinson - Preschool teacher African American English use and its relationship to child language and literacy development
Purpose Studies suggest that students who are not proficient in Standard American English (SAE) may experience difficulty with school literacy curricula (Labov, 1995; Rickford, 1999). While much research focuses on identifying factors that promote the development of strong language and literacy skills, little has been done to assess the impact of teachers' language use on their early development. This paper investigates whether preschool teachers' use of African American English (AAE) might influence their students' linguistic development and emergent literacy skills. Method Data were collected from 36 African American teachers and 180 children from Head Start classrooms in the southeastern U.S. Both teacher and child language samples were orthographically transcribed and coded for 18 common AAE features (reliability>85%), and a Dialect Density Measure (DDM) (Craig & Washington, 2006) indicating overall dialect use was calculated. Standardized measures (i.e., PPVT-III, EVT, WJ-III) collected at the beginning and end of the Pre-K year were used to assess children's gains in language and literacy skills. Results *Teacher DDM was correlated with children's average number of different AAE features (r =.221; n=82; p=0.046). *Both teacher AAE and child AAE were not significantly correlated with child gains in language and literacy. Conclusions Results indicate a weak positive relationship between teacher and student language, as higher levels of teacher AAE use was associated with greater diversity of AAE feature use by students. There were, however, no significant correlations among teacher or child AAE and any of literacy measures studied, suggesting that AAE use is not connected to emergent literacy outcomes measured by standardized assessments.
Jessie Ricketts (University of Reading, UK)Julie Dockrell; Olympia Palikara; Tony Charman; Geoff Lindsay - A longitudinal investigation of oral language and reading in children with SLI and ASD
Purpose - While reading comprehension has been explored longitudinally in specific language impairment (SLI), no such data exist for autism spectrum disorders (ASD; Ricketts, 2011). We designed a longitudinal study to compare children with SLI and ASD. We expected that the ASD group would outperform the SLI group on language and reading tasks (cf. Lindgren et al., 2009) and that word recognition and oral language would be unique predictors of reading comprehension (cf. Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Method - At Time 1, 40 children with SLI and 40 children with ASD aged 7-12 years completed a battery of standardised oral language and reading assessments. Groups were matched for age and nonverbal ability. Twelve months on, language and reading assessments are being re-administered (Time 2). Results - At Time 1, the ASD group obtained significantly higher scores than the SLI group on measures of word recognition, reading comprehension and a range of oral language tasks. However, groups did not differ on a measure of grammar. Regression analyses also indicated differences between groups. For the SLI group, reading comprehension was uniquely predicted by both word recognition and a composite measure of oral language. In contrast, for the ASD group, oral language was a unique predictor of reading comprehension while word recognition was not. Time 2 data will be analysed to investigate whether these group differences hold over time. Conclusions - This presentation will specify differences between SLI and ASD and provide novel longitudinal data on language and reading profiles in these groups.
Sarah Robins (Washington University in St. Louis, Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program)Rebecca Treiman, Psychology Department, Washington University in St. Louis, SSSR Voting Member - What letters do parents and preschoolers talk about?
Purpose: Parents and children talk informally about letters beginning when children are very young. We examined which specific letters parents and children discuss and how this changes over the preschool years. Method: We searched the CHILDES database of conversations, focusing on U.S. English-speaking parents and children aged one to five, for use of letter names alone and in two-letter sequences (digrams). Results: Single letters early in the alphabet sequence were used more than later letters, especially at younger ages. As children got older, the frequency with which a letter appeared in words in children's books also became a significant predictor of its use. The change in the relative influences of alphabetic position and frequency of occurrence in children's books was slower for children than parents. Parents and children often said digrams in alphabetic order, particularly when letters were early in the alphabetic sequence, and they also showed an elevated use of repeated digrams, such as TT. The frequency of digrams in children's books was a significant predictor of parents' bigram use throughout the age range studied, even after the frequency of the individual letters was taken into account. Digram frequency emerged as a predictor of children's digram use after age 2. Conclusions: The results point to important changes in the home literacy environment over the preschool years. The letters that children use in spelling, and their understanding of how writing works, may be influenced by the letters and letter sequences they hear at home.
Noemia Ruberto (Noemia Ruberto); Ahlem Ammar; Daniel Daigle; Joëlle Varin - Orthographic strategies in dyslexic children learning French
The development of the orthographic competence is a considerable task for most children, especially for those who are dyslexic (Malatesha, Joshi, & Aaron, 2007; Troia, 2006). Indeed, dyslexic children face difficulties when processing words in reading and in writing (Sprenger-Charolles & Colé, 2003). In order to spell in a conventional way in alphabetic languages like French, writers need to develop and use phonological, visuo-orthographic and morphological knowledge (Gombert, 2003; Plisson, Berthiaume, & Daigle, 2010). To do so, young writers must acquire specific orthographic strategies that will enable them to choose the appropriate action while writing words (Fayol & Jaffré, 2008). Very little is known about orthographic strategies used by dyslexic writers. The main goal of this presentation is to report a study that investigating the orthographic strategies used by dyslexic writers (n: 32), as compared to 25 normal writers of the same age and to 25 younger writers with similar writing abilities. All participants wrote 24 dictated words of varying complexity, length and orthographic structure. After writing each word, participants were asked to define the strategies they used while writing and answers were recorded to facilitate the analysis. Results show a group effect in favor of control participants in terms of success rates, and number and frequency of orthographic strategies used. They also indicate an effect of variables controlled for in the experimental material (orthographic complexity, length, syllabic structure). Those results are discussed in light of the potential role of orthographic strategies in the development of spelling ability.
Yea Dun Ryu (Yea Dun Sienna Ryu);Ishita Aggarwal; Yuquing Hu; Inbal Gral-Azulay; Esther Geva - The relationship between English receptive vocabulary and Hebrew phonological awareness in junior and senior kindergarten children
Purpose Phonological awareness (PA) is a cognitive skill that predicts reading ability among children and correlates with vocabulary at early ages in monolinguals. This longitudinal study examines the relation between Hebrew PA and English receptive vocabulary among junior kindergarten (JK) and senior kindergarten (SK) children who speak English as a native language (L1) and learn Hebrew as a second language (L2). Method Children attending an English-Hebrew day school were tested. In the first wave of data collection, 48 JK and 38 SK children were assessed in L1 and L2 in three domains: cognition, literacy, language. English receptive vocabulary was examined with Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Hebrew PA was examined with three tasks (first phoneme separation, last phoneme separation, partial word separation) that were combined into one composite score by factor analysis. Results A correlation was found for the combined JK-SK sample between Hebrew PA and English receptive vocabulary, controlling for age. A similar relation was observed in the JK sample, but not in the SK sample. A correlation was found between L1 and L2 PA, but not between L1 receptive vocabulary and L1 PA. Conclusion Receptive vocabulary and PA are two emerging skills that facilitate each other during development. Their relationship diminishes with age as PA stabilizes in L1. PA development in L1 follows the same constructive structure in monolinguals and bilinguals. In bilinguals, the time-span for PA development in L2 is shortened because of pre-exposure to L1 PA, indicating that bilingualism accelerates the maturation of higher cognitive abilities.
John Sabatini (Educational Testing Service)Tenaha O'Reilly; Kelly Bruce - Summarization as a measure of reading comprehension
Purpose - Research supports the association of summarization skills to reading proficiency. We added a constructed response (CR) summary task to a reading components battery to investigate its feasibility, properties, and potential for adding value in understanding student reading abilities. Method - In Spring of 2011, 2600+ students in grades 6, 7, and 9 completed a six subtest computerized reading battery. We also collected state test scores. The reading comprehension (RC) subtest consisted of 3 passages, each with multiple choice questions. Each student also wrote a summary of one of the passages, which was scored on a 5-point rubric scale. Natural language processing (NLP) methods were applied to evaluate feasibility of automated scoring of student responses. Analyses consist of descriptive statistics, correlations, reliability, evaluation of automated scoring features, and regressions predicting state test score levels. Results - All subtests had strong reliability (>0.80) and were moderately intercorrelated (r=.5-.7); over 95% of summaries were scorable. Means increased by ability level and by grade. The correlation between the summary score and RC score increased across grades (r=.44 to .56 from 6-9th grade). Significant R-square change was found when adding summary score after RC score in a regression model predicting state test scores. Automated scoring techniques were highly promising. Conclusions - Technical issues of feasibility and utility including task design, reliable and efficient scoring, and construct validity were all evaluated. The results of this study show promise for adding a summarization task to traditional reading comprehension tests.
Amir Sadeghi (Islamic Azad University, Damavand Branch)John Everatt; Brigid McNeill - Text Processing in Persian-English Bilingual Children: A Bilingual View on the Simple Model of Reading
Findings will be presented from a study investigating the cognitive-linguistic predictors of reading comprehension levels amongst Persian-English bilingual primary school children. The Persian orthography, unlike English, is written from right to left. It is cursive, with most letters changing their shape when connecting to the preceding or following letters. The orthography also uses diacritic marks to represent short vowel sounds. These marks are not always included in written text, particularly in passages targeted at more experienced readers. A sample of 150 Persian-English bilingual school-children from grades 1 to 5 attending mainstream English-language schools in New Zealand and Australia were given measures of text reading involving Cloze completion or passages followed by comprehension questions in the two languages (i.e., English & Persian). Ability levels on these measures were compared to scores on additional measures of language competence, non-verbal skills, phonological ability, orthographic processing and speed of processing. Analyses indicated that both Persian and English reading comprehension levels were predicted by similar measures of linguistic competence and word decoding, with the latter being predicted by phonological and orthographic processing skills. However, in contrast to the English data, orthographic knowledge directly predicted Persian reading comprehension from an early grade and speed of processing was significant in older grades. The findings will be discussed in terms of the application of cross-language models of reading to inform global theories of reading comprehension. Comparisons, therefore, will be made with Arabic-English data, given the similarities in orthography, but differences in language family, between Persian and Arabic.
Elinor Saiegh-Haddad (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) - Children's spelling of the letter T in Arabic: The role of morphology
Purpose Arabic is a language with a synthetic and rich morphological structure. Thus, all content words in Arabic have an internal morphological structure. The question that follows then is whether young children use this internal morphological structure in their spelling of words. The current study is an attempt to answer this question. Method We examined spelling accuracy of the letter "T" among 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade Arabic native-speaking children (N= 150). The letter T is among the most frequent letters in Arabic because it participates in three morphemes: root, word-pattern, and affix. Yet, the letter T is also homographic. It represents the regular voiceless dental stop /t/ and its emphatic allophone /t/. We asked whether: a) children have more difficulty spelling the letter T when it is irregular than regular; b) children use the morphological status of the letter T in spelling. Results The results showed that irregular letters were more difficult to spell than regular letters. Further, spelling accuracy was sensitive to the specific morphological unit that the letter was embedded within with inflectional units represented more accurately than derivational units and with some derivational units represented more accurately than other derivational units. Conclusions The results demonstrate the morpho-phonological nature of Arabic spelling and the important role that morphology plays in the development of letter spelling in young children. This implies that that letter learning is context dependent and taps knowledge beyond phonology
Anna Samara (School of Psychology, Bangor University)Markéta Caravolas - Learning novel graphotactic constraints in children and adults
Purpose: Children's spellings often reflect various statistical properties of their orthography (Deacon et al., 2008). Young spellers seem to rely on untaught graphotactic conventions for permissible letter positions (e.g., ck is illegal as an onset), as well as constraints on permissible letter contexts (e.g., i before e except after c). This study examined the learning process underlying sensitivity to both patterns. We hypothesised that (1) learning can arise rapidly by attending to the relative frequencies of letters in specific positions or contexts, and (2) such rapid learning can be induced among children as well as adults. Methods: We adapted a two-phase experiment from Onishi et al. (2002) to induce learning of novel graphotactics in 137 typically developing children (mean age = 7.4) and 113 skilled adult spellers assigned to one of four experimental conditions formed by crossing the factors of type of constraint (on letter position versus context) and training exposure duration (short versus long). Results: Adults outperformed children. However, the effects of type of constraint and exposure duration were similar in both age groups. Both types of constraints were acquired reliably, although, the effect size was much larger for learning constraints on the permissible position of letters. Exposure duration did not affect performance. Conclusions: Our results revealed qualitatively similar learning performance in a group of typically developing children and adults. Consistent with a statistical learning perspective in literacy, we suggest that sensitivity to both graphotactic patterns develops incidentally from the early stages of learning to read and spell.
Ami Sambai (); Max Coltheart; Akira Uno - A non-lexical reading processing occurs serially for the Kanji writing system?
Purpose We investigated a length-by-lexicality interaction and a position-of-atypicality effect (i.e., position-of-irregularity effect in English) to confirm whether a non-lexical procedure is applied to Kanji words serially or not. Experiment 1 Method Participants were 43 Japanese normal adults. They read 72 Kanji words and 72 Kanji nonwords. Stimuli fell into three character-length conditions: the one-character, the two-character and the three-character conditions. Familiarity, imageability, frequency, N-size and consistency were controlled. Results Linear regression analyses of RTs indicated a length effect for words (t=4.958, p<0.01) and nonwords (t=14.47, p<0.01). The effect was much larger for nonwords (slope 102.3 ms/character) than for words (slope 22.4 ms/character). Experiment 2 Method Same participants also read 78 two-character Kanji words and 100 nonword fillers. Words fell into three conditions: the first condition consisted of words with atypical readings in the second position (Typical-Atypical); the second consisted of words with atypical readings in the first position (Atypical-Typical); the third consisted of words with atypical readings in both positions (Atypical-Atypical). Same word attributes were also controlled. Results A mixed effect modeling revealed that Typical-Atypical were read significantly faster than both Atypical-Typical (t=2.26, p<0.05) and Atypical-Atypical (t=2.09, p<0.05). There was no difference between Atypical-Typical and Atypical-Atypical. Conclusion This study is the first report showing serial effects (i.e., length-by-lexicality interaction and position-of-atypicality effect) on reading aloud for the Kanji writing system, which is non-alphabetical and opaque in character-sound correspondences. Therefore we concluded that the non-lexical reading procedure occurs serially rather than in parallel during Kanji word and nonword reading.
Karinne Sauval (URECA, University of Lille North of France);Laëtitia Perre; Séverine Casalis - Do speech units participate to written word recognition in young readers? a cross-modal priming study
Reading acquisition studies have focused on the importance of phonological recoding at the onset of literacy. The alphabetical principle necessitates to establish links between written and phonological units. However, how phonological representations of spoken language (PRSL) are involved in silent reading needs to be clarified. The aims of the study were to examine through on-line measures 1)whether the sublexical PRSL can be involved in beginner and more advanced child readers in visual word recognition 2)whether the phonological units were engaged to a phonetic level. A cross-modal priming procedure was used. Word recognition was assessed within a go/no-go task. Stimuli were thirty-nine visual targets. Four kinds of auditory syllable primes were used. In "identical" condition, the prime was identical to the first syllable of the target (/bRə/-BREBIS) . In "close-variation" condition, the fragment prime was close to the first syllable of the target, only the first phoneme was different by one phonetic feature (/dRə/-BREBIS). In "distant-variation" condition, the first phoneme was different by more than one phonetic feature (/fRə/-BREBIS). In "unrelated" condition, all phonemes were different to those of the first syllable of the target (/sta/-BREBIS). Results showed that all child readers benefit from sublexical spoken "identical" primes in visual word recognition. There was no facilitation in the "close-variation" and "distant-variation" conditions. These results suggest that 1)PRSL can be involved in written word recognition in young readers 2)the phonological-orthographic connections are not engaged at the phonetic level but at least at the phonemic level at the onset of the reading acquisition.
Wolfgang Scharke (Child Neuropsychology Section, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Hospital of the RWTH Aachen); Josefine Vollmar; Thomas Günther - The application of symbol learning tasks in the early recognition of dyslexia -differences in children with and without familial risk
Purpose Phonological awareness and rapid naming tasks are commonly used to identify preschool children at risk for dyslexia. However, the predictive power of these instruments is insufficient. When a child learns to read, it has to master a cognitive task that is much more complex than solely mapping speech sounds to their corresponding letters: the child needs to develop an understanding of symbols. A fundamental ability which is at the bottom of this development is visual-verbal associate learning. According to a recent theory of dyslexia, affected individuals show a deficit in this domain. We developed a receptive and a productive paired-associate learning task for preschoolers, both targeting symbol acquisition. The purpose of the study was to test the applicability of the tasks. Method The tasks were administered to a group of children with and without familial risk for dyslexia (nfamRisk=88; ncon=197). Accuracy and reaction times were measured. Results Both tasks proved to be age-appropriate and practicable for children. In the receptive task, no differences in accuracy between the groups were found. In the productive task, controls performed significantly better than children with familial risk. In both tasks, reaction times were significantly higher in the at-risk group than in the control group. Conclusions The results suggest a relation between familial risk and the inherent ability for symbol learning before children enter school. Follow-up measurements will show which children will actually develop dyslexia. In the long run, the tasks could contribute to an improved accuracy in the prediction of dyslexia.
Elizabeth Schaughnency (university of Otago)Philippa Struthers; Ruth Kaminski - Evaluating technical adequacy of DIBELS in a New Zealand sample of early elementary students
Purpose: To examine technical adequacy evidence of the Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) in New Zealand samples. Method: We longitudinally followed two general samples of children (N = 145) across their first two school years, following one sample to the end of their third year. Each year, we administered DIBELS at three time-points and school personnel provided school-used reading progress measures, including: instructional book level, Clay's Observation Survey (age 6), and teacher judgment. We administered the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised/Normative Update at the end of data collection (second school year for one sample; third year for the other). In addition, we collected progress monitoring data twice weekly for a further sample (n = 26) of classmates of one sample who were nominated to receive supplemental homework support, monitoring progress over baseline, followed by formative evaluation of the homework intervention. Results: Analyses will examine four issues: sensitivity to development over time, linkages in performance over time, concurrent correlations with school-used indices, predictive correlations with criterion indices at outcome, and differential performance as a function of risk status derived from school-used indices. Preliminary analyses examining DIBELS performance in first year students generally suggest (a) linkages within constructs across the year; (b) concurrent and predictive relations with school-used criterion indices, especially pseudoword decoding. Conclusions: This study adds to the evidence base for DIBELS in New Zealand. Findings and potential implications for future research and practice will be discussed.
Barbara R. Schirmer ()Laura Schaffer; William J. Therrien; Todd N. Schirmer - Reread-Adapt and Answer-Comprehend intervention: Investigation of the effect on fluency and comprehension of struggling deaf readers
Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the Reread-Adapt and Answer-Comprehend intervention on the reading fluency and comprehension of deaf elementary level students identified as making poor progress in reading development. Method The design was a mixed quantitative design of switching replications experimental design along with single subject experimental design. Participants were selected from a convenience sample among elementary grade students at a state school for the deaf based on reading achievement levels that reflected lag compared to their classmates. The 6 participants were randomly assigned. Pre- and post-test measures included Running Records and reading subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson III Achievement Tests. Session measures included number of comprehension questions answered correctly and reading level of materials. Results Using a dependent t-test, we found no significance for any of the distal measures when we compared intervention to comparison groups. We conducted an ANOVA with data collapsed across each of the three assessment points and found a main effect for reading comprehension and fluency. For the proximal measures, we found consistently good literal and inferential comprehension during each session and a continuous increase in difficulty level of the materials. Conclusions First, unlike our previous studies, we did not find significant improvement on reading fluency. Second, like one of the prior studies, the students demonstrated consistently good comprehension during the intervention sessions. Finally, students in this study showed consistent improvement in ability to read fluently increasingly more difficult passages, which we had not found in the prior studies.
Paula J. Schwanenflugel (University of Georgia); Rebekah George Benjamin; Carolyn Groff; Lilly Steiner; Stephanie Lai - Reading fluency skill and the prosodic marking of linguistic focus
Children with good reading prosody tend to have greater fluency and comprehension than those who do not (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008). Good prosody may benefit comprehension by supporting the maintenance of key information in working memory (Hirschberg, 2002). To date, research on reading prosody has largely focused on sentence features (c.f., Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006), and not to discourse-level features of text. Method. 120 U.S. third graders read a specially-constructed passage that contained examples of direct quotation versus reported speech, contrastive and noncontrastive uses of "that" and "this," and parenthetical versus nonparenthetical information. The passage controlled for features of the surrounding text so that the prosody of the focused and unfocused constructions could be directly contrasted. For example, for direct quotation, children read, "Toad said, 'It doesn't seem that there is…' " but elsewhere for indirect quotation they read, "Frog said it doesn't seem that there is." However, all segments directed at features of linguistic focus were part of an integrated story. Children were given sight word reading (TOWRE) and comprehension skill (WIAT-III). Results. Reading prosody will be analyzed using Praat (spectrographic analysis) for the features. Data has been collected and preliminary analysis has been completed. Our main questions are: (a) Are children with greater fluency more likely to prosodically mark segments related to linguistic focus than children with less fluency? (b) Does this prosody predict reading comprehension, once accounting for correct words per minute and sight word reading skill?
Lucja Segal-Seiden (OISE/UT)Esther Geva - Development of story construction in L1 and L2 children between grades 4 and 6
* Purpose - Investigating development of written language between grades 4 and 6 in children who are native speakers of English (L1) and children for whom English is a second language (L2). * Method - This was a longitudinal study, matched pair design, involving 44 L1 and 44 L2 (total n=88) normally developing children. Children were matched on language status and nonverbal cognitive ability (Raven Test score). Study included analysis of the stories written by the same children as part of TOWL-3 test in grades 4 and 6 in response to the picture stimulus. This poster focuses on results from TOWL-3 test, Subtest 8, "Story Construction", which tests the overall coherence and quality of the writing sample. Data analysis was carried through Repeated Measures ANOVA with language group (L1/L2) and cognitive ability (Low/High) as the independent variables. * Results - All children made progress in story construction and story quality. However, high cognitive ability children significantly outperformed low cognitive ability children. The L2 children were not disadvantaged and on some specific tasks, eg. on expressing moral or philosophical theme, and on overall story quality they performed better than the L1. * Conclusions - Overall, in mastering story construction it was not the language status but cognitive ability that determined performance, with high cognitive ability children writing better constructed stories than the low cognitive ability children.
Eliane Segers (Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen); Xijia Luo; Ludo Verhoeven - Modality-specific testing and feedback effects in learning from text
* Purpose - In previous studies, we repeatedly found a modality effect: listening to a text+watching pictures led to higher learning gains than reading a text+watching pictures directly after the intervention. However, this effect reversed after a week or even a night. Even more so, in the reading condition, there was a learning gain over time, especially on transfer questions. We now further explored this testing effect by comparing three conditions: reading+testing, reading+testing+feedback, and reading+studying questions and answer. We hypothesized to replicate the testing effect and to find an additional feedback effect. * Method - Seventy-six adult participants were divided over the three conditions. Each participant went through 128 slides on physical processes in MRI. Each slide consisted of three sentences and a picture. Directly after studying, group 1 received a test, group 2 received a test and later compared their answers to the correct answers, and group 3 could read the test with the answers. On Day 2, all participants were tested again, with half of the questions being similar to Day 1, and half new questions. Tests consisted of 20 retention and eight transfer questions. * Results - There was a significant Time*Condition effect: Testing+feedback led to higher scores on transfer questions at Day 2, compared to Day 1, and compared to the other groups. * Conclusions - We evidenced both testing and feedback effects in transfer questions. Previous literature mostly focused on retention effects. We now show that having feedback resulted in higher levels of reading comprehension.
Francisca Serrano (University of Granada)Sylvia Defior - Efficacy of RFI (Reading Fluency Intervention) program in Spanish dyslexic and poor readers across age.
Purpose. RFI program has shown effectiveness improving fluency skills in reading disabled children from 2nd to 4th grade. It also seems to improve reading related skills: comprehension, phonological awareness, and prosody. This work tries to prove this efficiency beyond that age in late primary, secondary education and adults. Improving fluency in these ages is especially interesting in transparent orthographies like Spanish, in which fluency problems are more salient and can be a more evident manifestation of dyslexia in late ages. The RFI efficiency will be compared across age. Method. The program combines both repeated and accelerated reading approaches in an intensive, structured and sequential training at syllable, word and text reading levels. Additionally, it includes phonological skills training. Participants were 50 dyslexic and reading disabled subjects of different ages. A pretest-postest design was carried out, including measures of reading accuracy and fluency at word, pseudoword and text level, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and prosodic knowledge. Results. It is found a clear improvement in fluency measures at word, pseudoword and text level in all ages. Results also indicate improvements in reading comprehension in children from 2nd to 6th grade. In older students and adults the improvement of comprehension is mediated by the progress of prosodic skills. Conclusions. RFI is a experience-based program focused in reading fluency that shows to successfully enhance fluency and reading related skills along different ages, even in adult dyslexic subjects. The relevance and implications of this intervention program are discussed.
Elisabet Service (McMaster University)Marja Laasonen; Veijo Virsu - Evidence for impaired working memory for sequences in dyslexia
Purpose: The literature suggests that dyslexia co-occurs with both phonological and other information processing deficits. Recently, it has been suggested that one or more risk factors together result in reading difficulties. Especially in transparent languages, in which orthography directly supports phonemic analysis, a better understanding is needed of why reading fluency fails to develop after initial grapheme-phoneme correspondences have been mastered. Here we investigated how working memory (WM) for sequences is related to dyslexia. Impaired memory for visual and spatial sequences has recently been reported by Ram-Tsur et al. (2006; 2008) and Szmalec et al. (2011), respectively. Method: Twenty dyslexic and 24 fluent adult readers of orthographically highly transparent Finnish were tested on five measures of phonological WM, nine measures of sensory WM involving sequences of light flashes, tones and tactile stimulation of fingertips, twelve measures of temporal acuity and four reading tasks. Results: Dyslexic readers were impaired in WM for both phonological and sensory sequences, which were correlated. Both predicted reading. Conclusions: A common underlying difficulty in dyslexia affecting processing of sequences that unfold in time is proposed. This difficulty is suggested to affect tasks which require episodic binding of a temporal structure or temporal updating of information. Reading as well as many phonological processing tasks are thought to depend on the ability to represent and rapidly update sequential information in time.
Renee Seward (University of Cincinnati);Beth O'Brien; Allison Breit-Smith; Pamela Williamson; Benjamin Meyer - Teaching phoneme-grapheme correspondence with digital interactive text and dynamic graphic cues
Purpose: Knowledge of letter-sound correspondence plays a fundamental role in learning to read (e.g., Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Stevenson, 2004). Technology offers novel ways to engage children in the processing of text, and thus provides an optimal medium for teaching these phoneme-grapheme relations. Here we evaluate an innovative iPad-based training tool for letter-sound correspondence (SeeWord Reading) using interactive text with at-risk beginning readers. Method: A single subject experimental research design was used with randomization to order of conditions. Twenty kindergarten and first-grade children participated. The training condition included structured lessons on iPads teaching 23 phonemic sounds corresponding to letterforms. Visual cues to the letter sounds were dynamically displayed by tracing and touching the letters that were presented independently, then embedded within words and text. The control condition included a sequence of alternate educational iPad applications (for math, science, and art). Each condition comprised 20 lessons over a 10-week period. Pre and post-test measures of alphabet knowledge and fluency (DIBELS), phonological awareness (CTOPP), word identification (WJIII), and spelling and writing were compared between conditions. Results: Randomization tests indicated that performance on word identification improved to a greater extent in the SeeWord training condition than in the control condition (p = 0.03). Findings for training effects on the other measures were less consistent. Conclusions: Findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the SeeWord Reading tool as a means to advance early word reading skills, and support its use as an engaging supplement for teaching letter-sound correspondence to at-risk beginning readers.
Tsila Shalom (Levinsky Teachers' College, Tel Aviv, Israel) - Alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness in the acquisition of early orthographic representations
Purpose: The acquisition of the alphabetic principle, encompassing phonemic awareness and print alphabet knowledge, is critical to learning to read. However, it is not well understood how each work together to enable the acquisition of the earliest orthographic representations. The research aimed to identify how alphabet knowledge and the broader phonological awareness contributes to initial sight word learning in young non-readers, and the contribution in attempting to read and spell previously unknown words. Method: Sixty-four children (54 to 58 months of age) who had not had any formal literacy instruction and could not read or spell any words beyond their own name were taught to either read or spell eight words derived from a set of three consonants and five vowels. These taught words (sight-words) were post-tested alongside eight generalisation words (unknown words) derived from the same three consonants and five vowels. Pre-testing levels of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, as well as levels of phonological awareness were used to group children. Results: The results indicate that children used letter-name knowledge to read and spell sight-words, although having letter-sound knowledge improved accuracy compared to children with low letter-name knowledge. The results also indicated that children with letter-sound knowledge were better able to accurately attempt spelling unknown words, but not to read them. Conclusions: The results suggest that children make use of pre-existing letter name knowledge and phonological awareness to acquire orthographic representations of the sight-words, but use letter-sound knowledge and phonemic awareness to attempt unknown words.
Tsila Shalom (Levinsky Teachers' College, Tel Aviv, Israel)Dorit Ravid - Top-down measures in 7th grade writing: the effects of genre and SES
Purpose. Writing requires the meaningful integration of bottom-up (lexical and syntactic) and top-down (content and discourse structure) processes in view of the overall goal of the text - the discourse genre it serves. The current study aimed to assess the top-down components that contribute to text quality in 7th graders' writing in view of text genre and students' SES backgrounds. Method. Participants were 90 Hebrew-speaking 7th grade students - 45 from mid-high SES, and 45 from low SES. Each student wrote three texts - one personal-experience narrative, one expository text about an abstract topic, and one informative text about "the car". This yielded a database of 270 texts. Each text was measured for size (words, clauses, and mean clause length), and assessed using the following top-down criteria as related to the three text genres: Content quality and quantity (content); quality of text opening and text coda (global structure); connectives and referencing (cohesion). Results. The low-SES students did worse than their high-SES peers on all measures - they wrote shorter texts, with fewer and less well-developed ideas, with less well-constructed openings and often with no codas, and with poorer-quality connectivity and referencing. All students did better on the narrative texts, which scored better on all criteria. The informative and expository texts were more challenging to all students, especially to the low-SES students. Conclusions. Top-down measures of written texts proved to be diagnostic across both text genre and SES background.
Kathleen Sheehan (Educational Testing Service) - A comparison of two fundamentally different approaches for measuring cohesion
Purpose Quantitative text complexity measures that incorporate valid information about cohesion may relate more strongly to expected patterns of reader development. This paper presents validity evidence for two approaches for measuring cohesion: approaches that define cohesion in terms of the number of explicit cohesive devices detected in a text, and approaches that instead define cohesion as the difference between the number of explicit cohesive devices that a reader would need to see in order to develop an accurate mental representation of a text's content, and the number of explicit cohesive devices actually detected in a text. Method Exemplar indices of each type are evaluated relative to two sets of human judgments: complexity classifications collected for 1,026 reading passages selected from high-stakes assessments, and low/high cohesion classifications collected for 12 passages selected from published text adaptation studies. Results While both types of measures were successful at distinguishing texts adapted by human experts to exhibit lower or higher levels of cohesion, only measures developed via the second approach were also successful at distinguishing texts classified as appropriate for readers with lower- or higher levels of reading ability. Conclusions Validity findings obtained via text adaptation designs will not necessarily generalize to the case of texts that have not been adapted. Complexity measures intended for application to texts that have not been adapted should incorporate cohesion measures that consider both the number of explicit cohesive devices detected in a text, and the number needed to develop an accurate mental representation of a text's content.
Elaine Silliman (University of South Florida)Ruth H. Bahr - Complexity of relative clause perspective shifting by elementary-aged Spanish-English bilinguals: Implications for cognitive-syntactic interactions in two languages
Purpose: To examine how cognitive and syntactic factors may interact to facilitate oral sentence comprehension in bilingual children. (1) The complexity of cross-linguistic perspective shifting in relative clauses processing (MacWhinney, 2005) was investigated: 0 (no switch); 1- (main clause subject to main clause object); 1 + (abrupt shift to relative clause subject); and 2 (main clause subject to main clause object back to original main clause subject). (2) The sensitivity of new software was explored to discern subtle differences in processing patterns. Method: Oral processing of Spanish and English relative clauses was assessed in 16 carefully selected Spanish-English bilinguals and 13 monolingual English-speaking students. Sentence processing tasks, including control sentences, were developed in Spanish and English and presented using Mouse Tracker software (Freeman & Ambady, 2010). Participants decided if presented pictures reflected clausal perspectives described in accompanying oral sentence presentations. Processing differences were analyzed using the same software, which recorded response accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mouse trajectory patterns as measures of cognitive processing complexity. Results: MANOVA results revealed a significant main effect for sentence type and no effect of language in all analyses, i.e., bilingual participants performed similarly across languages and like monolingual students. In general, accuracy levels and d' values were greater for the 0 switch and control conditions. RTs were longer for the more complex switches with the 1+ condition most consistently difficult. Analyses of spatial attraction and trajectory complexity were more sensitive to differences in sentence processing and between languages. Conclusion: Mousetracker implications are explored for examining individual variation in cognitive-syntactic processing in bilinguals' reading comprehension.
Macarena Silva (Universidad de Chile); Kate Cain - The prediction of reading comprehension in beginner readers: the role of lower- and higher-level oral language skills.
Purpose: Previous research has looked at the contribution of oral language skills to reading comprehension. However, this work has typically either treated different oral language skills (word, sentence, discourse) as a composite measure or it has not included all levels of oral language in the same model. The current study investigated the contribution of lower- and higher-level oral language skills on word reading and reading comprehension in beginner readers longitudinally. Method: Eighty-two children aged 4 - 6 years completed assessments of nonverbal IQ, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar. Narrative comprehension was assessed through answers to questions about the content of a picture book. Narrative production was assessed through a storytelling and a retelling task using the same picture book. One year later, 69 children of the original sample were assessed on their word reading and reading comprehension skills. Results: After controlling for age and nonverbal IQ, lower- and higher-level oral language skills explained unique variance in both word reading and reading comprehension. Of note, once word reading ability was taken into account, narrative comprehension still contributed significantly to the prediction of later reading comprehension. Conclusions: Lower- and higher-level oral language skills make independent contributions to reading comprehension ability over time. This finding suggests that word, sentence, and discourse level skills each need to be taken into account in models of early reading comprehension development. Moreover, not all narrative skills contribute equally to reading comprehension, suggesting that different discourse abilities need to be assessed.
Deborah Simmons (Texas A&M University)Angela Hairrell; Melissa Fogarty; Leslie Simmons; Eric Oslund; Sharon Vaughn; Greg Roberts - Efficacy of critical reading practices on high school students' reading for understanding
Purpose: This presentation reports findings from an experimental study that examined the effects of a multicomponent intervention on ninth- and tenth-grade students' reading comprehension. This study is in progress (data collection completed December, 2011). Method: Design and Research Questions: We used a randomized block design, assigning each teacher's English language arts classes to treatment (Critical Reading Practices; CRP) or comparison conditions. We addressed the following questions: (a) What is the efficacy of CRP on 9th and 10th graders' reading comprehension? (b) Is CRP effective for struggling readers? (c) What are student and teacher perceptions of CRP efficacy and feasibility? Participants and Setting: We conducted this study in ninth- and tenth-grade English language arts classes from three high schools in Texas. Thirty classes from eight teachers (2 male; 6 female) including 347 students were randomly assigned to CRP (n = 16) or the comparison condition (n = 14). Materials/Procedures: CRP includes three phases: Text Set-Up, Text Evidence Analysis, and Text Evidence Synthesis with narrative and informational text prototypes. Teachers implemented CRP over 14 weeks. Measures: We assessed reading achievement using the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test and proximal measures of narrative and informational comprehension. Teachers and students completed social validity surveys. Analyses: Multilevel modeling will be used to estimate effects of treatment and moderators. Teachers will be used as a stratum for purposes of assignment. Results: Results will be reported by research questions including main effects of treatment and descriptive survey statistics. Conclusions: We anticipate discussing effects by outcome measure and learner ability.
Ian Simpson (Universidad of Granada, Spain);Sylvia Defior; Gabriela Seidlová Málková; Betty Mousikou; Markéta Caravolas - Learning the letters of three Latin alphabets: Influences of alphabet features, letter-sound consistency, and instruction.
examine whether language-specific features of orthography, and teaching methods affect the rate and patterns of children's letter learning. We addressed these issues in a longitudinal study comparing letter knowledge development among learners of three languages: Czech, Spanish, and English. While these alphabets all derive from the Latin alphabet, their letter inventories differ in size and letter-level features. Moreover, the languages differ in letter-sound mapping consistency (especially of vowels), and in methods of letter instruction. Thus, we investigated whether orthographic and instructional factors influenced the development of letter knowledge over and above letter-level characteristics. Method Groups of 153 Czech (age at T1: 5;4-7;1), 190 Spanish (age at T1: 6;1-7;1), and 188 English (age at T1: 4;5-5;7) children took part in a series of letter name and letter sound production tasks at four time points over an 18 month period. Growth curve and hierarchical linear modeling will be used to investigate cross-linguistic differences. Results Preliminary analyses confirmed that letter-level factors affected children's performance. In addition, the manner of teaching as well as letter-sound consistency seemed to differentially influence the rates and patterns of letter learning across languages. Conclusions While Latin letter inventories contain many similarities across languages, our study suggests that learning such alphabets is nevertheless influenced by factors such as symbolic (letter-level) attributes, instructional methods, and orthographic consistency; the results inform our understanding of how a cornerstone of literacy is acquired.
Pauline Sirois (Université Laval)Pauline Sirois; Alice Vanlint; Émilie Hébert; Isabelle Savage - Linguistic foundations and reading development in deaf children
Purpose: Students living with a hearing impairment have significant difficulties in reading. These difficulties may take root in the foundations that support written language learning. We present the results of a study that examines the links between deaf children's developmental level in these foundations and the development of their reading skills from Grade 1 through Grade 3. Method: The study was conducted among 21 deaf children and 99 hearing children. Measures related particularly to morphosyntactic development, story comprehension and conceptualization of the writing system were taken at the beginning of Grade 1. Measures in reading comprehension were subsequently collected at the end of Grades 1 and 3. Results: The analyses showed a considerable gap between deaf children and hearing children in terms of their developmental level in these foundations when beginning the process of learning to read. The findings also brought out a relation between the level of morphosyntactic development and story comprehension at the beginning of Grade 1 and difficulties in reading comprehension at the end of Grade 3, in particular among deaf children. The gap seen at the beginning of Grade 1 is strongly extended to the benefit of hearing children as many deaf children have already failed at the end of Grade 1 or still have difficulties in reading comprehension at the end of Grade 3. Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of providing support to deaf children before they begin the formal process of learning to read and through the whole elementary cycle, particularly in activities supporting morphosyntactic development and story comprehension to foster the development of reading comprehension.
Sara Smith (Doctoral Student, University of Oxford);Victoria Murphy - Differential verb + noun collocational knowledge among young learners and its relationship with reading comprehension
*Purpose: Assessment of vocabulary in reading comprehension has tended to emphasize counting the number of words an individual knows, or vocabulary breadth. However, to process these lexical items effectively the learner must also have vocabulary depth. One area of vocabulary depth of increasing interest is the role multi-word phrases, collocations, play in language acquisition and processing. While it has been long established that multi-word items are ubiquitous in naturally-occurring discourse (Sinclair, 1991) and can negatively affect the reading comprehension of adult English learners (Bishop, 2004; Martinez & Murphy, 2011), at present the nature of collocational knowledge in young learners and its possible correlates with literacy remain relatively under-explored, largely because there are no available appropriate measures. *Method: The current paper details the validation of a verb + noun collocation measure with 100 British English speaking children, learners with English as an Additional Language (EAL) and monolinguals, between 7 and 11. The instrument was then administered to 40 Year 4 students along with measures of vocabulary and reading comprehension. *Results: The test discriminates well between learners of different ages and language backgrounds, has high internal consistency and reliable test-retest results. Scores correlate highly with other standardised measures of vocabulary knowledge. Rasch analysis will be presented with a discussion of item difficulty. *Conclusions: Collocational knowledge differs between young learners with EAL and monolingual speakers and shows a clear relationship with reading comprehension.
Patrick Snellings (University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology)Patrick Snellings; Ilonka de Haas; Wery van den Wildenberg - When fast word recognition becomes automatic word recognition: insights from an interference control study
Purpose Proficient and fast readers assumedly read relatively automatic with beneficial effects on the reading process. This study determined when word recognition becomes automatic. We predicted proficient readers' accuracy and speed during word recognition to be immune to interference of a secondary auditory stimulus. In contrast, we predicted average and especially weak readers to respond slower and less accurate during interference than during facilitation, suggesting non-automatic word recognition. Method We tested 108 children of Grades 2,3 and 4. We combined a lexical decision task with a Simon task. During lexical decision an auditory stimulus was presented in the ear congruent or incongruent to the response hand (Facilitation and Interference condition) or in both ears (Control condition). Simon effects are the difference scores on speed and accuracy between congruent and incongruent trials. Results As predicted, Simon effects on speed and accuracy were smaller for proficient than for weak readers. Unexpectedly, Simon effects of average readers were similar to proficient readers on word reading speed. In contrast, average readers had larger Simon effects on accuracy and on nonword reading speed. Conclusions These findings indicate that proficient readers are not only faster but also more automatic than weak readers. Simon effects on speed suggested that average readers were automatic in word reading but not in nonword reading. Moreover, Simon effects on accuracy also indicated otherwise. In sum, some fast reading entails automaticity but not all fast reading.
Catherine Snow (Graduate School of Education, Harvard University) - Discussant
Discussant
Brooke Soden (Ohio State University, Dept of Psychology); Sara Hart; Jeanette Taylor; Chris Schatschneider - Genetic and environmental overlap and specificity in reading and spelling during the "reading to learn" years
Purpose The current study investigated the genetic and environmental overlap and specificity among reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a diverse sample of twins. Though there are quite a few published genetically sensitive studies that include reading fluency and comprehension, very few genetically sensitive studies that include spelling outcomes have been reported. Method Genetic and environmental variability was decomposed for reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 4,856 twins (788 monozygotic, 1640 dizygotic) using a Cholesky decomposition model. Data were collected during the 2010-2011 academic school year for twins in grades 3-7. Results There was a general genetic factor underlying the covariance among reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling. Beyond the general genetic influences, there was an additional independent genetic factor influencing reading comprehension alone, as well as an independent genetic factor influencing spelling alone. Additionally, there was a general shared environmental factor underlying the covariance among all the measures, with little evidence of any other shared environmental influences. All three outcome measures had modest nonshared environmental influences which were specific to each measure. Conclusions Currently, many screening measures are used to gauge reading proficiency and identify students who are at risk for reading difficulties. As educators and policymakers are pressured to make tough decisions with regard to allocating limited time and resources, it is important to understand how different academic skills are related to each other, especially those that are related to literacy success such as spelling. Studies such as the current one offer evidence that common genetic and environmental factors influence reading and spelling.
Pernilla Soderberg (Linnaeus University); Christer Jacobson; Thomas Nordström - Twenty years of reading development in Kronoberg
Purpose: This poster addresses findings from a Swedish longitudinal reading project, Reading Development in Kronoberg, during a period of 20 years (1989 until 2010). The purpose is to answer questions about consequences of poor decoding ability in grade two concerning decoding development and ability as adult as well as academic success. Method: On the basis of two word decoding tests administered in a cohort of 2165 children in grade 2 (age 8-9) together with teachers' estimates of poor readers, a total of 103 children with reading disabilities (RD) were selected. A control group of 90 children with normal reading capacity were matched on gender, school class and non-verbal cognitive ability. The RD children and the controls were retested with different reading and cognitive tests in grade 5, 9, 12 and 30 RD plus 28 controls, at the age of 29, together with information about their marks and academic careers. Results: The RD group was significantly poorer at all reading related measures at all test points. Especially, phonological measures and spelling were far behind as well as academic success. The decoding gap between RD and controls increased, in particular after the end of formal schooling. Except a few subjects, they followed a deficit model. Conclusions: It seems like as long as RD takes part of the education system they continues to develop their decoding ability, but than the decoding level away. It also seems like decoding ability in early grades are more important for later academic success than cognitive non-verbal ability.
Jonathan Solity (KRM-PER Ltd) - The Real Books Database: A Rational Analytic Approach to Teaching Reading
Purpose: The current research is underpinned by rational analysis and examined the statistical properties of the word tokens contained in 'real books' to establish (i) whether their structure is the same as in highly decodable texts and (ii) the extent to which they reflect Pareto's Law. Method: An electronic database was created from 800,000 words contained in over 900 'real books'. Each word's orthographic and phonemic representation was noted along with its frequency count. Spelling to sound mappings were analysed at two levels: whole words and grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Results: The analysis revealed that the distribution of whole words and grapheme-phoneme correspondences in the real books database approximates to Pareto's Law. The most frequently occurring word types and grapheme-phoneme correspondences accounted for over 90% of the word tokens on the database. Conclusions: The research outcomes have three major implications. The first is that the 900 books in the 'real books database' provide comparable opportunities for beginning readers to apply their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and whole word reading skills as books in the reading schemes included in Stuart et al.'s (2003) database. The second is that typically over half the grapheme-phoneme correspondences taught within synthetic phonic programmes occur with low frequency or not at all in 'real books' and are of little practical value. Finally the levels within programmes such as Reading Recovery are arbitrary and generally contain the same proportion of frequently occurring grapheme-phoneme correspondences and word types enabling students to decode similar proportions (between 70-75%) of word tokens in books at different levels.
Carmen Sotomayor (CIAE Universidad de Chile); Macarena Silva - Written production in Chilean elementary school: an exploratory study of children narrative skills.
Purpose: Previous research looking at language and communication skills in Chile has focused on reading, and just a few studies have looked at writing skills. The current research describes the production of written narratives of elementary school children, focusing on the main difficulties found in the construction of a written story. Method: A total of 945 children aged 9-13 years produced a written story. Two different stimuli were used to elicit written production: topic continuing and picture sequence. Narratives were coded according to 5 criteria: coherence, cohesion, textual organization, development of ideas, and adequacy to the communicative setting. Results: Results showed that children improved in their overall writing skills with age specially, between the youngest participants (9 years-old) and the rest of the sample. Significant differences were found depending on the stimuli: performance on coherence, cohesion and ideas development was better for the topic continuing stimuli; adequacy to the communicative setting was better in the picture sequence stimuli. Most common difficulties tended to be normally distributed, except for the use of cohesive devices that was particularly difficult for this sample. Textual organization was significantly correlated to all other criteria. Conclusions: Writing skills vary depending on the stimuli used to elicit written production, suggesting that adequate materials might prompt better the construction of more organized narratives. The relation of textual organization with all the other criteria suggests that the inclusion of story elements is core when exploring written production, highlighting the relevance of text structure.
Anne Soussi (Education Research Unit, Departement of Education, Geneva); Jacqueline Lurin; Pascal Zesiger - The roles of teachers and students' attitudes in the literacy development of low-achieving students in a multilingual context
Purpose: The study describes the literacy development of a sample of 60 low achieving secondary school students in Geneva (30 speaking French and 30 allophones of varied languages) across the first three years of secondary education and relates this development to factors explaining these adolescents' progression. We focus on the explanatory roles of teacher/student interpersonal relations and students' attitudes towards reading and writing. Method: Literacy development was measured using French versions of the reading and writing tasks from the TTC-project three times consecutively (in grades 7, 8 and 9). Interpersonal relationships between students and their teachers, and students' attitudes towards reading and writing were measured by questionnaires administered to students and teachers in each of the consecutive grades as well. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to relate students' attitudes to their reading and writing skills. Results: Students' attitudes towards reading predicted their proficiency in grade 7 but ceased to do so in grade 9. Different results were found for writing, as writing attitudes kept a predictive power for writing proficiency in grade 9. Furthermore, significant correlations were found between student/teacher relationships and students' literacy skills at different points in time. Finally, the analyses did not show significant differences between monolingual and bilingual students' literacy development. Conclusions: The study shows that student attitudes and student/teacher relationships have a small but significant role in literacy development of mono- and bilingual low achieving students.
Richard Sparks (College of Mt. St. Joseph) - Does the simple view of reading explain L2 reading in high school L2 learners?
Purpose: The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model has been found to predict word decoding and reading comprehension among young English language learners (ELL). However, U.S. high school students generally do not begin L2 study until high school. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the SVR model explains L2 word decoding and reading comprehension skills in high school L2 learners whose L1 is English. Method: One hundred and sixty-five high school students (91 males, 79 females), none of whom had previous L2 experience, were administered measures of Spanish word decoding, pseudoword decoding, phonemic awareness, reading fluency, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and vocabulary at the end of their first or second year Spanish courses. Spanish pseudoword decoding, phonemic awareness, and reading fluency were used as predictor variables of Spanish word decoding, and Spanish listening comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency were used as predictors of Spanish reading comprehension. Results: Several different methods of examining predictive and overlapping variance (hierarchical regression, commonality analysis, path analysis) were employed. Findings showed that Spanish pseudoword decoding alone explained 76.2% of the variance in Spanish word decoding, and that Spanish listening comprehension (65.3%) and Spanish vocabulary (3.3%) explained the variance in Spanish reading comprehension. Commonality analysis indicated that Spanish pseudoword decoding and Spanish phonemic awareness had substantial overlap (14.7%), suggesting that the remaining variance in Spanish word decoding is explained by Spanish phonemic awareness. Commonality analysis indicated that Spanish listening comprehension and Spanish vocabulary had substantial overlap (31%), suggesting that the remaining variance in Spanish reading comprehension is explained by Spanish vocabulary. Spanish reading fluency did not explain unique variance in either Spanish word decoding or reading comprehension and also did not share substantial overlap with the other predictor variables. Path analysis found that that there was not a unique relationship between Spanish word decoding and Spanish reading comprehension, i.e., standardized beta coefficients between the two variables, .162 and .017, were not significant. Conclusion: The findings support the SVR model, which suggests that word decoding is best predicted by pseudoword decoding, and that reading comprehension is best predicted by listening comprehension. The findings extend the explanation for reading skill proposed by the Simple View model to L2 learners who do not begin the study of a L2 until high school.
Erin Sparks (); Helene Deacon - Reading multisyllabic words: Affixes and readers' sensitivity to orthographic stress cues
Purpose: In English, certain letter patterns are probabilistically associated with lexical stress. Readers are sensitive to whether a word's actual stress pattern is consistent with these cues. Affixes are quite strong indicators of word stress, and notably, orthographic stress cues can be patterns that never function as affixes (nonaffixes; -el), or that occasionally function as affixes (pseudoaffixes; -er). This study examines whether readers' sensitivity to stress cue consistency differs according to the cue's status as a pseudo- or nonaffix, both when reading isolated words and connected text. Method: Items will contain an orthographic stress cue that is either consistent or inconsistent with word stress, and is either a pseudoaffix or nonaffix. 60 participants will complete a lexical decision (LD) task; 60 more will complete a Missing Letter Effect (MLE) task, in which items are embedded in a passage that participants read, for comprehension, while detecting a specified letter. Results: We expect processing to be more efficient when stress cues are consistent, rather than inconsistent, with word stress. This would mean faster/more accurate responses to words with consistent cues in the LD task, and more target letter omissions in these words in the MLE task. Given how strongly affixes predict stress placement, we also expect an interaction between cue consistency and cue type, with a larger difference between consistent and inconsistent cues when the cue is a pseudoaffix than when it is a nonaffix. Conclusions: This study will help to clarify the ways in which readers process multisyllabic English words.
Mercedes Spencer (Florida State University) - Investigating the Factor Structure of Vocabulary Knowledge
Abstract Purpose The purpose of the present study was to test a new assessment of vocabulary knowledge and to investigate the factor structure of this knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge contains a definitional knowledge component, a usage component, a relational knowledge component, and a morphological knowledge component. Our goal was to investigate the relationship amongst these variables. Method The current measure assesses word knowledge within each of these areas using the same twenty-three vocabulary words for 90 8th graders. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is used to model these variables in three different ways: (1) a four-factor model that presents each variable as a related yet distinct facet of vocabulary knowledge, (2) a two-factor model that considers vocabulary knowledge and morphological knowledge to be two separate components, and (3) a one-factor model in which all variables load on a single latent construct. Results Unique variance is present at the individual, word, and question levels. CFA reveals that the four-factor model is the best fitting model. Conclusions Although vocabulary knowledge is comprised of several highly interrelated components, there is still some distinction among the four factors. This finding has several implications for how vocabulary knowledge is both learned and taught in the classroom.
Elsa Spinelli (Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition Grenoble)Sonia Kandel; Helena Guerassimovitch; Ludovic Ferrand - Graphemic cohesion effect in reading and writing complex graphemes
Purpose AU and AN in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence AU is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, AN can be associated with either one phoneme (in e.g., CRAN ''notch'') and be parsed as a complex grapheme; or with two phonemes (/an/ in e.g., CANE /kan/ ''duck''), thus being parsed as two simple graphemes. As a consequence, AU would be a more cohesive grapheme than AN, for which there is a parsing ambiguity. We examined whether the reading system takes into account this potential parsing ambiguity due to the graphemes' degree of cohesion when processing complex graphemes. Method The Experiment consisted of a letter detection task. The participants had to detect, for example A in strongly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., AU /o/) or weakly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., AN). Results A was detected faster in weakly cohesive complex graphemes than in strongly cohesive ones. Conclusions Our results show an effect of parsing ambiguity due to graphemic cohesion of complex graphemes; these results should be accounted for by current models of written word processing.
Joseph Stafura (University of Pittsburgh); Joseph Z. Stafura; Charles A. Perfetti - Making the association: an ERP investigation of the effect of association strength on word-to-text integration in comprehenders of varying skill
Purpose: This study examined the effect of antecedent-anaphor association strength on on-line word-to-text integration processes in more and less skilled comprehenders. Methods: 40 more and less skilled comprehenders took part in this study. Participants read 90 two-sentence passages across three conditions. In the strongly associated (SA) and weakly associated (WA) conditions, critical words in the second sentence were strong or weak associates of antecedents in the first sentence. The baseline (BA) condition contained the same critical words, which lacked readily available antecedents. Event-Related Potential measurements were taken at critical words. Results: For both groups, greater early negativity (N170) was elicited over occipital electrodes by the associated conditions relative to the BA condition. For skilled comprehenders, reduced negativity was seen over left parietal electrodes for the associated conditions relative to the BA condition around 350 ms post-stimulus (N400). For less skilled comprehenders, this reduced negativity was seen later, and only in the SA condition. Among the less skilled comprehenders, relative to WA and BA conditions, the SA condition elicited increased positivity over frontal electrodes and decreased negativity over right temporal electrodes, with both effects emerging around 200 ms post-stimulus. Conclusions: The results indicate that more skilled comprehenders are able to rapidly integrate associatively related anaphors, in terms of form expectancy (N170) and lexico-semantic integration (N400). While less skilled comprehenders showed facilitated integration of strongly associated anaphors, this effect occurred later and was preceded by distributed activity patterns. This suggests less skilled comprehenders recruit additional processing systems during word-to-text integration.
Rhona Stainthorp (Institute of Education, University of Reading) - National assessment of phonics knowledge in 6 year old children in England: what is the value added?
Purpose: It is now national policy in England that initial instruction in reading is based on a programme of structured synthetic phonics. The UK government have introduced a phonics screening check for all pupils in Year 1 (age 6 years), the stated purpose of which is to "is to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard." This study is designed to investigate the relationship between pupils' performance on the phonics check, their reading related skills at the start of school (age 5 years) and their reading performance. Method: The participants are 60 children in Year 1 (age 6 years) in two mainstream schools in a SE area of England. Performance data on literacy related skills at the start of school (age 5 years) have been collected. Additionally the phonics screening check; the Diagnostic Test of Word Reading Processes (DToWRP); and the New Group Reading Test(NGRT) will be administered to each participant. Results: The data will be analysed a) to investigate the relationship between performance at the start of school and performance on the phonics check after a minimum of four terms of reading instruction and b) to investigate the relationship between performance on the non norm based phonics check and reading as measured by standardised, norm based tests of wider reading skills. Conclusions: The study will provide an indication of whether performance on a phonics screening check can provide any additional evidence about individual reading progress not provided by more traditional standardised norm based measures .
Laura Steacy (Vanderbilt University); Donald Compton; Jennifer Gilbert; Devin Kearns - An examination of word level characteristics to form pedagogically relevant clusters of words
Purpose As children learn to read, they develop an orthographic lexicon, which is a system of word representations that allows for efficient word recognition (Perfetti, 1992). The building of individual representations, or sight words, in the lexicon is facilitated by the systematic and successful application of letter-sound relationships contained within the word (Ehri, 1992). Very little attention has been paid to the process of adding sight words directly to the lexicons of poor readers. The purpose of this research was to explore whether natural groups of words exist that would facilitate both the addition of sight words to the lexicon and the learning of decoding relationships. Method We coded the 4,000 most frequent words (Zeno et al., 1995) to represent important word level characteristics (e.g., grade frequency, overall word frequency, word length, orthographic neighborhood size, age of acquisition, etc.) using the MRC Psycholinguistic (Wilson, 1988) and the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007). Cluster analysis was used to explore word level characteristics that may group words into pedagogically relevant clusters that maximize the efficiency with which students acquire words and learn decoding rules. Results To identify clusters, three hierarchical agglomerative algorithms were used to identify initial clusters (Ward's method, average linkage, and complete linkage) followed by an iterative partitioning method (k-means). K-means was used to clarify and refine the initial solutions produced by the three hierarchical methods. Results suggest that models derived separately for words based on grade-level frequency result in pedagogically relevant clusters that allow for the addition of sight words and learning of decoding relationships. However, further weighting procedures are needed to help refine clusters. Conclusion Preliminary results suggest that words can be grouped in relevant ways that may assist students in establishing word representations within their lexicons. This research may have important implications for intervention for students at-risk for reading disabilities.
Jonathan Steinberg (Educational Testing Service); John Sabatini; Tenaha O'Reilly; Kelly Bruce - Dimensionality analysis of a computerized battery of reading measures
Purpose - to examine the dimensionality of a computerized battery of reading component subtests designed for struggling adolescent readers. The chosen components were not typically examined in broad reading comprehension tests, and targeted difficulties that could become focal areas for instructional interventions. We hypothesized that a two-factor model would fit the data, corresponding roughly to a lexical factor and a continuous text factor. Method - In Spring 2011, 13000+ students in Grades 6 through 9 completed a computerized reading battery of six subtests measuring: word recognition & decoding; vocabulary; morphological awareness; sentence processing; efficiency of basic reading comprehension; and reading comprehension. Results - There is added value in a multi-factor model over a single-factor model using the six subtest scores in Grade 8 as the Comparative Fit Index increases by 0.012, which is significant. In Grades 6, 7, and 9, the improvement in fit was slightly under this threshold. There is marginal goodness-of-fit to the data (90% CI for RMSEA includes 0.08) for two factors in Grade 8. The latent inter-factor correlation for a two-factor model in each grade was above 0.90, so some caution is needed in distinguishing this model from a one-factor model. Conclusions - We found support for a two-factor model corresponding to a lexical factor and a continuous text factor. The results provide insights into the construct validity of the assessment battery and have implications for its utility in guiding instructional decision-making for struggling adolescent readers.
Jackson Stenner (MetaMetrics); Don Burdick; Jill Fitzgerald - Text complexity: toward construct definition and measurement
Purpose The purpose of this session is to theorize text complexity and delineate a measurement process that is isomorphic to that theory. Method and Result The following key premises from Rosenblatt's (1938, 1994) transactional view of reading are considered to create a relational definition of text complexity: a) Reading happens through a transaction between a particular individual and a particular text. b) Transaction means the reader and the text are aspects of the total reading experience, "each conditioned by and conditioning the other." c) Through the transaction, an evocation of meaning occurs that reflects reader comprehension and text comprehensibility. Four constructs are central to a particular reader-text-transactional occasion: reader ability (a permeating individual trait-the power to create meaning through transacting with text); printed text complexity (characteristics represented by the printed symbols that embody meaning[s] intended by the author); reader comprehension for the occasion; and text comprehensibility for the occasion. A Rasch model is presented and is shown to be isomorphic to the transactional outlook. The reader-text-transactional occasion is modeled as a function of printed text complexity and reader ability Further, the Rasch model expresses reader ability and text complexity on a common developmental scale. Evidence regarding the fit of data to this model is presented. Conclusion Examining the construct, text complexity, from a philosophical stance may lead to further discussion and debate, which in turn may result in greater clarity about the meaning and measurement of this important construct.
Karen Stoiber (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)Maribeth Gettinger - Attendance and social competence as predictors of early literacy outcomes with high-risk preschoolers
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the role of children's attendance and social competence on high risk children's early literacy outcomes. It is hypothesized that both children's attendance and social competence will be positively associated with emergent literacy outcome measures. Method: The participants in this study are 288 low-income, African-American preschoolers enrolled in 18 Head Start classrooms in the Midwest. Classroom teachers received professional development in evidence-based early literacy instruction. The predictor measures included children's attendance, which served as a proxy for their exposure to the strategic early literacy instruction, and teachers' ratings of student's positive and challenging behavior. Ten measures of early literacy, including phonemic awareness, letter naming, oral language, and print awareness served as outcomes of the intentional instruction. Results: Multiple regression analyses indicated children's attendance as a significant predictor of preschoolers' early literacy performance on five of ten measured outcomes. Further, children's social competence significantly predicted their early literacy performance on seven of ten measures, including vocabulary recognition and comprehensive literacy screening tasks. Challenging behavior only was associated with only two literacy outcome measures, suggesting these behaviors as being less potent in impacting on literacy outcomes. Conclusions: Low-income children's attendance in strategic early literacy instruction was associated with better performance on emergent literacy measures. In addition, positive social competence was linked to 7 of 10 measures of early literacy. The results support the integration of evidence-based practices in early literacy with social competence in improving language and school readiness among low-income, minority preschoolers.
Sue Stothard (); Maggie Snowling; Charles Hulme - Examining the effects of gender, SES and EAL on reading attainments: findings from a representative sample of English school children
Purpose: This study explored the effects of gender, SES and EAL on reading attainments in a large representative sample of English school children. Method: 50 state-funded schools in England representing a range of socio-economic and geographic backgrounds participated in this study. 1,553 children aged 6-16 years completed tests of single word reading and passage reading. For passage reading, children were asked to read fiction and non-fiction passages and immediately answer comprehension questions that tapped literal, inferential and vocabulary based comprehension skills. We assessed the effects of gender, SES and EAL on reading skills across two age groups: primary (6-11 year olds) and secondary (11-16 year olds) school pupils. Results: We first analysed the effects of gender, SES and EAL on the development of reading accuracy, rate and comprehension skills. There was a highly significant effect of SES: social deprivation was associated with weaker reading skills for primary and secondary school pupils. There was also a significant effect of EAL on reading comprehension for secondary school pupils. Contrary to expectation, there was no effect of gender for accuracy or comprehension. We then explored the prevalence and classification of reading difficulties. 3.3% of primary and 4.9% of secondary school pupils displayed specific decoding difficulties (dyslexics). 5.3% of primary and 5.0% of secondary school pupils met criteria for specific comprehension difficulties (poor comprehenders). Conclusions: Our data indicates that different demographic variables are associated with the development of reading accuracy, rate and comprehension skills and these relationships change during childhood.
Jung-Hsuan Su ()L. Quentin Dixon - A study of 11th grade students' English reading motivation, language problems, and English reading achievement in Taiwan
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to examine 11th grade students' English reading motivation, language problems that EFL students generally encounter while reading in English, and how these affect their motivation to read as well as reading achievement. Method: 302 11th grade students from an urban high school in southern Taiwan participated in the study. Measures included an English reading comprehension test, a questionnaire for English reading motivation, and a language problem in reading English questionnaire. A factor analysis validated the items of the motivation questionnaire and the factor loadings were interpreted as motivational orientations. Multiple regression and correlation analysis were performed to examine the relationship among reading motivation, language problems, and reading achievement. Results: These 11th grade Taiwanese students mostly reported motivation for knowledge and social purposes in reading English. Self-reported lack of grammar knowledge and overall reading comprehension problems had significant influence on reading achievement. Moreover, motivation for compliance, lack of grammar knowledge, and overall reading comprehension problems were significantly associated with reading achievement when controlling for parental educational levels. Conclusions: The study found that Taiwanese 11th grade students were both motivated by intrinsic motivation, wanting to read English to gain knowledge, and extrinsic motivation, reading English for purposes or fulfillment. However, extrinsic motivation was the most significant predictor on reading achievement; grammar knowledge and reading comprehension problems had significant influence on reading achievement as well. The results contradict with some studies that extrinsic motivation is a more important factor to EFLs' reading achievement than intrinsic motivation.
Nadia Taibah (King Abdulaziz University)Abeer Alkhouli - The development of phonological awareness and decoding skills in Arabic over the initial primary school years
This study investigated the order of acquisition of phonological sensitivity skills among Arabic 1st to 5th graders. Total of 250 children undertook a series of phonological-based and reading-related tasks (including sound deletion, non-word reading, phonological memory and rapid naming). This research explored the effect of multiple factors on the ability of children to isolate word parts in a sound deletion task: the position of syllables, vowel, or phonemes (i.e., final syllable vs. initial syllable, final phoneme vs. medial phoneme, and final vowel vs. medial vowel); It also explored the ability to decode non-words based on whether the stimuli shared features of real words or not, and the number of syllables to be verbalised. Hierarchical lognlinear analyses were used to assess order and level of acquisition of phonological skills and to model the relationship, in a parsimonious way. Modelling evidenced to follow an anticipated pattern developmental progression, corresponded to a hierarchical model of word structure. Factorial MANOVA was also used to examine the difference in decoding ability according to word type and segmentation. The results revealed differences across phonological tasks which found to follow a developmental progression with respect of word structure and segmentation. Findings are discussed in terms to the unique structure and features of the phonological units in Arabic and the relationship to their application in improving assessment and literacy instruction.
Jakke Tamminen (Royal Holloway, University of London); Marjolein Merkx; Matthew Davis; Kathleen Rastle - Learning about the 'nule' in 'sleepnule': acquisition and abstraction of newly learned morphemes
Purpose: Abstract morphological knowledge is critical for the interpretation and creation of new words (e.g., untweetable). We report two experiments investigating the acquisition of this knowledge using an artificial language learning approach. Method: Participants learned novel affixes (e.g., -nule) embedded in new meaningful words (e.g., sleepnule is a participant in a study about sleep), then were tested immediately or after several days' delay to assess whether they had acquired abstract knowledge of the novel affixes. Tests included a shadowing and sentence priming task. Results: In the shadowing task participants showed an immediate benefit for novel affixes over untrained affixes when they occurred with trained stems (sleepnule vs. sleepnept). This benefit generalised to novel affixes with untrained stems (buildnule vs. buildnept) only in the delayed test some days later, suggesting that abstraction of new morphemes requires offline memory consolidation. In the sentence priming task participants generalised the meanings of the novel affixes to exemplars with untrained stems one week after training but not immediately. Conclusions: We suggest that participants can acquire context-independent, semantically-rich representations of novel affixes, but that this process of abstraction requires offline memory consolidation, as predicted by complementary learning systems accounts. An understanding of how these general accounts of memory apply to language learning offers insights for example into second language instruction: pupils can learn linguistic units or rules through exposure to a limited set of exemplars, but require time before this knowledge generalises to natural language processing.
Luisa Tarczynski-Bowles (Coventry University)";Clare Wood" - Longitudinal analysis of stress rhythm sensitivity and reading skills
Purpose Main aim of the study is to provide further support for the importance of an inclusion of stress rhythm sensitivity (SRS) in reading models (e.g. Wood et al. 2009). Hypotheses include: - Can SRS measured at Time 1 predict reading components at Time 2? - Which literacy components can predict SRS at Time 2? - Are developmental changes of SRS apparent over time? Method A longitudinal study investigating SRS has re-tested 94 children (aged 8 to 11 years) on a stress rhythm sensitivity measure (Lexical Judgment Task), word reading, comprehension and fluency (using YARC) and a morphological awareness task (from Duncan et al. 2009). These results will be analysed in connection to the data obtained at Time 1 (4-12 months previously), which included measures of IQ, phonological awareness and phonological processing and SRS. Results Preliminary regression analyses indicate a bi-directional relationship of SRS and reading comprehension; showing that each variable can predict the other one from Time 1 to Time 2. No other literacy component can predict stress sensitivity at Time 2. Regression analyses show unique variance contributed by stress rhythm to reading comprehension; this effect diminishes however when including autoregressors. Conclusions These findings are in line with current literature and offer further support of a relationship between stress rhythm and reading. This highlights that stress rhythm is an important aspect of literacy and should be considered when describing reading development models. The relationship of stress rhythm to reading components will be highlighted further in conjunction with an examination of age differences.
Jo Taylor (Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit); Kathleen Rastle; Matthew Davis - Do item specific and generalizable spelling-sound knowledge depend on separable neural systems? An artificial language learning experiment using fMRI
Purpose: Consensus is not yet reached about whether item-specific knowledge, necessary for irregular word reading (SEW, YACHT), and generalizable rules, supporting novel word reading (TEW, YANG), depend on separable neural systems encoding whole-word and sub-word spelling-sound mappings. This is perhaps because brain activity increases with the greater reading difficulty of both unfamiliar and irregular items. In this experiment we combined an artificial language paradigm with fMRI to dissociate the neural mechanisms underpinning learning of sub- and whole-word knowledge, without the confounding influences of meaning and familiarity. Method: Twenty-four adults learned to read 36 new words written in novel symbols, whilst in an MRI scanner. Some words were regular - all symbols had one possible pronunciation, some words were irregular - vowel symbols were pronounced differently in different words. Learning consisted of interleaved phases of training (see word-hear pronunciation) and testing (read words aloud), and was followed by generalization to untrained items. Results: Participants learned the trained words (regular-80%, irregular-70% correct) and generalized their knowledge to untrained words (70% correct). Left anterior fusiform was more active when whole-item knowledge was necessary to perform accurately, whereas parietal cortices were more active when good performance depended on symbol-sound knowledge. Activity in left inferior frontal gyrus and hippocampus declined through training for all items, suggesting a contribution to both item learning and generalization. Conclusion: Our data suggest that left anterior fusiform encodes item-specific representations that may contribute to irregular word reading. However, the development of these representations depends on neural systems which also support generalization to novel forms.
Danielle Thompson (Middle Tennessee State University); Stuart Bernstein - Response time effects in the developing lexicon vs. the consolidated lexicon
Purpose: The goals were to create word recognition tasks for prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness for imaging studies. Studies examined unique variance in word recognition that was accounted for by reaction time (RT) and accuracy. Method: Two studies using correlational design tested 130 children and 69 adult participants. Regression analysis was conducted with general reading achievement measures as dependent variables (TCAP and ACT). The independent variables were vocabulary (WWJ-III), word attack (WWJ-III), prosodic sensitivity, morphological awareness, and RT. Results: With adults, RT but not accuracy for morphological awareness to bimorphemic words was correlated with ACT reading (r = -.404, p < .001) and letter/word ID (r = -.515, p < .001). Similar results were found for prosodic sensitivity where RT, but not accuracy for words was correlated with ACT reading (r = -.292, p < .05) and letter/word ID (r = -.413, p < .001). With children, accuracy but not RT in morphological awareness was correlated with TCAP reading (r = .346, p < .001) and letter/word ID (r = .388, p < .001). Accuracy, but not RT for prosody was correlated with letter/word ID (r = .229, p < .05). Regression analysis revealed a decoding factor accounted for 19% of the variance and a morphophonological factor accounted for an additional 5% in TCAP reading. Conclusions: Results suggest that morphological awareness and prosodic sensitivity consolidate in the lexicon by adulthood as evidenced with strong correlations present between RT and ACT reading only in adults. This is important for imaging study use.
Jenny Thomson (University of Sheffield) - Is "assistive technology" really assistive? The impact of information technology on writing processes
Purpose Digital technology is transforming the amount of knowledge that can be accessed and shared. For individuals with and without learning disabilities, such technology is commonly seen as assistive, for example within the domain of writing, by reducing task demands on working memory, capacity is freed up for higher-level knowledge use. However, the picture may be more complex, with technology having potentially negative effects on some aspects of higher level writing. It is argued here that while digital technology may solve some learning problems, it also create others. Methods We explore the effect of writing modality - i.e. use of a word processor versus manual writing, within a higher education population (n=40) with and without learning disabilities. Students wrote two expository writing samples each. One sample was written using word processing software on a keyboard and the other was written manually, using a stylus and tablet. For each modality data was collected to quantify writing behaviors such as pausing and revision. Writing efficiency was captured through variables including words generated per minute and total writing time. Writing quality of the final writing sample was evaluated using the Lectical Assessment System. Results Initial analysis has yielded intriguing results, suggesting use of a keyboard WIDENS the performance gap amongst this sample of higher education students with and without learning disabilities. Conclusions The results of this study provide new insights into the strengths and limitations of current technologies in facilitating the demonstration of knowledge, and how this may vary among different populations of learners.
Elizabeth Tighe (Florida State University)Christopher Schatschneider - Cognitive predictors of reading comprehension in third, seventh, and tenth grade students
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to rank order by importance the contributions of different cognitive predictors to reading comprehension in third, seventh, and tenth graders. Method: The participants included 215 third graders, 188 seventh graders, and 182 tenth graders (n = 585) enrolled in three Florida educational districts. Participants were administered a battery of tasks measuring reading comprehension, listening comprehension, oral reading fluency, working memory, verbal reasoning, and nonverbal reasoning. Results: Principal components analyses (PCA) were conducted at each grade level in order to reduce the number of variables for further analysis. For third grade, we used a 4-factor solution (fluency, language, nonverbal reasoning, and working memory), which accounted for 80% of the variance in the original measures. For both seventh and tenth grade, we used 3-factor solutions (fluency, reasoning, and working memory), which accounted for 74% and 71% respectively, of the variance in the original measures. Factors from the PCA were entered into dominance analyses to rank order predictors of reading comprehension at each grade level. For third grade, fluency was the most important predictor. For seventh grade, dominance could not be established between fluency and reasoning; however, both dominated working memory. For tenth grade, reasoning was the most important predictor of reading comprehension. Conclusion: The results indicated that fluency, followed by oral language abilities are the most important predictors of third grade reading comprehension. At increasing grades, reasoning skills become more important in predicting reading comprehension. Working memory is the least predictive measure of reading comprehension at all grade levels.
Xiuhong Tong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)Catherine McBride-Chang; Shu Hua - Differences and similarities in writing quality between Hong Kong and Beijing children
Purpose: We tested longitudinal cognitive and linguistic predictors of writing quality in 11-year-old Beijing and Hong Kong children. Method: 290 11-year old children in Beijing and Hong from a ten-year longitudinal study were sampled. Different tasks such as speed of processing, speeded naming, word dictation, vocabulary knowledge were included from ages 5-8. We coded the syntactic errors of both Beijing and Hong Kong Children's essay writing. Children's writing compositions were scored according to a 7-element scheme used in Hong Kong children including relevance, breadth, depth, sentence level organization, paragraph level organization, key sentences and intelligibility. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), multiple regression and T-test were performed in relation to scoring scheme, predictors of writing and grammar error differences, respectively. Results: Results of CFA of the essay writing showed that relevance, depth, sentence level organization, paragraph level organization and intelligibility among the 7-elements were reliable in representing overall writing quality of Beijing children, a slightly different from that found for Hong Kong Chinese children. However, measures of vocabulary knowledge, speed of processing, and speeded naming at ages 5- 8 were significantly associated with children's overall writing quality at age 11. Hong Kong children exhibited more errors in word order and word usage than Beijing children, but they performed better at usage of punctuation relative to Beijing children. Conclusion: Beijing and Hong Kong children show certain differences in essay-writing approaches as well as in grammatical skills, but both Beijing and Hong Kong children's overall writing quality were significantly associated particularly with speed measures.
Wim Tops (Thomas More University College)Maaike Callens; Marc Brysbaert - Beyond spelling: the writing skills of higher education students with dyslexia
Purpose: To have a clearer idea of the problems students with dyslexia may face during their studies, we compared writings of 100 students with dyslexia and 100 age matched control students in higher education. Method: We studied the number and type of spelling mistakes, the quality of the texts produced, the use of words, and the handwriting, both in a free narrative task (writing a summary of a text) and in a dictation task (sentence writing). The marking was done by experts blind to the aims of the study and where needed on transcriptions corrected for spelling errors. Results: Our results showed medium to large effect sizes for spelling errors (d = .93 for rule-related errors, d = .55 for memory-related spelling errors) and a medium effect size for punctuation errors (d = .40). The quality of the texts produced was judged lower for students with dyslexia than for the controls (d = .61 for text structure and d = .56 for agreeability), even though the number and types of words used by both groups were very much the same. There was no significant difference in the quality of the handwriting (d = .15). Conclusion: On the basis of these findings we can conclude that written texts of students with dyslexia tend to be judged lower in quality than those of control students, even when the judgment is based on transcriptions free from spelling errors. Given that remedial teaching has been shown to be effective for essay-writing skills, educational support along these lines may be helpful for dyslexic students.
Minna Torppa (University of Jyväskylä ); Kenneth Eklund; Elsje van Bergen; Heikki Lyytinen - Is familial risk for dyslexia continuous?
Purpose: This study examines two questions: (1) Is familial risk for dyslexia continuous? If so, we would expect that even the children at familial risk but without dyslexia perform below control children in reading related skills. (2) Does the employed dyslexia criterion affect conclusions concerning continuity of familial risk? Differences in the type of measures used to define dyslexia (i.e. accuracy or fluency measures) might explain the mixed results in previous studies. Method: The Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia includes 100 Finnish families with parental dyslexia (at-risk group) and 100 control families. We report data on children's development in early language and literacy skills, reading, and spelling from 1 to 9 years (Grade 2). Analyses include comparison of three groups: (a) at-risk children without dyslexia in Grade 2, (b) at-risk children with dyslexia in Grade 2, and (c) control group. Second, we examine three different dyslexia criteria: accuracy-based, fluency-based, and a combination. Results: Preliminary findings suggest that the language and literacy development of the at-risk children without dyslexia do not differ from that of the control children if a combined dyslexia criterion is used. Change of dyslexia criterion to only accuracy or fluency impacts findings. Conclusions: The use of different dyslexia criteria could be one explanation for differences between studies examining the continuity of familial risk for dyslexia.
Jessica Toste (The University of Texas at Austin); Douglas Fuchs; Kristen L. McMaster; Lynn S. Fuchs; Ebba Svenson; Anneke Thompson - A Peer-Mediated Approach to Fluency-Building in First Grade
PURPOSE: Research over the past decade supports the use of repeated reading activities to build students' reading fluency. However, such activities are often difficult for teachers to implement. Partly for this reason, we developed a peer-mediated approach to strengthen young children's fluency. The current study sought to evaluate the peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) program in first grade. Specifically, it was of interest to compare two versions of the program: PALS with a fluency-building component (PALS+Fluency) and PALS without this component (PALS). METHOD: Thirty-three first grade teachers and their students (N=491) were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions: PALS+Fluency, PALS, or control. The 35-minute lessons consisted of three parts: teacher-directed instruction, sounds and words, and partner reading. The study was conducted for 22 weeks, with assessment of reading performance pre- and post-intervention. Reading measures addressed phonological awareness, alphabetics, fluency, and reading comprehension. Teachers' and students' fidelity of implementation was documented throughout the intervention. RESULTS: Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that both of the PALS groups outperformed controls on measures of phonological awareness. However, only the PALS+Fluency group demonstrated significant improvement on reading fluency and comprehension measures. Further, mediation of student-type (low/average/high achievers) and school-type (Title I and Non-Title I) was explored. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that the fluency-building component of PALS supports reading fluency and comprehension. This is a particularly important finding as the time devoted to repeated readings was modest (2.5 hours across the intervention), suggesting that peer-mediated approaches may be effective for fluency-building within diverse classroom settings.
Mirjam Trapman (Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam); Amos van Gelderen; Jan Hulstijn; Erik van Schooten - Reading comprehension development in monolingual and bilingual adolescent low achievers: the roles of language knowledge and fluency
Purpose: In the Netherlands many adolescents, especially those with an immigrant background, struggle with comprehending texts they are faced with. They may lack the necessary linguistic or metacognitive resources or might have problems accessing these efficiently. This study addressed (1) whether linguistic and metacognitive knowledge and processing speed predicted reading comprehension, (2) whether the predictive relationships differed for bilingual and monolinguals students, and (3) how reading comprehension and the relationships developed over time. Method: A longitudinal analysis was conducted on reading skills of 50 low achieving bilingual and monolingual students (grade 7-9) in and around the city of Amsterdam. Several linguistic, metacognitive, and processing skills were assessed. Results: Initially, the bilinguals' scores on reading comprehension were somewhat lower than those of the monolinguals, but they improved, even more than the monolinguals. Regression analyses of the data collected in grade 7 showed that linguistic and metacognitive knowledge predicted students' reading proficiency. The predictive power of these variables was stronger in the bilingual students than in the monolingual students. In Grades 8 and 9 a substantial part of the variance found in students' reading comprehension was predicted by earlier proficiency. Above this, linguistic and metacognitive knowledge, added to the explanation of the variance in both groups of low achieving students. Conclusions: Since monolingual and bilingual low achieving adolescents profit from linguistic and metacognitive knowledge, both in reading ability and its development, we assume that effectively enhancing students' knowledge will positively affect their reading comprehension skills.
Kalliopi Trouli (University of Crete); George Manolitsis; Michalis Linardakis - Preschoolers' graphomotor development and emergent writing skills
Purpose: The effects of graphomotor development on emergent writing skills are less examined than the effects of cognitive-linguistic development. The purpose of this study was to examine whether preschoolers' emergent writing skills were differentiated by their level of graphomotor development. Method: 380 Greek preschoolers (4-6 years old) were assessed in the middle of their school year on seven aspects of early graphomotor skills: body posture during writing, hand control, pencil grasp, reproduction of simple and complex figures, writing orientation, basic writing principles. Furthermore, participants were assessed on their early writing skills by writing down seven CVCV words and three CVCVCV words. Two dimensions of scoring the words were used; (a) "phonological spelling" based on the number of correct phoneme-grapheme correspondences by word and (b) "emergent writing features" based on a 9-point rubric of Puranik and Lonigan's (2011) scoring system. Results: Kindergartners with higher achievement on the aspects of writing orientation and reproduction of complex figures achieved higher scores on both "phonological spelling" and "emergent writing features" than children with lower scores on the respective graphomotor skills. Moreover, higher achievement on "emergent writing features" was linked with higher achievement on hand control skills for Kindergartners and with higher achievement on body posture for prekindergartners. Higher performance on pencil grasp was linked with higher scores on "phonological spelling" and "emergent writing features" for both Kindergartners and prekindergartners. Conclusion: The findings suggest that early graphomotor development contributes to emergent writing skills more on Kindergartners than on prekindergartners.
Chien-Chih Tseng (Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University ); Hsueh-Chih Chen; Li-Yun Chang; Kuo-En Chang - A Data-Driven Study on Position-Based regularities for Chinese Radicals
Purpose: This study was aimed at extracting position-based regularities for Chinese radicals by analysis of a large number of Chinese characters. Radicals, as basic components of Chinese characters, and configurations are integral parts of Chinese orthography. Radicals are not put together randomly; instead, they follow particular configuration-based or position-based regularities. Methods: First, this study disassembled 6097 frequent characters with 439 radicals and seventeen positions through the use of the square-like figure space that the characters occupy. For example, the radicals 女 and 子 that appear in the character 好 were labeled as left and right respectively. For each radical, we computed the position-based proportions in which the radicals appeared in the seventeen positions. The highest position-based proportion was retrieved as the radical's position-based regularity; moreover, we labeled this position as the radical's typical position. Results: The data indicated that among the seventeen positions, there are four positions in which radicals commonly appear: top (20.3%), bottom (21.1%), left (16%), and right side (21.6%). In addition, there are ninety-nine radicals which have strong regularity, meaning they only appear in one particular position. For example, for all the Chinese characters that share 夬 as a common radical (i.e., 快抉決缺袂訣筷鴃炔), the radical 夬 only appears in the right side of each character. Conclusions: These results not only provide Chinese teachers with well-grounded information for choosing the radicals that students should learn first, but also assist researchers in selecting or controlling experimental materials.
Ya-Ying Tseng ()Ya-Ying Tseng; Shiu-Hsung Huang ; Tsung-Wen Chen; Yea-Mei Leou - The effect of teaching online reading comprehension ability for 6th graders in Taiwan
Purpose-This study explored Taiwanese 6th graders online reading comprehension ability and investigated the effect of online reading comprehension curriculum. Method-This mixed-method study was conducted in two sequential phases. 154 six-grade students of Taiwanese elementary school participated in the research. Standardized Chinese Reading Comprehension Test and the pretest and posttest of researcher-made tests, Online Reading Comprehension Test ⅠandⅡ(ORCT І &Ⅱ), were administrated to both experiment and control groups to examine the effect of teaching online reading comprehension strategies. The video recording software, Screen 2, were used to record the process of participants' answering the ORCT І &Ⅱ. Results- The results showed students' performance on online reading comprehension correlated with paper reading comprehension and academic language art significantly. The effect of teaching online reading comprehension strategies not help students' on line reading ability but transfer to paper reading comprehension. In addition to better web-reading and searching skill, skilled online reading readers have better reading strategies including key word, prediction, summarizing and evaluation. Less skilled readers usually have poor web-reading knowledge and get lost in the information then can't use the information to produce meaningful learning or solve problem. Conclusions- Online reading comprehension relies on paper reading comprehension ability much. Due to the complicated structure of web-reading, it seems easier to teach reading comprehension from printed material then transfer to online reading.
Kimberley Tsujimoto (Brock University); Jan Frijters; Maria De Palma; Maureen Lovett; Rose Sevcik; Robin Morris - Changes in motivation emerging from change in reading skills during intensive remediation for middle-school students.
Purpose. Current evidence is mixed on the direction of the relationship between motivation and reading achievement. Some research has suggested that motivation is dependent on developmental experiences with reading (e.g., Wang & Guthrie, 2004), but other research has also identified broader influences on motivation itself, including persistent individual dispositions (Kistner et al., 1988). The present study attempts to address this gap by measuring both constructs longitudinally in the context of active and intensive reading intervention, using measures that also allow for identification of motivational profiles. Method. Participants included 320 children from grades 6, 7, and 8 identified as having a reading disability (RD). Participants were engaged in one of two intervention programs or special-education control. Reading skills (WJ-III reading subtests; TOWRE) and motivation (Sydney Attribution Scale; Intrinsic Motivation Inventory) were assessed before, during and after 125 hours of intensive phonological and metacognitive reading intervention. Results. Cross-lagged correlations and change-score analyses indicated that changes in motivation were preceded by changes in reading skill, and not vice-versa. Identification of motivational profiles according to a helplessness and mastery framework predicted growth-curve indices of gains in intervention-related reading skills. Conclusion. When measured longitudinally during active reading skill growth, changes in motivation appeared to be driven by changes in reading skill; however, motivation profiles consistent with those previously associated with long-standing learning disabilities were associated with different patterns of reading growth. Results suggest that there are complex causal relationships between motivation and reading achievement.
Eishi Tsutamori (University of Tsukuba, Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences)Eishi Tsutamori (muscle_eishi@yahoo.co.jp; University of Tsukuba, Japan) Akira Uno (uno@human.tsukuba.ac.jp ; University of Tsukuba, Japan) Noriko Haruhara(nharuhara@hotmail.com; Mejiro University, Japan) Masato Kaneko (kaneko1234@hotmail.com; Teikyo Heisei University, Japan) Noriko Awaya (awaya.n@hotmail.co.jp; LD/Dyslexia Centre, Japan) Junko Kozuka (nzkozuka@maple.ocn.ne.jp; University of Tsukuba, Japan) Takashi Gotoh (mm03020a@hotmail.co.jp; Mejiro University, Japan) Sylviane Valdois (sylviane.valdois@upmf-grenoble.fr; Universite Pierre Mondes, France) Taeko N. Wydell (taeko.wydell@brunel.ac.uk; Brunel University, UK) - The relationship between Japanese children's writing skills and other cognitive skills including Visual Attention Span (VAS)
Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between the writing skills of Japanese children and their Visual Attention Span (VAS) as well as other cognitive skills. Method: Three developmental dysgraphic，20 developmental dyslexic with dysgraphia (both aged 8-14) and 42 normal (aged 7-13) children as participants were tested individually using writing tests (syllabic-Hiragana/Katakana, and logographic-Kanji), Valdois' VAS tests in Katakana as stimuli, PA tests (reverse word repetition & nonword repetition), Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCFT) test, and vocabulary test (SCTAW). Results: Results of ANOVAs, PCIs and regression analyses revealed the following: (1) VAS did not predict the writing performance of three different participant groups. (2) ROCFT, PA, and SCTAW predicted Kanji writing accuracy. (3) PA predicted Hiragana and Katakana writing accuracy. Discussion & Conclusion: VAS exerted no influence over writing performance of Japanese children with or without dysgraphia or dyslexia, regardless of the script types. In contrast, visual memory, vocabulary and PA skills were found to be significant predictor variables for Kanji writing. Further PA skills were the only significant predictor variable for Hiragana/Katanaka. Thus the current study has shown that various cognitive skills affect acquisition of writing skills in Kanji and Hiragana/Katakana differently, and which cognitive skills are more important than the others are determined by the characteristics of each script.
Catherine Turcotte (Université du Québec à Montréal)Catherine Croisetière - A teaching program to improve comprehension strategies and the progress of very low achievers, low-average and good readers
Purpose: This study measured the effects of a teacher development program promoting explicit teaching, modeling and scaffolding of comprehension strategies among three types of readers (very low achievers, low-average and good readers) in a francophone setting. The program included modeling, explicit teaching and guided practice of the following strategies on a daily basis while reading informative and narrative texts from October to May: predicting, visualizing, activating prior knowledge, formulating questions and hypothesis, finding main idea, summarizing, confirming and reacting. Method: Participants were n=176 students in 8 classrooms from a very low SES neighbourhood where 50% of students are historically and constantly categorized as very low-achievers in reading at the end 6th grade. Quantitative analyses of data from monthly direct observations of students and teachers while reading activities and qualitative analyses of data from interviews with teachers, advisers and other school professionals showed that the program was successfully and equally integrated by all teachers. Results: Progress in reading comprehension was measured among all students with literal, inferential and macrostructural open-ended questions in September and May. Comparative analysis of data from monthly observations of students and from pre and postest reveal that the program beneficiated to the very low achievers more than low-average and good readers. Conclusions: comparative analysis of the results concerning the three types of readers will be presented and discussed. Also, while 50% of the students were categorized as very low-achievers in September, only 20% remained at the end of the year. Implications for a tier 2 intervention addressed to these students will also be discussed.
Sonja Ugen (Université du Luxembourg); Hubert Marx; Romain Martin - Using a language independent test to evaluate reading in a multilingual environment
Diagnosing reading problems in multilingual educational systems is difficult. In Luxembourg, Luxembourgish is used in Kindergarten, reading skills are acquired in German and French is added in grade 2. Further, over 40% of the population are foreigners. As most reading tests are presented in a specific language, the cause of possible reading problems in multilinguals is complex to determine: is the problem related to the test language or to a specific reading deficit? Therefore, we adapted the dynamic Copenhagen International Dyslexia Test elaborated for adults to a school age population. This test is not dependent on a specific language, but focuses on the acquisition of the alphabetic principle. It comprises three parts: (1) learning of 3 symbols and corresponding phonemes, (2) learning and training of monosyllabic pseudowords, and (3) the reading evaluation of 22 pseudowords of increasing length and difficulty. Instructions are gestured. Seventy-eight second grade children (mean age: 8.3 years) passed the symbol-reading test as well as a German standardized word and pseudoword test. In terms of accuracy and latency, children of different linguistic backgrounds (Germanic, Romance, Germanic-Romance bilinguals) performed similarly for symbol- and 'German' pseudoword reading. However, Romance children showed longer latencies for German word reading, although they read as accurately as the others. Reading latency is a major indicator of dyslexia in transparent writing systems (e.g. German). As the Romance group performed well on both pseudoword reading tasks, they successfully apply the alphabetic principle. The longer reading latencies on the German word reading are thus language related. Conclusively, the symbol-reading task seems to be a good instrument to evaluate basic reading skills in a multilingual environment and could constitute a diagnostic tool in the future.
Joanna Uhry (Fordham University); Laura Raynolds; Fernando Reggianini - Vowel-sound representations in the invented spellings of urban kindergarten children over time
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine vowel-sound representations in the spellings of urban kindergarten children at three points in time over the course of a school year. Based on findings from an earlier study by the author, it was hypothesized that children who were bilingual Spanish/English would enhance spellings with diphthong-like extra vowels to a greater degree than English monolingual children since English long vowel sounds in the Spanish phonological system are treated as a combination of two separate vowels. Method Participants were ninety kindergarten children in a Title 1 school. Daily instruction--using Wilson's Fundations-included letter-sound associations. The children participated in three rounds of data collection (November, February, May). Data included (a) invented spelling, (b) letter and word reading, (c) blending, and (d) segmenting. ANOVAs were used to compare groups (Spanish/English versus English monolingual) over time (T1, T2, T3) and across vowels. Results Both groups increased vowel scores over time. While the Spanish/English-speaking children were significantly weaker in vowel spelling at the onset of the study, this difference diminished over the three times of testing. There was a persistent group difference-with an advantage for monolingual children--in over-use of extra vowels for long-vowel diphthongs consistent with the author's earlier findings. Conclusions These findings have value in terms of implications for classroom practice. For example the spelling of make as MAEIEIK should be valued as a developmental acknowledgment of the complexity of vowel diphthong sounds rather than viewed simply as a misspelling.
Akira Uno (University of Tsukuba, Japan); Eishi Tsutamori; Noriko Haruhara; Masato Kaneko; Noriko Awaya; Takashi Gotoh; Sylviane Valdois; Taeko N. Wydell - The effects of visual attention span (VAS) on Kanji reading by Japanese children with and without dyslexia: a cross sectional study
Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine the extent to which visual attention span (VAS) and phonological awareness (PA) skills contribute to reading skills in Japanese children. Method: 42 normal (aged 7-13) and 26 developmental dyslexic (aged 8-14) Japanese-speaking children were tested individually with (i) the Valdois's VAS (global/partial report tasks) paradigm with Katakana and Non-Verbal Figure (NVF) as stimuli, (ii) PA skills (word repetition in reverse order & nonword repetition), (iii) reading (logographic Kanji consistent/inconsistent words & Kanji nonwords) and (vi) vocabulary measures (SCTAW). The data were analysed using regression analyses and principle component analyses. Preliminary Results: The results showed the following: (1) SCTAW (vocabulary test), VAS and PA predicted consistent and inconsistent Kanji reading accuracy for both dyslexic and normal children. For nonword Kanji reading, only SCTAW and VAS were found to be significant predictor variables. (2) Dyslexic children showed significant lower scores for only VAS with NVF stimuli than children without dyslexia. This is despite the fact that VAS with Katakana and VAS with NVF were highly correlated with each other. (3) The results of the PCA revealed that dyslexic children fell into the following three groups depending on the type of deficits: PA-deficit: 12.5%, VAS-deficit: 20.8%, and PA/VAS-deficits: 20.8% Conclusion: These preliminary results suggest that (1) VAS and PA skills as well as SCTAW (vocabulary) contribute to Kanji word reading; (2) it is possible to identify Japanese-speaking dyslexic children with a VAS deficit ONLY as is the case with French dyslexic children.
Sylviane Valdois (Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition, CNRS UMR5105, France) - The visual span deficit hypothesis in developmental dyslexia
Purpose: This paper provides background on the visual attention span (VAS) deficit hypothesis in developmental dyslexia by reviewing the available evidence: Method: (i) Behavioral evidence for a VAS disorder in developmental dyslexia showed that some dyslexic children exhibited a VAS disorder in the absence of phonological problems. Investigation of French and British dyslexic children revealed the existence of a subgroup characterized by a single VAS disorder and another subgroup characterized by a double (VAS and phoneme awareness) deficit. Some children exhibited a single phonological disorder, while others showed none of these two deficits. The VAS was further found to contribute uniquely to different aspects of reading in both dyslexic and typical readers. (ii) Investigation of the cerebral correlates of the VAS disorder in developmental dyslexia revealed the involvement of the superior parietal lobules. This brain region was found underactivated in a group of dyslexic children with a single VAS disorder. Two contrasting case studies further revealed that atypical activation of the superior parietal lobules was found in the dyslexic individual with a VAS disorder but absent in the other participant with a single phonological disorder (with preserved VAS abilities). Results & Conclusion: The overall data suggest a specific role of VAS in developmental dyslexia and literacy acquisition. Most of the studies have been conducted on French individuals but some findings come from the investigation of British and Spanish participants, suggesting a potential role of the VAS in literacy acquisition and reading across different languages.
Araceli Valle (University of Alaska Fairbanks); Nuria Calet Ruiz; Clara Gomes; Sylvia Defior - Reading motivation, reading competency, and gender in second through fourth grade children in Granada, Spain
Purpose: Motivation is a key factor in literacy development during elementary school. It is important to consider reciprocal effects of motivation on interventions designed to improve reading skills. Our purposes were: (1) to evaluate a translated motivation survey for use in two intervention studies in Granada; and (2) to test whether motivation related to reading skill and to gender as has been found in other populations. Method: The 20-item Reading Survey portion of the Motivation to Read Profile (MRP; Gambrell et al., 1996), developed to assess self-concept, value of reading and overall motivation among elementary school children in the US, was translated to Spanish by bilingual speakers. It was administered during pre-testing in two studies: one evaluating methods for fostering vocabulary development in 3rd graders (N=86); the other comparing methods for improving reading fluency among 2nd (N=74) and 4th (N=48) graders. Results: Internal consistency of the overall scale was acceptable (Cronbach's slpha = .71 to .88); however, analyses suggest a 3 rather than the 2-factor structure reported by Gambrell et al. (1996). Motivation and reading skill were correlated. Gender differences were consistent with recent US findings: boys valued reading less than girls but did not differ on reading self-concept. Conclusions: Our results support use of the overall MRP motivation scale among Spanish school-children; however, caution should be taken in relying on the MRP subscales in this environment. Furthermore, our data provides evidence that relations among reading motivation, reading competence and gender generalize to Spanish elementary school children.
Elsje van Bergen (University of Amsterdam); Peter F. de Jong; Ben Maassen; Evelien Krikhaar; Anna Plakas; Aryan van der Leij - IQ of four-year-olds who go on to develop dyslexia
Purpose - According to the so called aptitude-achievement discrepancy model, dyslexia is defined as a discrepancy between intelligence and reading achievement. One of the underlying assumptions is that the general cognitive development of children who fail to learn to read has been normal. The current study tests this assumption. In addition, we investigated whether possible IQ deficits are uniquely related to later reading or are related to arithmetic as well. Method - Four-year-olds (N = 212) with and without familial risk for dyslexia were assessed on 10 IQ subtests. Reading and arithmetic skills were measured four years later, at the end of Grade 2. Results - Relative to the controls, the at-risk group without dyslexia had subtle impairments only in the verbal domain, while the at-risk group with dyslexia lagged behind across IQ-tasks; particularly on verbal IQ. Deficits in nonverbal IQ were associated with both reading and arithmetic, whereas difficulties in verbal IQ were uniquely related to later reading difficulties. Conclusions - The children who went on to develop dyslexia performed relatively poorly in both verbal and nonverbal abilities at 4 years of age, which challenges the discrepancy model. Furthermore, we argue that their verbal deficits are causally linked to poor reading, while their nonverbal deficits might well be epiphenomenal.
Madelon van den Boer (University of Amsterdam);Peter F. de Jong; Marleen M. Haentjens-van Meeteren - Phonological and visual correlates of reading: Dissociating sensitivity to word length and general reading speed.
Purpose. There is ample evidence about cognitive abilities that underlie reading development, but the majority is based on the outcome of the reading system; reading accuracy and/or speed. We examined the relation between these cognitive abilities and sensitivity to word length, i.e. the relation between reading latency and the number of letters in a word. Sensitivity to word length is generally assumed to reflect the degree of sublexical processing in reading, and can therefore be considered a marker of the reading process. Method. Three to five letter (non)words were read by 175 beginning readers. Phonological awareness, rapid naming and visual attentional span were also measured. Results. Through structural equation modeling, individual differences in the length effect were modeled. Reading latencies were determined by individual differences in sensitivity to length but also by a more general speed factor. Phonological awareness and visual attentional span were related to sensitivity to length, indicating the degree of serial processing. Rapid naming was related to more general reading speed. Conclusions. Sensitivity to length and general reading speed represent separate but related aspects of the reading process. The results suggest that two types of slow readers can be distinguished. Children with poor phonological awareness are slow readers who continue to rely on serial processing, whereas children with poor rapid naming are overall slow readers, who might (or might not) shift toward a parallel processing strategy.
Kees P. van den Bos (University of Groningen);Barry de Groot; Margo Jansen - Development of word-reading speed differentially linked to the development of phonemic analysis skills and alphanumeric naming speed
Purpose. In many traditional as well as current reading models it is assumed that, with age, word-reading speed increases because word-holistic or lexical processing mechanisms get dominance over word-analytical or sub lexical mechanisms. An indirect way of testing hypotheses based on this assumption is to predict differential developmental links with reading-related skills which tap these lexical and sub lexical mechanisms. In our research lexical and sub lexical reading-related skills are operationalized by alphanumeric naming tasks (RAN) and phonemic analysis tasks (or phoneme awareness, PA), respectively. The main hypothesis is that, with age, reading speed-RAN relationships increase, whereas reading speed-PA relationships decrease. In previous, cross-sectional research (Van den Bos, 2008) age levels of 8-year-old through 14-year-old children (total N = 927) were studied. Standardized tests of word-reading (WR), RAN, and PA were used. Hierarchical regression outcomes offered clear support for the hypothesis. The present research raises the same hypothesis, but in this study, a longitudinal design is employed. Method. Ninety 'random' readers from intact classes from 6 Dutch schools for regular education were followed from grade 3 to grade 6 (ages 9 through 12). During the four years of this study, children were tested at the end of each school year, with the same tests as mentioned above. Data were analyzed with multi level analysis, which accommodates for auto-regression. Results. The results offer clear support for the developmental hypothesis. Conclusions. Contrasts with reading accuracy and spelling performance (for which different predictions than for reading speed apply) are discussed, as well as some implications for tests of the double deficit hypothesis of dyslexia (Wolf & Bowers, 1999).
Wim Van den Broeck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); Eva Staels - Is impaired Hebb-learning a viable explanation of developmental dyslexia?
Purpose: In a recent study Szmalec et al. (2011) contended that dyslexia and its various associated cognitive impairments reflect an underlying deficit in the long-term learning of serial-order information, operationalized as Hebb repetition learning. They hypothesized that Hebb sequence learning mimics naturalistic word learning. In these authors' study, a group of dyslexic adolescents and a control group matched on IQ were presented three Hebb-learning conditions: a verbal-visual condition (written nonsense syllables), a verbal-auditory condition (spoken nonsense syllables), and a visuospatial condition (Corsi-like dots). They found that the dyslexics performed inferiorly on all conditions regardless the presented modality, implying a general serial-order learning deficit. The aim of our study was to replicate this design in a population of primary school children. Method: The same design as already described was completed in a sample of fourth and fifth grade dyslexic (N=23) and typical reading children (N=16). In a repeated measures design 30 sequences of seven items were presented to all participants for each condition. Every third sequence was a repeated sequence, unknown to the participant. This sequence was repeated 10 times (the Hebb sequence). Results: We found that Hebb learning was present in both groups, and it was not statistically different for both groups. The absence of a statistically different effect was observed in all three conditions. Conclusions: No empirical evidence was found to sustain the hypothesis of an underlying deficit in long-term learning of serial-order information of dyslexic children.
Paul van den Broek (Leiden University, The Netherlands) - Individual differences in cognitive processes during reading comprehension by adolescent readers
Purpose A central component of successful reading comprehension is the construction of a coherent representation of the text at hand. The construction of such representation depends on the ability to generate inferences that connect different parts of information in the text to each other and to the reader's background knowledge. Here, we summarize findings from several studies on individual differences in adolescent readers' cognitive processes. The aim is to determine whether subgroups exist with distinct patterns of cognitive processes, and whether such patterns are related to differences in reading comprehension. Method Across studies, good and struggling adolescent readers are identified through standardized and experimental comprehension tests. Individual properties such as working-memory capacity, decoding skills, etc., are measured. Participants read narrative and expository texts while on-line (process) measures are obtained, using eye-tracking, think-aloud, fMRI, and other methods. Results Results reveal distinct subgroups of struggling readers, with unique patterns of attention allocation and other cognitive processes -different from each other and from good comprehenders. These subgroups are indistinguishable in off-line comprehension scores or in decoding skills. Conclusions Consideration of cognitive processes during reading suggests different causal mechanisms for comprehension problems adolescent readers may face. These findings have implications for theories of reading comprehension and for intervention and diagnosis.
Gesa van den Broek (Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands); Eliane Segers; Atsuko Takashima; Guillen Fernandez; Ludo Verhoeven - Neurocognitive aspects of retrieval effects in vocabulary learning
Purpose: The retrieval of information from memory is beneficial for the long-term retention of that information. With the present event-related functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) experiment we investigated the neurocognitive processes underlying this so-called testing effect to better understand why retrieval enhances (word) learning and memory. Method: Twenty-six young adults practiced previously encoded Swahili-Dutch word-pairs by either observing them (restudy: roho - soul), or by retrieving the translation from memory (retrieval : roho - translate). During practice, brain activity was measured by means of fMRI. Results: Delayed recall was significantly better and faster for retrieval words than for restudy words, and during practice, a large network of brain regions was more active during retrieval than during restudy. This network included inferior frontal , ventral striatal and midbrain areas. Furthermore, Inferior parietal and middle temporal activity during retrieval but not during restudy predicted later memory. Conclusions: The results support and extend existing cognitive theories of testing-effects. First, there is support for theories that effortful control processes and deep processing is enhanced during retrieval. Second, the results suggest that explanations should also consider a role of ventro-striatal reward circuits that could enhance memory during retrieval by signaling relevance or by feelings of reward. Third, there is support for theories that semantic elaboration is an effective component of retrieval practice, but not of restudy practice. These results improve insight into the mechanisms of testing and inform and promote the use of retrieval practice in educational practice.
Anne van Hoogmoed (Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen) - Complex word reading in Dutch deaf children and adults
Purpose: Deaf children are often behind in reading comprehension (Traxler, 2000), while their lag in word reading is less severe. However, word reading is often tested only with monomorphemic words (Wauters, Van Bon, & Tellings, 2006). In the current study, we investigated the reading of polymorphemic words (compounds and derivational words) to investigate whether deaf children lag behind in reading these complex words, and whether this proceeds into adulthood. Method: 21 deaf 6th grade children, 42 hearing 6th grade children, 25 deaf adults, and 30 hearing adults were tested in a lexical decision task on derivational words, compounds, monomorphemic control words, and pseudowords in these three categories. Results: Results show that deaf children were less accurate in reading derivational words than in reading compounds, and less accurate in reading compounds than in reading monomorphemic words, while the adults and hearing children all performed at ceiling level. With regard to reaction times, deaf and hearing children showed similar outcomes, responding faster to monomorphemic words than to compounds, and faster to compounds than to derivational words. Deaf adults responded generally slower than hearing adults, but both groups showed the same reaction time pattern with faster responses to monomorphemic words than to derivational words and compounds. Conclusions: Deaf children are behind in word reading, and have difficulty in reading morphologically complex words. This might be due to their lower vocabulary. Teaching these children morphographic strategies (Gaustad, 2000) at school might help them to improve reading of complex words and help develop larger vocabularies.
Claudia van Kruistum (Langeveld Institute, Utrecht University); Paul P.M. Leseman; Mariëtte de Haan - Youth media lifestyles and the relationship with literacy skills
Purpose: Due to a diversity of media lifestyles not all youth are equally prepared to handle the complexities of a heavily mediatized world. Schools need to address digital competencies vital to young people's future, but this is difficult considering that it is as yet unclear which new media practices merit educational attention. This study set out to (1) identify out-of-school media lifestyles, which included traditional and new literacy practices, and (2) relate these to literacy skills. Method: A literacy activities questionnaire and tests from the TTC-project measuring receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension were administered to 503 students (grade 8) from lower and higher tracks in and around Amsterdam. The frequency of engagement in 33 literate activities and the language used for each activity were assessed. Literacy profiles were construed by means of cluster analysis and then related to literacy skills in a regression analysis while controlling for prior skill. Results: Four media lifestyles were identified: (a) "traditional", which did not exclude engagement in new media, (b) "social", which concerned socially motivated engagement with media, particularly new media, (c) "gamers", and (d) "infrequent users". For youth from the higher tracks the traditional lifestyle and for youth from the lower tracks the social lifestyle was most strongly related to gains in literacy skill. Conclusions: Our results indicate that some out-of-school lifestyles may contribute to the development of literacy skills youth need for schooling. Furthermore, they suggest that a lifestyle which includes new media engagement may be particularly beneficial for so-called "struggling" youth.
Roel Van Steensel (University of Amsterdam)Ron Oostdam; Amos Van Gelderen - Affirming and undermining motivations of adolescent struggling readers and their relationships with reading achievement
Purpose: All major motivational theories include some facet of 'amotivation' (Skinner et al., 2009). While some treat amotivation as the reverse of motivation, others view it as a distinct construct (Guthrie & Coddington, 2009). In the latter view, amotivation holds its own affects and behaviors and is assumed to account for a unique portion of the variance in students' achievement. We tested the hypothesis that amotivation particularly contributes to struggling readers' reading proficiency: we expected that for these students 'undermining' motivations are more important than 'affirming' motivations. Method: The sample comprises 483 students in prevocational secondary education, which is characterized by relatively large incidence of reading failure. The sample was divided in three subsamples representing varying degrees of reading risks. We administered the AM(O)SR questionnaires developed by Coddington (2009)-measuring intrinsic motivation, avoidance, self-efficacy, and perceived difficulty, for both school and out-of-school reading-and a reading comprehension test. We conducted confirmatory factor analyses to examine whether the presupposed distinctions could be confirmed and multilevel analyses to examine the predictive value of the motivation scales and their interactions with at-risk status. Results: The data largely reflected the presupposed factor structure. We found that one of the undermining motivation scales-perceived difficulty of out-of-school reading-remained as the only significant predictor of students' reading proficiency. Interaction effects could not be established. Conclusions: Amotivation (i.e. perceived difficulty) seems to constitute an independent factor that plays a significant role in adolescent students' reading proficiency. Repercussions for engaging reading education will be discussed.
Sophie Vanvooren (KU Leuven); Hanne Poelmans; Michael Hofmann; Heleen Luts; Pol Ghesquière; Jan Wouters - Auditory temporal processing in dyslexia: neurophysiological and psychophysical indicators in preschoolers
Purpose: It is hypothesized that a deficit in the processing of specific auditory cues underlies a deviant development of phonological representations in developmental dyslexia, causing reading and spelling difficulties. More precisely, processing problems for slow temporal modulations in speech are assumed. Previously, our results of behavioral measures indicated that temporal auditory processing in preschoolers was a predictor for future reading performance. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between 'objective' neurophysiological and 'subjective' psychophysical indicators of auditory processing before formal reading instruction. This investigation may lead to differences in temporal auditory processing on different levels. Method: 45 children with and 45 children without an increased hereditary risk of dyslexia participate in this longitudinal study. All children are born in 2006 and currently attend the last year of nursery school. Neural temporal processing was investigated by auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs). ASSRs measure the ability of the auditory system to follow the rate of temporal information and may therefore provide an objective measure to determine the sensitivity for important acoustical-phonological elements in language. Multichannel ASSRs were recorded in a 64 electrode configuration using speech-weighted noise stimuli amplitude-modulated at 4, 20 and 80Hz. ASSRs to the 20Hz and 4Hz modulations are related to phoneme-level and syllable-level processing skills respectively. Psychophysical thresholds were estimated for frequency modulation detection and rise time detection. An intensity discrimination task was also conducted as a non-temporal control condition. In addition, speech-in-noise perception was investigated. Results: Analyses are ongoing. Results and implications will be discussed at the conference.
Joëlle Varin (Université de Montréal)Joëlle Varin; Daniel Daigle; Rachel Berthiaume; Noémia Ruberto - Orthographic revision in children with dyslexia
Dyslexic children face great difficulty learning to read and write (Troia, 2006; Zesiger, 1995). More specifically, they encounter problems acquiring the orthographic system (Plisson et al., 2010). In order to spell in a conventional manner, young writers need to become sensitive to different types of knowledge related to phonological, visuo-orthographical and morphological properties of the orthographic system and use that knowledge consciously during the revision of their writing (Bryant et al., 2006; Catach, 2005, Cameron et al., 1997). The main objective of this paper is to report a study investigating dyslexic children's ability to make spelling judgments. Thirty two dyslexic children aged 11.5 were compared to normally developing children of the same age (n: 25) and to normally developing children with similar writing abilities (n:25). All participants had to process both correct sentences and sentences containing spelling errors, which were phonological, visuo-orthographical or morphological in nature. Participants were asked 1) to determine if a spelling error was present in the sentence, 2) if so, to correct the errors, and 3) to justify the correction verbally. The children's comments were recorded. Results indicate a spelling judgment deficit in dyslexic children. Moreover, differences were observed concerning the nature of their errors and their ability to justify corrections in metalinguistic terms. The results are discussed in light of constraints associated with revision tasks (judgment, correction, justification) and their relation to spelling ability.
Dorina Veldhuis (Tilburg University) - The effect of literacy on the online processing of chunks of language
Offline language segmentation studies have shown that there is a relation between literacy and people's awareness of words as units. Accordingly, it can be assumed that words are not necessarily basic units of language. In Cognitive linguistics, studies with young children have shown that the units they use are also often not single words, but meaningful multi-word chunks are. Purpose: Investigate to what extent literacy also affects people's unconscious language processing Method: four tasks conducted among 42 pre-literate and 40 literate Dutch children: 1)a click task: children repeated sentences with clicks of white noise occurring in multi-word constructions. 2)a mixed word task: children repeated sentences with multi-word constructions presented in mixed order. 3)a matching task: children matched, as soon as possible, a picture of a part of a construction (e.g., 'hands') with a spoken construction ('wash your hands'). 4)an eye-tracking task: children saw pictures of a complete, and of parts of, constructions (e.g.,'wash hands'). Children heard a phrase with the construction. For tasks 1-3, correct answers and reaction times (task 3) were analysed. In task 4, eye-movements were investigated. Results: The first results from these tasks suggest that pre-literates' and literates' online processing of chunks differ: literate children seem to be able to use word-knowledge in language processing too. Conclusion: The literacy-effect that has been found before in studies focused on conscious language segmentation, thus not only seems to work offline, but it seems to affect people's online language processing as well.
Marian J. A. J. Verhallen (Leiden Universitity, The Netherlands); Adriana G. Bus - Beneficial effects of illustrations in picture storybooks for storing and retaining story text
Purpose: Main aim was testing whether young children concretize the story language while hearing an oral rendition of text during storybook reading. Are eye fixations on illustrations time locked to referential expressions in the oral text? A second aim was testing when not yet conventional readers use print as a source of information. Method: Three conditions were created: (1) oral text matching the illustration, (2) illustration without oral text, and (3) oral text not matching the illustration. We registered children's eye movement while listening to text. Afterwards we elicited a retelling of the oral text. Results: Children fixated longer on the illustration than on print. However, attention for print increased from 5% when oral text matched the illustration to about 20% when oral text was missing or conflicting with the illustration. Children fixated more on visual referents in the illustration that were highlighted in the oral text than on not highlighted referents. They recalled more of the oral text when it was congruent with the illustration than when oral text did not match the illustration or was missing. Conclusion: Visual attention to illustrations is controlled by the summoning power of the meaning of the oral text. When the oral story is missing children pay more attention to an alternative source of information - print. This suggests that children need a story as a guide when processing illustrations. Furthermore, the data evidence that concretizing the oral text facilitates storing and retaining the story language.
Ludo Verhoeven (Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands); Barbara Wagensveld, Miranda van Turennout, Pienie Zwitserlood, Peter Hagoort & Atsuko Takashima - Neural networks in unfamiliar word decoding processes
Purpose: The focus of this study was on the brain activity involved in unfamiliar word decoding processes. Dutch university students studying Greek were trained to read aloud unfamiliar disyllabic letter strings written in Greek alphabet and pronounceable in Dutch over multiple sessions. Method: There were three conditions: (i) "Trained" (letter strings that were extensively trained), (ii) "Recombined" (letter strings of which the disyllables were recombination of the syllables in the trained condition), and (iii) "Novel" (novel pronounceable letter strings). Brain activity was measured on three different time points (day 1, 5, and 28) with multiple extensive training sessions in between using fMRI technique while they were instructed to overtly read the print on the screen. Results: The data show that subjects were able to map unfamiliar grapheme-to-phoneme conversion quite rapidly and that they benefited from repeated training. The results suggest that the subjects were not only coding the word as a whole but they also read recombined pseudowords faster and more accurate than novel pseudowords. Conclusions: Two distinct brain activity networks emerged: First, the assembled phonology network which was dominant during the initial phase of the trained words on day 1 and for the novel words throughout the experiment. Second, the addressed phonology network which increased in activity with repetition over the course of day 1, and also kept increasing in activity over a month of repeated practice.
Caroline Villiger Hugo (Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg); Christian Wandeler; Alois Niggli - Effects of a family literacy program on different aspects of reading motivation of L2 learners
Purpose: Current studies show that a considerable portion of struggling readers consists of L2 learners. Thus, there is a particular need to develop programs that facilitate reading development of those students. One possible way of giving supplementary support to struggling readers are family literacy programs because they may offer an emotionally supportive context to foster reading (Baker, 2003). Moreover, there is evidence that minority parents, like parents in general, are positively disposed to helping their children succeed academically (Goldenberg, Rueda, & August, 2008). While meta-analyses of the efficacy of family literacy programs show inconsistent results, little is known about the particular effects of such efforts on L2 learner's literacy development. Given some discontinuities between the homes and classrooms of those children, the question of involving minority parents is even more relevant. Method: A recent study in Switzerland implemented a school-home based program involving parents in reading promotion during homework. One research question analyzed the effects of the program on the students' reading motivation. The school-home intervention group was compared to a school-based program without parental participation (total N = 469). Effects were investigated in a pretest-posttest design by means of structural equation modeling. Results: Results showed significant differences in the development of reading curiosity, reading anxiety and self-concept between German students (first language) and L2 learners. Parental behavior appeared to be a mediator variable. Conclusions: The paper seeks to contribute to the discussion whether and how parents of L2 learners can be effectively involved in reading promotion.
Lesly Wade-Woolley (Queen's University); Katey Austin; Jessica Chan - Prosodic awareness and reading in musicians and non-musicians
This poster reports a new measure of prosodic awareness and tests its relation to reading ability in musically-trained and musically-novice adults. Prosodic awareness is a relatively new construct that has been shown to have a strong relationship with reading that shows an explanatory relationship to reading and spelling after the contribution of phonological awareness. However, most studies published so far rely on receptive judgments of prosodic manipulations, such as matching, same-different and acceptability judgments. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to determine whether prosodic awareness is related to general measures of reading ability in a sample of skilled readers, and (2) to determine if adults with high levels of formal musical training (i.e., Grade 8 Royal Conservatory) are more able to manipulate prosodic information than are adults without such training. Our study uses a new oral language task in which participants are asked (1) to identify the syllable on which they hear the main stress in a spoken word (e.g., resiDENtial) and then (2) pronounce the word that would result when the stress is shifted one syllable to the right (e.g., residenTIAL). To our knowledge, this is the first productive prosodic awareness task that has been reported. Reading outcomes are the Woodcock Word ID, Word Attack and Passage Comprehension subtests and the TOWRE. Control measures include, among others, a non-speech rhythm task, so see if any benefits of musical training are conferred on speech rhythm (prosody) as well as musical rhythm. Data analysis is ongoing.
Richard Wagner (Florida State University); Mercedes Spencer; Elizabeth Tighe - A causal-indicator model of the role of morphology in reading comprehension
Purpose: The purpose of the study was to test a causal-indicator model of relations between morphological knowledge, vocabulary, listening comprehension, decoding, and reading comprehension. Our goal was to estimate both the unique and total relations between these exogenous variables and reading comprehension as specified in a causal indicator model. Method: Participants were 90 8th grade students who were given multiple measures of morphological knowledge (morphological derivation, morphological form generation), vocabulary (defining words, using words in context, antonyms and synonyms), listening comprehension (two forms of a listening comprehension version of the TOSREC), decoding efficiency (two forms of the TOWRE), and reading comprehension (2 forms of the TOSREC and the Gates). Results: The model provided an excellent fit to the data and the parameter estimates indicated that each of the exogenous constructs made a unique, total, or both contribution to reading comprehension. Conclusions: Morphological knowledge represents an important facet of vocabulary knowledge for older students. Causal indicator models provide a new tool for conceptualizing relations between morphological knowledge, other reading relevant constructs, and reading comprehension.
Chiung-Chu Wang (National Kaohsiung Normal University)Yu-Zen Zhang - Reading Comprehension of Scientific Text: Challenges for Fourth Graders
According to Chall's stages of reading development, children above third grade begin reading to learn. However, fourth-grade teachers in Taiwan do not spend enough time in teaching comprehension strategies and reading nonfiction materials, such as informational texts. Informational text is one common written type in adult life. Unfortunately, teachers often neglect the influence of students' information retrieving ability on knowledge increment. The purpose of this study was to explore the challenges for fourth graders when they reading scientific texts. One hundred and twelve students from educational priority area (EPA) were selected. EPA is defined as high proposition of school students from low SES families. Participants were given two kinds of scientific texts, learned and new, and later were asked to answer eight comprehension questions. Eight items were designed to measure four major processes of reading comprehension: 1) retrieve explicitly stated information, 2) make direct inferences, 3) interpret and integrate ideas, and 4) examine and evaluate contents. Results indicate that students performed best on retrieving explicitly stated information, and worst on examining and evaluating contents, no matter the texts they have learned or not. Generally speaking, students performed poorly on the reading comprehension of new text. They had big problems in reasoning and integrating information crossing texts and illustrations. It is necessary to improve the writing style of scientific texts for elementary school students. Otherwise, students have difficulties while independent reading, even they are in the stage of reading to learn.
Min Wang (Dept. of Human Development)Chuchu Li; Candise Lin; Taomei Guo - The Activation of Segmental and Tonal Information in Reading Chinese among Children and Adults
Purpose: The present study addressed the following questions: 1) Do native Chinese speakers activate segmental and tonal information in reading Chinese? 2) Does this activation differ between characters, Pinyin (a phonetic transcript of written Chinese), and spoken syllables? 3) To what extent do children and adults differ? Method: Three primed naming experiments were conducted. The targets were always the written characters. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, the primes were presented as characters, Pinyin, and spoken syllables, respectively. There were four types of prime-target relation: 1) S+T+ (the prime and target share the same syllable Segment and Tone); 2) S+T- (the prime and target share the same Segment but differ in Tone); 3) S-T+ (the prime and target share same Tone but differ in Segment); and 4) T-S- (the prime and target did not share Segment nor Tone). Twenty-four adults and 23 nine-year-old children participated in each of the three experiments. The prime duration in Exps 1 and 2 was 100ms. Results: Adults showed significant facilitative effects in S+T+ condition across all three experiments and a significant facilitative effect in S+T-condition for Pinyin primes. Children showed a significant facilitative effect in S+T+ condition for Pinyin primes and significant inhibitive effects in the S+T- condition for the character and spoken syllable primes (plus a clear inhibitive trend in the S-T+ condition). Conclusion: Segmental and tonal information in written characters, Pinyin and spoken syllables jointly facilitate character recognition in adults. Children are less sensitive to segmental and tonal information simultaneously than adults; the activation of segmental or tonal information alone may impede children's character recognition.
Stephanie Wang (OISE, University of Toronto); Jaryd Gabison; Christie Fraser; Esther Geva - An examination of vocabulary and reading comprehension in Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese ELLs: A closer look at the of role SES across language groups
Purpose: Understanding how language background and SES contribute to second language reading development for ELLs living in a multi-culturally diverse country like Canada is important. The purpose of this study was to provide a cross-language analysis of vocabulary and reading comprehension for Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese ELLs. Two research questions were addressed: (1) Do differences exist across ELL language groups in vocabulary and reading comprehension? (2) Are these differences explainable by various facets of SES? Method: Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese ELLs (N = 145) were assessed in Grades 3 and 4. The EVT and NEAL standardized measures were administered to assess participants' vocabulary and reading comprehension respectively. Questionnaires were used to collect information related to SES (e.g., parent education, home language activities). ANOVA and regression were used for statistical analyses. Results. ANOVA revealed significant group differences in vocabulary and reading comprehension at both grade levels. All three groups improved significantly from Grades 3 to 4 in both vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Chinese ELLs performed significantly better in both skills in both grades. Regression analyses indicated that home language activities (e.g., home language, English TV watched) accounted for variance in vocabulary and reading comprehension after age, non-verbal ability, and word reading were controlled for. Conclusion: Some of the differences that exist across ELL language groups in vocabulary and reading comprehension may be explained by differing home language activities. This finding provides another avenue to pursue when thinking about ways to improve vocabulary and reading comprehension skill in ELL children.
Dong Wang (University of Toronto OISE)Eun Jung Lee; Tamara Kornacki; Alisha Ng; Debra Lee; Esther Geva - The influence of typological grammatical features of L1 on grammatical knowledge in L2
PURPOSE: The aim of this research was to examine whether typological grammatical structures of one's L1 influence L2 grammatical knowledge. Previous research has demonstrated that English plurality of nouns, pronominalization, and auxiliary use are dissimilar to Cantonese but similar to Punjabi. Furthermore, English word-order is similar to Cantonese but dissimilar to Punjabi. Therefore, we hypothesized that on English plurality of nouns, pronominalization, and auxiliaries EL1s would be better than Cantonese ELLs but equal to Punjabi ELLs. Secondly, we expected that EL1s English word order knowledge would be equivalent to Cantonese ELLs but better than Punjabi ELLs. METHOD: A Grammatical Judgment Task (based on Newport & Johnson) assessed these component grammatical skills. The sample consisted of 40 Cantonese, 41 Punjabi, and 41 EL1s. Group means for component grammatical skills were compared using one-way analyses of variance. RESULTS: There was no significant effect of native language on English knowledge of plurality, pronominalization, and auxiliaries. However, word order varied significantly across language groups. Planned contrasts revealed that ELL performed more poorly on word order knowledge compared to EL1; however, there was no significant difference between Punjabi and Cantonese groups. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that the typological grammatical features of an ELL's native language have no lasting significant effects on the elements of English morpho-syntactic grammatical knowledge tested here. Furthermore, apart for a weakness in word order, the grammatical knowledge of these grade 1 ELLs is equivalent to their EL1 peers. What needs to develop further is their word-order knowledge.
Ying Wang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong); Catherine McBride-Chang - The unique role of copying skills on Chinese kindergarteners' word writing
Purpose: The repetition of Chinese character writing is the most dominant approach to fostering children's literacy development across Chinese societies (Packard et al., 2006; Wu, Li, & Anderson, 1999). Chinese characters are composed of strokes to make up sub- character components; producing them focuses on visual structure and configurations. We tested unique predictors of Chinese writing in very young Chinese children. Method: Ninety-four Chinese Mainland children were tested in this crosssectional study. They were from 53 months to 79 months (mean age= 65 months, SD = 6.94). All the kindergartners were given tasks of general copying skills of unfamiliar scripts (of Korean, Vietnamese and Hebrew, respectively), delayed copying Chinese characters, Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, vocabulary knowledge, RAN for numbers, syllable deletion, morphological awareness, and Chinese word writing. Results: With age, kindergarten levels (K2 & K3) and nonverbal IQ controlled, delayed copying and Hebrew copying independently explained 9% and 5% variance in Chinese word writing, respectively. Conclusion: These findings imply that copying skills might facilitate children's acquisition of writing in Chinese. Visual-motor skills, including visual-perceptual skill, visual-motor integration and ocular-motor control, may be helpful for young children to better coordinate vision and motor skill to learn to produce wellformed Chinese characters.
Barbara Wasik (Temple University)Barbara A. Wasik; Annemarie H. Hindman - Teacher Input in Preschool Children's Vocabulary Development
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanism through which one effective teacher training model, ExCELL, predicts children's vocabulary skills. In particular, we examine the role of teacher input during shared book reading - including comments, questions, and feedback on children's responses - plays in preschoolers' vocabulary development. We hypothesize that 1) teachers' use of comments, questions, and feedback during reading will predict children's vocabulary skills and 2) the number of child responses will be an even stronger predictor of children's vocabulary outcomes. Method: Nineteen Head Start preschool teachers were trained to implement strategies to increase children's oral vocabulary and emergent literacy skills. Before and after training, their classroom shared book readings were videotaped. Reading observations were also conducted in 11 "business as usual" Head Start classrooms. Teacher and child language during readings were coded for comments and questions (open [i.e., no right answer] closed [i.e., right answer], and yes/no), with attention to conversational turns (i.e., initiating or response comments and questions). Results: Preliminary results suggest that there were no differences in the number or type of questions and comments provided by teachers in intervention or control classrooms; however, children in intervention classrooms made more remarks, both solicited by teachers and volunteered by children, and used more unique words. The frequency of child talk predicted vocabulary learning. Conclusions - Findings help to understand what teachers practices result in increases children's language development and to explain the mechanisms by which language and literacy coaching programs are translated into gains for children.
Gloria Waters (Boston University);David Caplan; Julie Bertram; Jennifer Michaud; Adam Ostrowski; Karole Howland - Component reading and listening skills as predictors of performance on high stakes exams in middle and high school
Purpose: Determine which oral language and reading component skills best predict performance on high stakes exams. Methods: In 2009, 1,355 middle and high school students were tested on 11 tasks that assessed the sublexical, lexical, morphological, and sentential levels of language in each of the auditory and written modalities. Reaction time and accuracy was recorded. 1,836 students were tested in 2011on a modified version of the battery. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis of the 2011 data based on exploratory factor analyses of the 2009 data resulted in 3 reliable factors in both modalities in middle and high school-recognizing forms of words, understanding words, and structuring and comprehending sentences. Structural Equation Models were formed on the basis of the CFAs to determine the relationship between these factors and performance on the NY State ELA Exam in middle school and NY State Regents Exam in high school. In middle school, the strongest determinant of performance was understanding written simple and morphologically complex words, while in high school there were direct effects of structuring and comprehending both written and auditory sentences. In both middle and high school students the ability to recognize the forms of auditory and written words and understanding of words presented auditorily only showed indirect effects on performance. Conclusions: Factors that predict performance on high stakes exams changes across middle and high school.
Pam Webb (Florida State University);Beth Phillips; Christopher Lonigan - Family demographic characteristics influencing the early childhood home literacy environment
Purpose Previous research demonstrates associations between the home literacy and language environment and children's early reading skills, which are highly predictive of future conventional reading skills. Family characteristics, such as socioeconomic status and ethnicity, correlate with the type and frequency of HLE behaviors, but considerable variability within these groups suggest a more complex relationship. Thus, more investigation is needed to refine our understanding of the influences from these demographic variables. The purpose of this study was to examine collective and unique contributions of specific demographic factors that influence the home literacy environment and parental behaviors related to literacy. Method Home literacy surveys were completed by the primary caregivers of 1044 2-5-year-old children attending a variety of childcare centers and representing a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds in a medium sized U.S. city. Family demographics (e.g., parental education, ethnicity, income to needs ratio, parental occupation, neighborhood characteristics) were examined for prediction of specific home literacy caregiver behaviors (e.g., reading frequency, rhyming games, alphabet activities). Results Multivariate regression models will test the unique and shared variance in parental home literacy and language behaviors and will evaluate whether aspects of SES and family ethnicity interact to predict these outcomes. Conclusions The findings of this study will provide further insight into which demographic factors are the strongest predictors of literacy practices in the home. Because children's literacy development is shaped by exposure to certain literacy activities and beliefs, the influence of the home literacy environment has great implications on a child's future literacy skills.
Elana Weinberger (Yeshiva University)Scott J. Goldberg - MaDYK early Hebrew literacy assessment: Development of preliminary benchmark goals
Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to establish preliminary benchmark goals for MaDYK (a Hebrew acronym for Mivchan Dinami shel Y'cholot Kriah), the first ever standardized, dynamic curriculum based measure of early Hebrew literacy. Method: MaDYK Oral Reading Fluency (MORF) benchmark measures were implemented in nine schools in North America during the 2010-2011 academic year. First grade students were tested twice, and second grade students were tested three times. Students' scores were divided into groups based on percentile rank, a procedure that has been used for development of benchmark goals for similar tests (e.g. DIBELS; Good, Kaminski & Dill, 2002). Results: Preliminary benchmark goals have been established. Additional results to be discussed include validity of the measures as compared to teacher ratings of students' reading abilities, and comparison of MaDYK growth rates with DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) growth rates in first and second grades. Conclusion: MaDYK provides educators with a valuable tool for early and ongoing assessment of students' Hebrew reading skills. The new preliminary cut scores will allow educators to compare their students to national norms and to provide improved instruction and support on the individual student, class-wide and school-wide levels.
Karen Whalley (Queensland University of Technology) - Prosodic skills and reading comprehension
* Purpose: This study tested whether prosodic skills contribute directly to children's reading comprehension, beyond the components of the Simple View of Reading (word decoding and language comprehension). It is proposed that text comprehension places particular demands on prosodic skills due to the paucity of prosodic information in text, compared to spoken language. Parallel tests of listening and reading comprehension were developed, comprising relative clause sentences designed to engage the structure-prosody interface (using simple vocabulary to minimise word decoding demands). Previously, it was demonstrated that Year 3 children's ability on a stress assignment task (Derived Word Production Task [DWPT]; Jarmulowicz, 2006) predicted variance in relative clause reading comprehension, after controlling for word decoding, relative clause listening comprehension, vocabulary, working memory, and phonological awareness. However, the DWPT, requiring children to derive morphologically complex words entailing stress change (angel/angelic), contains both prosodic and morphological elements. This study further examines the relationship between prosodic skills and reading comprehension, controlling for morphological skills. * Method: Seventy-seven Year 4 children completed tests assessing word decoding (TOWRE), prosody (DWPT; Question/Statement), morphology (Grammatical Closure; Inflectional Derivation/Decomposition), and relative clause listening and reading comprehension. * Results: Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that both the DWPT and Question/Statement tasks predicted unique variance in relative clause reading comprehension, after controlling for word decoding, listening comprehension and morphological skills. * Conclusion: These data support the view that prosodic skills make a direct contribution to children's reading comprehension, allowing readers to imbue text with critical prosodic information available in spoken language.
Joanna P. Williams (Columbia University);Jenny C. Kao; J. Grant Atkins; Rong Cheng; Jill G. Ordynans; Lisa S. Pao - Developing description and problem-solution text structure instruction using social studies content for second grade at-risk students
Purpose To present (1) the preliminary evaluation of the two final instructional modules (Description and Problem-Solution) of an intervention designed to teach expository text structure embedded in social studies lessons, and (2) general recommendations for how to integrate reading comprehension and content instruction. The intervention emphasizes close reading and analysis of well-structured texts along with evidence-based strategies. Question: Can young children at risk for reading failure benefit from explicit, structured reading comprehension instruction? Method (1) Analysis of previous work on sequence, compare-contrast, and cause-effect modules (2) Iterative development/revision of individual lessons (10 students) (3) A quasi-experimental treatment-control study (80 second-graders from low-achieving urban schools). Posttest measures: oral and written summaries, questions involving structural and nonstructural text elements, strategy questions, and social studies content and vocabulary questions. Also, classroom observations, teacher questionnaires and interviews. Results (1) Positive results on an informal posttest administered to the 10 students and to 6 non-treated students. (2) Findings from our larger study (to be completed in May 2012). We expect that the text structure students will perform significantly better than the no-treatment control students. Posttest measures will be analyzed to determine the most appropriate for large-scale evaluation of the intervention. (3) Recommendations for future intervention development. Conclusions The data will demonstrate that students can learn two structures that are quite different from other basic structures and will support the conclusion that elementary-level at-risk students can benefit from explicit comprehension instruction. Recommendations will address issues such as linkage of familiar and social studies content, teacher talk, and lesson redundancy.
Joshua Wilson (University of Connecticut); Natalie Olinghouse - The Use of Content Vocabulary in Writing Across Genres
Purpose - Scardamalia & Bereiter's (1987) knowledge-telling model identifies two main influences on a written composition: genre knowledge and topic knowledge. Previous studies using the knowledge-telling model have not explored how vocabulary in writing may be influenced by topic and genre knowledge. This study examined whether content vocabulary (words specifically related to a particular topic) varied by genre: story, persuasive, and informative. Method - The study controlled for topic knowledge; 105 fifth-grade students wrote about outer space in each genre. The content vocabulary list was developed by examining over 160 children's books and websites to determine frequently-used words specific to outer space. Concordance software (Watt, 2000) identified the number of content words in each student essay, and the specific content words in each written composition were recorded. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA determined the effect of genre on vocabulary usage after controlling for topic knowledge. Results - The repeated measures ANOVA was significant (p < .001). Bonferroni contrasts revealed that students used significantly more content words in informative writing (n = 12) compared to story (n = 5) or persuasive (n =4) writing. Informative writing included a greater breadth of content vocabulary (86 unique words) compared to story (48 words) or persuasive (63 words). Also, students varied the specific content words depending on the genre. Conclusions - The results suggest that, controlling for topic knowledge, students vary their use of content vocabulary by genre, indicating that genre knowledge influences written composition through vocabulary choice.
Maximiliano Wilson (Département de réadaptation, Faculté de médecine, Université Laval); Sven Joubert; Perrine Ferré; Sylvie Belleville; Ana Inés Ansaldo; Yves Joanette; Isabelle Rouleau; Simona Maria Brambati - Normal and impaired exception word reading in French: an fMRI study
Purpose. The aim of the present study is to test whether the functional brain regions that mediate exception word reading in normal French readers overlap those brain regions atrophied in semantic dementia, a neurodegenerative disease that occurs following the atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes. The subsequent degradation of semantic knowledge and the surface dyslexic profile found in these patients highlighted the role of the anterior temporal lobes for exception word reading. However, imaging studies in healthy subjects have failed to detect its activation during exception word reading. Method. We used the voxel-based morphometry technique to map the brain regions of grey matter atrophy in AF, a patient with mild semantic dementia and surface dyslexia. Subsequently, we mapped the activation pattern associated with low-frequency exception word reading compared to pseudoword reading in 16 young healthy participants using fMRI. Results. The patient's voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed grey matter atrophy in the left anterior superior, middle and inferior temporal gyri and in the temporal pole. Normal exception word reading revealed areas of significant activation in the same regions described in previous studies: the left inferior frontal gyrus, pars triangularis and the left anterior fusiform gyrus. Critically, significant activation was also observed in the left anterior middle temporal gyrus, a region observed to be atrophic in patient AF. Conclusions.These results reconcile data from neuropsychological studies of semantic dementia patients and functional imaging of healthy subjects, revealing the critical role of the left anterior temporal lobe in exception word reading.
Rebecca Wiseheart (St. John's University);Lori J.P. Altmann; Denise Magdales - Phonological representation and RAN speed in bilingual adults
Purpose: Previous researchers find rapid automated naming (RAN) to be both language- and orthography-specific and interpret this as evidence that RAN is related to reading via orthographic representation. However, the effects of phonological representation on bilingual RAN performance have not been explored. Based on previous work, we used rime neighborhood density (RND) as a proxy for phonological representation in two RAN tasks. We predicted a high density and monolingual advantage. Additionally, because the rime unit is implicated in phonological representations acquired through lexical restructuring during the preschool years, we predicted that English-dominant bilinguals would outperform other bilinguals. Method: 26 monolingual English speakers; 13 bilingual English-Tagalog speakers (English dominate); and 21 bilingual Spanish-English speakers (Spanish dominate) completed discrete Object RAN tasks in English with high, mid, or low RND words. Results: There was a significant facilitative effect of high RND across tasks. There was also an interaction between RND and group. In the high and mid density conditions, RTs for Tagalog bilinguals were virtually identical to those of the English monolinguals and both of these groups significantly outperformed the Spanish bilingual group. In the low density condition, however, Tagalog bilinguals performed similarly to the Spanish monolinguals; both bilingual groups responded significantly slower than English monolinguals. Conclusion: Consistent with our previous findings with monolinguals, bilinguals are sensitive to the effects of phonological representation on RAN: stronger phonological representations result in faster naming. The asymmetry in the Tagalog group's performance suggests that this RND advantage may be related to lexical restructuring.
Ulrika Wolff (University of Gothenburg) - Long term effects of a phonological training study on early reading skills: an application of structural equation modelling
Several studies have shown that training of phonological abilities prior to the beginning of reading instruction has positive effects on early reading acquisition (Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993, 1995; Lundberg et al., 1988). The phonological training has to be explicit and structured (Cunningham, 1990: Lundberg et al. 1988), and it seems to be even more efficient if combined with training of phoneme-grapheme correspondences (Adams, 1990; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Snowling, 2000). In Sweden formal reading instruction starts at the age of seven, and the phonological training is usually implemented when children are six years old. One aim of the current study is to examine the effect of phonological training which starts when children are four years old. A Swedish phonological training program has been developed and implemented three years before formal reading instruction takes place. The intervention group (n=139) received one wave of phonological training 25 minutes per day for six weeks in small groups when children were four years old, and an additional wave of training at the age of five. The control group (n=83) received non-phonological training under corresponding circumstances. When children were six years old, both groups took part in ordinary phonological training activities in their kindergarten. A second aim of the current study is to examine relations between non-verbal cognitive skills and verbal cognitive skills, and to examine relations between phonological skills at different linguistic and phonological levels. Structured equation modelling gives the opportunity to examine these relations between groups and over time.
Julie Wolter (Utah State University) - Dynamic assessment of morphological awareness and literacy achievement
Purpose: Based on Larsen and Nippold's (2007) original research, the purpose of this study was to determine whether a dynamic assessment of third-grade morphological awareness was sensitive to a range third-grade functioning, related to reading and spelling achievement, and whether third-grade children improve their performance on a dynamic morphological awareness assessment following systematic scaffolds. Method: Forty five typically developing third-grade children were administered an adapted morphological awareness dynamic assessment task two times (second administration 2-3 days later) and a reading and spelling test battery. The morphological awareness dynamic assessment task consisted of words which contained high frequency base words and affixes (e.g., yellow, -ing) but resulted in low frequency derived words (e.g., yellowing). Children were asked to explicitly define the words, and if unsuccessful, were provided with a series of prompts which ranged from asking about the parts of words to a choosing from multiple-choice answers. Results: The dynamic assessment of morphological awareness revealed a wide range of performance for third-graders and was significantly and moderately related to third-grade spelling, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Additionally, performance on the dynamic assessment morphological awareness task significantly increased from time one to time two. Conclusions: A third-grade dynamic morphological assessment may be a helpful assessment tool to predict elementary school literacy success. Moreover, scaffolds included in a dynamic assessment may prove to be a valuable way to not only increase morphological awareness performance, but also to provide treatment insights for implementing morphological awareness instruction for individuals struggling with this important skill.
Clare Wood (Coventry University, Psychology Department); Nenagh Kemp; Sam Waldron, Lucy Hart; Neelam Nagra; Claire Pillinger - The impact of text messaging (SMS use) on children's and young adults' understanding of grammar and orthography
Purpose: To examine whether children's and young adults' texting behaviours is correlated with grammatical understanding or is able to explain individual differences in the development of grammatical understanding, including its orthographic representation. Method: 243 participants (89 primary school children; 84 secondary school children and 70 undergraduates were recruited. At time 1 they completed an IQ assessment (WASI), the Test of Receptive Grammar, a Psueudoword Orthographic Choice task (which assessed participants' recognition of the correct orthographic spelling of the word based on the sentence context), Wordchains (used here as a test of orthographic processing speed), and the WRAT-4 Spelling subtest. They also provided a sample of their text messages which were then coded for the proportion and type of grammatical violation that the participants made when texting. This battery (except for the WASI) was re-administered one year later. Results: At this point, we have analysed the concurrent data from Year 1, and we are in the process of collecting the Year 2 follow up data which will enable us to see whether there is evidence of an impact of grammatical violation when texting on the participants' developing understanding of grammar or orthography. The concurrent analyses indicate that there is no evidence of any negative association between making grammatical violations when texting, and children's understanding of grammatical or orthographic conventions. However, for adults we see a different pattern. The extent of association is limited, but there is evidence that adults' grammatical violations during texting is able to explain unique variance on the orthographic choice task, even after controlling for individual differences in IQ and spelling ability. Conclusions: Overall we argue that the data indicate that the extent of the relationship between text messaging and grammatical understanding is overstated. The pattern of results may indicate that children are robust to the effects of producing 'poor' grammar during phone use because their cognitive systems for grammar, spelling, reading and orthography are less well integrated than those of adults. However, when we consider the impact of SMS on the development of grammatical understanding we may see a different pattern of results.
Yi-Chieh Wu () - An exploratory study of the spelling errors made by 4th graders
Purpose:The purpose of this study is to investigate the spelling error patterns and the use of linguistic knowledge in 4th graders. In order to reach the objective, a two-part coding system was established. Method:To represent typical performance of 4th graders, 19 items were randomly selected within each fixed difficulty (bi) interval (ranging from -1.0 to 1.0) from Word Analysis pilot data for FAIR (Florida State Department of Education, 2009) and up to 50 responses of each item were randomly selected as spelling sample. The inter-rater reliability was 100% for the Target Spelling Pattern (TSP) and 85% for the Linguistic Feature (LF). Results: 6 out of 9 TSPs met the criterion for the need of additional intervention. The high percentage (i.e, 67.02%~46.34%) of equivalent replacement in the top 4 most misspelt TSPs showed that 4th graders do not have solid spelling pattern knowledge. The scores of misspellings in LF reflect the lack of phonological, orthographic, or morphological knowledge. Sequentially, a phoneme that is not or over represented using any grapheme is coded as 1 in Phonological Misrepresentation; a misspelt grapheme is coded as 1 in Orthographic Legality; and an affix is coded depending on the orthographic acceptability and whether omitted or not in Morphological Legality. The results showed that 4th graders seldom misrepresented a phoneme (i.e, 2.15%) in their spellings but had the highest chance (18.74%) to morphologically misspell words. 4th graders also made more orthographic errors in more difficult words. Conclusions: The findings in the current study evidenced the lack of spelling knowledge in typical 4th graders.
Taeko N. Wydell (Brunel University, UK); Liory Fern-Pollak; Sylviane Valdois - The effects of visual attention span (VAS) and phonological awareness (PA) skills on reading in English primary-school children as well as English dyslexic and normal adults
Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine the contribution of visual attention span (VAS) or phonological awareness (PA) to reading skills in opportunity samples of English-speaking children and adults. Method: 80 English-speaking children (40 YR-2 (aged 6-7) and 40 YR-4 (aged 8-9) ) and 48 English-speaking adults (25 dyslexic (mean-age: 26.2) and 23 normal (mean-age: 25.3) )were individually tested using VAS, PA and reading tests. Results: For Children: * VAS accounted for greater variance in reading performance than PA. * Compared to YR-2, the contribution of VAS decreased in YR-4 only for regular word reading, while the contribution of PA decreased with age for all words, regardless of regularity and lexical status. For Adults: * PA accounted for greater variance in reading performance than VAS, particularly for dyslexic adults. * Unlike in French, most dyslexics showed a double deficit (~40%). Conclusion: These results suggest that: * At primary-school level, VAS plays a role in reading performance, in addition to PA. * The influence of PA on reading accuracy is qualitatively different for children aged 6 and 8, i.e., in YR-2 PA skills are rudimental whereas in YR-4 these skills are more fine-tuned. * In adults, PA had a greater influence on reading performance, particularly with the dyslexic group. * In this sample, poor PA accounted for dyslexia to a greater extent than VAS. * The results of the adult study therefore suggest that English-speaking adults with dyslexia tend to suffer from a phonological rather than VAS deficit.
Ti Yan (University of South Carolina)Robin Morris - The influence of word frequency on tongue-twister reading
Purpose: People take longer reading tongue-twisters in which many word-initial phonemes are repeated in comparison to reading sentences without phonological repetition, called as the tongue-twister effect (TTE). Previous research consistently indicated that phonological repetition causes difficulty in integrating information at the end of sentence thus prolongs reading time. But some eye movement evidence (Warren, 2009) suggested that phonological interference may occur quite early to impede lexical access during tongue-twisters reading. In order to detect the early effect, this study examined if TTE would be modulated by manipulation of lexical characteristics, e.g. word frequency. Method: tongue-twisters and control sentences were created as high and low word frequency groups. The phoneme-repeated regions (critical regions) in tongue-twisters were made of either all high or all low frequency words. Control sentences contained either all high or all low frequency words correspondingly. Twenty-one participants read all the sentences when their eye movements were monitored. Results showed larger difference between reading low-frequency tongue-twisters and controls (TTE) than that in high-frequency condition. But such a stronger TTE in low-frequency case only occurred in early processing. Afterwards that was overwhelmed by text integration effects, resulting in equivalent TTE in both high and low frequency sentences by the end of critical region. Conclusions: phonological repetition does result in interference to both early (lexical access) and late (information integration) stages of sentence processing in sequence. Word frequency in tongue-twisters modulates the size of phonological interference effect relatively early. TTE is more prominent when phonologically repeated words have lower frequency.
Hsiou-Wen Yang ()Yi-Fen Su - The Processing Speed Deficit of Children with Low Chinese Character Recognition and Spelling Abilities
Purpose - The purpose of this research is to investigate except Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) and Phonological Awareness (PA) whether there is a deficit on Processing Speed in children with low Chinese character recognition or spelling ability. This study compared children with low abilities on Chinese character recognition or spelling with normal children. Method - The subjects included 223 elementary school students, 109 from second grade, 114 from third grade, four classes in each grade. According to the performance on the character recognition and spelling, the subjects were divided into four groups: poor character recognition (35), normal character recognition (104), poor spelling (21) and normal spelling (144). Results - Based on t-test analysis, the results indicated that children with low character recognition ability performed significantly poorer on coding, tone and all RAN tests than normal children, and children with low character spelling ability performed significantly poorer on all Processing Speed, RAN and PA tests. Besides, the regression analysis showed that when the effects of PA and RAN are removed, the Processing Speed still contribute significantly to Chinese Spelling scores; however, the Processing Speed makes nearly zero contribution to Chinese Character Recognition when the effects of PA and RAN are removed. Conclusions - In conclusion, children with low Chinese character recognition and spelling abilities performed poorer on Processing Speed. The best predictor of Chinese character recognition is PA. While the Processing Speed, PA and RAN make significant and independent contribution to Chinese Character spelling. The limitations and the suggestions are also discussed.
Chihyu Yang ()Yu-Jen Chang;Hwa-Wei Ko;Chih-Chien Yang - Semantic Activation and Inhibition in Reading Chinese Polysemy
This study examined cognitive processes of reading Chinese polysemy within a semantic priming paradigm. Different lexical categories (noun and verb) on polysemy were examined at the pre-lexical and post-lexical stages by utilizing both short and long interstimulus intervals (ISIs). In addition, the study investigated time-courses in accessing semantic representations of dominate and subordinate meanings of polysemy via active and inhibitive paradigms mechanisms. Thirty-two undergraduate participants were assessed by the lexical decision task on related and unrelated prime-target pairs. The results showed that cognitive processes of reading Chinese polysemy were different between noun and verb. In short ISI condition (50ms), the response times (RT) in corresponding to the subordinate meaning were longer than dominate meaning of polysemy in noun, whereas no difference was found in verb. In long ISIs, similarity between noun and verb is shown. At both 250ms and 500ms ISIs, the RTs showed no differences between the dominate and subordinate meaning. However, at 750ms ISI, the access of the subordinate meaning was more slowly than dominate one. Based on these results, researcher speculated that at the pre-lexical stage, the multiple meanings of polysemy were automatically activated and affected by the lexical category and the strength of semantic relatedness of various representations. At the post-lexical stage, the multiple meanings showed the inhibitive mechanisms that the subordinate meaning was more slowly. The characteristics of noun and verb play an important role on the spreading activation of an automatic process in polysemy.
Christina Yeager Pelatti (Towson University)Shayne B. Piasta - Investigation of language and literacy learning opportunities in preschoolers
Purpose Research identifies language and literacy domains that impact preschooler's development in these critical areas (e.g., NELP, 2008). Yet, when examined at the aggregate level (e.g., Connor et al., 2006), studies highlight significant variability in preschool learning experiences. The purpose of this study was to extend previous findings by providing accounts of the amount and specific types of language and literacy learning opportunities afforded to preschoolers across a diverse array of classrooms. Method Videotaped observations were completed in 81 classrooms across Ohio. Observations were analyzed using a detailed scheme adapted from Connor et al. (2009), which provides amounts of time (minutes:seconds) that children are involved in 10 specific language and literacy opportunities. Interrater reliability was high (0.85 across codes). For these analyses, one child per classroom was randomly selected; data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results Preliminary results based on 24 classrooms revealed that most teachers dedicated instructional time in the following areas: oral language (M = 4.57 min.), listening and reading comprehension (M = 5.62 min.), and text reading (M = 5.47 minutes). However, only four teachers provided opportunities to learn about phonological awareness, 12 about print concepts, and 15 read a book aloud. Significant variability among teachers was noted. The remaining 57 observations will be coded by May, 2012; all results will be presented at the conference. Conclusions This study identified areas in which teachers may require additional professional development to ensure that preschoolers experience the full spectrum of language and literacy learning opportunities, which are supported by research in these domains.
Stephanie H. M. Yeong (); Janet Fletcher; Donna Bayliss - Importance of phonological and orthographic skills for English reading and spelling in English-Mandarin bilinguals: a comparison of English-L1 and Mandarin-L1 children
Purpose: Cross-linguistic research suggests that phonological and orthographic skills are as important for bilingual children learning English as a second language (ESL) as English monolingual children. However, characteristics of the first language influence the skills brought to the learning of English. This study investigates the relationships among phonological and orthographic skills with English reading and spelling in English-Mandarin bilingual children. Method: Two groups of 8 year old bilingual children (n=30 English L1-Mandarin L2; n=36 Mandarin L1-English L2) were tested on the elision and blending subtests from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP), tasks tapping orthographic skills adapted from Olsen, Forsberg, Wise, and Rack (1994), as well as the reading and spelling subtests from the Wechsler Individual Achievement Tests-2nd Edition (WIAT-2). Results: A factor analysis showed that the phonological and orthographic tasks loaded on two separate factors and factor scores were used in further analyses. A between-group ANOVA showed that the English-L1 children performed significantly better on the phonological and orthographic tasks than the Mandarin-L1 children. Results from separate regression analyses found only the orthographic factor predicted both reading and spelling performance in Mandarin-L1 children, while only the phonological factor predicted both reading and spelling performance in the English-L1 children. Conclusions: These findings suggest that bilingual ESL children may have poorer underlying skills to support their acquisition of English. These children may rely on other skills, acquired from their first language, in their English reading and spelling. This has implications for bilingual ESL children's reading and spelling acquisition.
Pui-sze Yeung (The University of Hong Kong) Connie Suk-han Ho, David Wai-ock Chan, Kevin Kien-hoa Chung - What cognitive-linguistic skills are important to text writing in Chinese?
Purpose The present study aimed to investigate what types of cognitive-linguistic skills are important to Chinese text writing among elementary grade children. Method Two hundred fifty-nine Grade 4 students (133 boys and 126 girls) from two representative elementary schools in Hong Kong were administered measures tapping text writing skills and cognitive-linguistic skills (verbal working memory, transcription skills, oral narrative skills, syntactic skills and discourse skills) that were significant predictors of text writing. Results Hierarchical multiple regression analyses results suggested that transcription skills and syntactic skills contributed unique variance to text writing after controlling for age, IQ and verbal working memory. However, oral narrative skills and discourse skills were not significant predictors of text writing. Path analyses results showed that only transcription skills and syntactic skills had direct effects on text writing. Conclusions These findings among Chinese children were contrary to those among children learning to write in transparent writing systems (e.g., Turkish, Finnish) (Babayiğit & Stainthorp, 2010, 2011; Mäki, Voeten, Vauras, & Poskiparta, 2001) where working memory and oral language skills were significant predictors of text writing, but not transcriptions skills (i.e., handwriting or spelling), starting in grade 2. The strong contribution of transcription skills to Chinese text writing among children beyond the early elementary grades may reflect the complexity of the Chinese writing system. In view of these differences in the cognitive-linguistic skills important to text writing across different orthographies, orthographic depth may need to be considered in developing a universal model of text writing.
Li Yin (Tsinghua University), Tsinghua University, China; Rebecca Treiman,Washington University in St. Louis, US - How Chinese Children Learn to Write Their Names
Purpose: Name writing plays an important role in literacy development, but most previous studies have examined learners of alphabetic writing systems. Here we studied Chinese children. Method: We analyzed data from two studies in which Chinese children wrote their names and several single-character words. One study included data from 90 children aged 2;0 (years; months) to 6;8; the other included 64 children aged 3;0 to 6;9. Results: Two-year-olds' written names were not recognizable as names. Three-year-olds never wrote their names correctly, but Chinese adults were above chance at determining that the productions were names rather than single-character words. Adults were also above chance at determining whether a production was that child's name as opposed to another name. Three-year-olds' name productions were more visually complex than their productions of single-character words and more likely to contain separate units, thus showing some of the properties of Chinese names (which usually contain three characters). Some children began to write their names correctly around age 4, producing more correct renditions of characters in their names than of non-name characters. Chinese children did not appear to learn their names starting with the first character, unlike learners of alphabets. Another difference is that Chinese children showed little or no tendency to write non-name characters the same as or similarly to known name characters. Conclusions: Given the characteristics of the Chinese writing system and culture, some aspects of name writing development are different in Chinese children than in Western learners of alphabetic systems.
Fong Yui Chi (The University of Hong Kong)Connie Suk-han Ho - Contribution of oral narrative skills to word reading, sentence and passage reading comprehension in Chinese first graders
Purpose: This study investigated the connection between oral narrative and literacy skills in Chinese children. Method: Ninety-one Chinese first-graders were assessed on oral narrative skills with three measures (narrative recall, narrative comprehension, and anomaly detection). Results: Results of hierarchical regression analysis showed that children's performance in narrative comprehension significantly accounted for variance in both word reading and sentence reading comprehension, independent of vocabulary and morphosyntatic skills. In the prediction of passage reading comprehension, both narrative recall and anomaly detection made unique contribution when children's working memory, vocabulary, morphosyntatic skills, as well as their word reading and sentence reading comprehension abilities were controlled. Conclusions: To conclude, these findings supported the importance of oral narrative skills to early Chinese literacy development. They also showed how different kinds of narrative skills might contribute to different aspects of reading ability. While children's general listening comprehension ability might be important for lower-level reading, it appears that passage-level reading comprehension might distinctively requires specific discourse skills (e.g., narrative structuring and comprehension monitoring), even at the beginning stage of reading comprehension development.
Keren Zadik (Tel-Aviv University)Dorit Ravid - Motion verbs in english: a study of lexical development
Purpose - Verbs are critical for vocabulary development, since they provide labels for actions, events and states. Motion verbs (e.g., run, swim) are a core category in the verb lexicon given their dynamic nature; however advanced motion verbs invoke cognitive states (saunter) and require specific knowledge (immigrate, wade). The current study aimed to determine age of acquisition of such verbs across the school years, hypothesizing different learning trajectories in motion verbs with different semantics. Method - Five age groups of typically developing English speaking children (aged 5-15) participated. A list of 102 English motion verbs was compiled based on the literature (Levin, 1993) and subsequently classified by 30 judges into 5 levels of difficulty, from the most familiar verbs such as walk to the rarest and most lexically specific, such as lope. Four tasks - Miming, Verb and Picture selection, and Verb Production - were administered to the participants, based on the pool. Results - Correct scores increased with age in tandem with level of difficulty on a Guttman scale. Lexically specific verbs such as flit or trot, and verbs implying inner states, such as sashay or cavort, were the hardest and took the longest to acquire. Tasks were ranked from easiest (Miming, not requiring verbal explicitation), to Production, which was the hardest, requiring active lexical knowledge. Conclusion - The study showed that motion verbs are acquired in English throughout the school years, and that lexical knowledge is not complete in this domain in adolescence.
Elena Zaretsky (College of Educatio and Human Development)Jelena Kuvac - Differences in distribution of pre-literacy skills and early literacy achievements among kindergartners with and without language impairment: Does orthography matter?
Purpose: This study investigated early reading development among TD children and children with SLI exposed to radically different orthographies. We examined the predictive nature of oral language- (lexicon) and code-related (PA and VWM) skills, as well as alphabet knowledge, on early reading, in view of the orthographic depth hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992). Method: 60 kindergartners, 15 in each group of TD and SLI (English- and Croatian-speakers) were assessed on measures of PA, VWM, vocabulary, alphabet knowledge, decoding, sight word recognition and spelling. ANOVAs and regression analyses were utilized to identify the predictive power of code- and oral language-related skills on the development of PA and early reading as a factor of orthography. Results: TD children and children with SLI in both linguistic groups showed similar code- and oral language-related profiles, suggesting the same core deficits in the SLI population regardless of the orthography. However, significant differences were found in the predictive nature of code- and oral language-related components on the development of PA and early reading skills as a factor of deep (English) and shallow (Croatian) orthographies. Conclusion: The results confirmed that the nature of orthography and rich phonological composition of ambient language showcases different distribution of skills in the development of PA and early reading, even among children with SLI, supporting previous research with TD children (Zaretsky, Kuvac, Core & Lancek, 2009) and children with SLI (Zaretsky & Clancy, 2011), that orthography puts emphasis on the use of different pre-requisite skills for PA development and early reading acquisition.
Maaike Zeguers (University of Amsterdam); Patrick Snellings; Hilde Huizenga; Maurits van der Molen - On the time course of orthographic and phonological code activation in a transparent language. Evidence from skilled and developing readers.
Purpose - Relatively little is known about the way the word recognition system is accessed in readers of transparent languages and about the development of these lexical access processes. The orthographic depth hypothesis assumes more detailed phonological access representations in transparent orthographies like Dutch, predicting earlier phonological influences than in opaque languages like English and French. We used time course analyses to chart the time course of phonological and orthographic code activation during visual word recognition in a transparent language at different phases of reading development. Method - Forward masked priming was used in a lexical decision task. Target words were preceded by one of three nonword primes (phonological, orthographic or unrelated control prime). Prime durations were 33, 50, 67 and 83 ms. 113 Adults and 335 children from 2nd (n=109), 4th (n=102) and 6th (n=124) grade participated. Results and conclusions - 1. - Orthographic primes facilitated word recognition both in skilled and developing readers. Phonological primes provided no additional facilitation. - Phonological priming was present in a subset of stimuli with high phonological contrasts between phonological and orthographic primes, and showed an identical time course to orthographic priming effects. This reflects intertwined orthographic and phonological influences rather than early but distinct phonological influences in a transparent orthography. The degree of phonological contrast determines whether priming effects reflect as phonological or orthographic influences. 2. In children, orthographic priming effects were apparent at increasingly early durations across ascending age groups, indicating increasing automaticity of lexical access during reading development.
Jason D. Zevin (Sackler Institute, Weill Medical College of Cornell University); Eliane Mi Chang; Clara Regina Brandão de Ávila - Pragmatic language and reading comprehension in reading disabilities
Pragmatic function of language regulates communication mediated by writing as well. Literature indicates the importance of pragmatic aspects assessment in children with any type of language difficulties. Purpose: to study the pragmatic function of language and reading comprehension of students with reading disabilities. Method: Twenty two students from 4th to the 8th grades of public Elementary Schools were evaluated. Eleven students (Research Group) received diagnosis of developmental dyslexia after neurological, neuropsychological and speech therapy evaluation (Research Group). The other students were indicated by their teachers as readers with 'no reading complaints' (typical readers), and matched by gender, age and grade to the RG, composing the Comparison Group (CG). All subjects were assessed regarding oral and reading comprehension (story comprehension task: literal, text-connecting and gap-filling questions - Cain and Oakhill, 1999), reading accuracy and pragmatic language - Test of Pragmatic Language (TOPL-2; Phelps-Terasaki and Phelps-Gunn, 2007). Mann-Whitney test with a 0.05 significance level were used. Results: RG presented significantly lower scores in reading accuracy, as expected, and TC comprehension questions (U reading accuracy =,000 and p>0,001; U TC comprehension =27,000 and p>0,05), but did not differ in the other measurements showing that deficits in decoding can influence reading comprehension in somehow but not totally. Conclusion: The reading disabilities students showed similar values on pragmatic language, oral and reading comprehension (literal and GF content) to the typical readers. Lower reading accuracy might be associated with lower values in TC questions since this type of inference depends on information from the text.
Felicia Zhang (University of Toronto); Jenny Shen; Joyce Mak; Chelsea Misquith; Esther Geva. - Reading comprehension predictors in ELL second graders
Purpose: Do oral language variables (syntax and vocabulary) make distinct contributions to reading comprehension in English Language Learners (ELL) from Spanish and Chinese L1 backgrounds in early elementary school? This study examined the effects of different predictors (syntax, decoding, vocabulary, nonverbal IQ) on English reading comprehension in ELLs. Methods: Grade 2 ELL students from Chinese (n = 83) and Spanish (n = 64) backgrounds were tested with the GORT for reading comprehension, TROG for syntax, PPVT for vocabulary, Word Attack for decoding, and MAT for nonverbal IQ. A mediation analysis was conducted to examine direct and indirect effects of syntax, decoding, vocabulary, and nonverbal IQ on reading comprehension. Results: For the Chinese L1 sample, decoding had a significant direct effect on reading comprehension; syntax had a significant indirect effect on reading comprehension through decoding. In contrast, for the Spanish L1 sample, decoding and vocabulary made direct and unique contributions to reading comprehension; syntax had a significant indirect effect on reading comprehension mediated by both decoding and vocabulary. Conclusion: The effect of syntax on reading comprehension appears to differ by language background. Spanish and English are more syntactically similar than Chinese and English, and there is a positive slope between L2 comprehension and L1 vocabulary knowledge (Proctor, 2006). A proposed explanation of our data is that the Spanish ELLs have more cognates to draw upon than the Chinese ELLs, which influences the effect of vocabulary on reading comprehension. This research is relevant to developing bilingual models for reading comprehension.
Jie Zhang (Western Kentucky University);Qiong Dong; Hong Li; Elizabeth Sholar; Jie Xu - Can adolescent learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language use radical information to learn Chinese characters?
Approximately 80% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds, each containing a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The purpose of this study was to examine whether learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) are able to use phonetic radicals and semantic radicals to learn new Chinese characters. Thirty-four 7th and 8th grade CFL learners who have received intensive Chinese instruction for one semester in the US were taught the sounds and meanings of 16 semantic-phonetic pseudo-characters paired with novel pictures in 3 learning trials. The pseudo-characters consist of four types: regular phonetic radicals and transparent semantic radicals, regular phonetic radicals and opaque semantic radicals, irregular phonetic radicals and transparent semantic radicals, and irregular phonetic radicals and opaque semantic radicals. After each learning trial, students were asked to produce the sounds and meanings of pseudo-characters given orthography. Students were also assessed on their prior knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and word reading in Chinese. Students were able to use the meaning cues provided by transparent semantic radicals to learn the meanings of new characters. Students were not able to use phonetic radicals effectively to learn the pronunciations of new characters probably because of their relatively poor phonetic radical knowledge. The orthography-meaning associate learning was easier than the orthography-sound associate learning. Knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and new character learning performance significantly correlated with Chinese word reading. These findings underscore the importance of radical knowledge in learning to read Chinese for CFL learners.
Juan Zhang (Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh)Catherine McBride-Chang - Auditory sensitivity, speech perception, L1 Chinese and L2 English reading abilities in Hong Kong Chinese children
Purpose: A four-stage developmental model, in which auditory sensitivity is fully mediated by speech perception at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels, and these further impact word reading through their associations with phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory and morphological awareness, was tested with Hong Kong Chinese children. Method:Participants were 180 second and third graders and they were tested on auditory sensitivity, speech perception, metalinguistic skills and reading ability in both Chinese and English. Nested model comparisons were conducted to test this model separately against alternatives in relation to both Chinese and English word reading using structural equation modeling. Result:For Chinese word reading, the proposed four-stage model was demonstrated to be the best model. Auditory sensitivity was associated with speech perception, which influenced Chinese word reading mainly through its relations to morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming. In contrast, for English word reading, the best model required an additional direct path from suprasegmental sensitivity (in Chinese) to English word reading. That is, in addition to phonological awareness, Chinese speech prosody was also directly associated with English word recognition. Conclusions:The present findings indicates that the role of auditory sensitivity on reading was fully mediated by speech perception.