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P.G. Aaron (Indiana State U. ) - Learning to spell English from print and learning to spell it from speech: A study of children who speak Tamil, a Dravidian language.
English spelling of a group of Tamil-speaking children who learn English first as a written language is compared with that of a group of American children who learn English first as a spoken language. It is concluded that learning English first as a written language helps children to avoid spelling errors that are dialectical in nature, but the phonology of native Tamil leads children to commit spelling errors of a different kind.
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Salim Abu-Rabia (U. of Haifa) - Bilingual Literacy among regular and dyslexic Arabic readers.
The focus of this paper will be on the way native Arabic speakers acquire second and third languages. An introduction about the Arabic orthography and its characteristics will be presented. Data about regular and dyslexic readers will also be presented. Two studies will be the focus of the presentation; the first examined the relationship among reading , writing, phonological, syntactic, orthographic, and memory skills in three languages with different orthographies, and the second examined regular and dyslexic Arabic speakers learning English as a second language. Based on this data some conclusions will be drawn about bilingual education among regular and dyslexic readers.
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Marilyn Jager Adams (Soliloquy Learning) - Using accuracy and fluency to estimate independent, instructional, and frustration-level reading material.
Students in grades 2-6 were asked to read aloud a series of passages that ranged in difficulty from beneath to above their grade-level. The readings were captured by speech recognition technology so as to allow re-scoring of accuracy, examination of dysfluencies, and precise measurement of both overall and within-passage temporal parameters. The goals were (1) to identify factors clustered at the transition from independent-level to instructional-level reading, and (2) to develop heuristics for estimating performance across text levels for individuals (e.g., predicting texts that should fall within a child's independent level). The results are surprising.
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Suzanne M. Adlof (U. of Kansas) Hugh W. Catts, Tiffany P. Hogan, Todd Little - The role of fluency in reading comprehension.
Studies suggest that reading fluency plays an increasing role important role in the reading comprehension abilities through the school years. In this study, we examined this hypothesis using a large, longitudinal sample of children tested in 2nd, 4th, and 8th grades on measures of word recognition, fluency, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Confirmatory factor analyses and structuring equation modeling were used to determine the unique contribution of fluency to reading comprehension across the grades.
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Lori J. P. Altmann (U. of Florida) Cynthia Puranik, Elizabeth Mikell, Linda J. Lombardino - Grammatical sentence production in individuals with and without dyslexia.
Dyslexia can result in delays in language development affecting phonological, morphological, and syntactic competence; however, the linguistic variables causing these difficulties have not been identified. We hypothesized that using noncanonical verb types might be particularly difficult for individuals with dyslexia, because they constrain sentence production to constructions of relatively low frequency. For example, a verb like “bored” requires an animate direct object (e.g., “The lecture bored the student”), while an irregular past participle like “hidden” requires a perfective, passive or adjectival construction. Consequently, the current study analyzed the sentence production of dyslexic and normal readers when using transitive verbs that varied in morphological regularity and argument structure.
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Alida Anderson (U. of Illinois) Yeqin He, Wenling Li - Children’s visual-orthographic representation of Chinese characters.
Chinese children’s perceptual representation of characters was investigated in four experiments in which several hundred children reproduced different types of characters and noncharacters after each had been briefly presented. Results indicate that major functional components of characters are more readily perceived as chunks than subcomponents that do not represent semantic or phonological information; however, subcomponents are reproduced far better than arbitrary stroke configurations, indicating that subcomponents also serve as perceptual chunks. The ability to see characters in terms of chunks develops gradually over the early school years and is correlated with measures of vocabulary and reading.
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Richard C. Anderson (U. of Maryland) - Linguistic specificity in preschool age children with and without specific language impairment.
This project describes linguistic specificity through literate language feature (LLF) use in preschool age children, to include those children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children’s linguistic specificity is examined in two conditions of play and storybook sharing with caregivers, in order to determine the extent to which young children use micro- and macro-level language features for specificity in naturalistic contexts of conversational discourse. Micro-level indices include children's use of elaborated noun phrases, conjunctions, adverbs, and mental and linguistic verbs (i.e., LLFs). Children's utterances will also be coded for linguistic specificity of utterance by type, which range from labeling to interpreting.
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Jason L. Anthony (U. of Texas-Houston Health Science Center) Renee McDonald - Socioemotional development IS important for emergent literacy acquisition!
We examined the link between socioemotional development and school readiness in 375 Head Start children. Participants were administered emergent literacy tests 4 times per year, and teachers rated children's social, emotional, and behavioral proclivities on the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC) midyear. Mixed modeling controlled for classroom growth, while individual growth trajectories for each emergent literacy skill were correlated with BASC scores. Although only individual growth rates in phonological awareness were predicted by BASC scores, end-of-year proficiencies in letter names, letter sounds, phonological awareness, print discrimination, and word reading were significantly predicted by BASC scores. Children's socioemotional and behavioral health are important outcomes not only in their own right but also because they appear related to literacy acquisition.
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Dorit Aram (Tel Aviv U. ) Sagit Hoshmand - Maternal writing mediation to kindergartners: Analysis via a twins study.
The study explored the nature of maternal writing mediation to kindergarten twins. It investigated the extent to which the mothers are sensitive to their children’s literacy level and tried to reveal if mothers have a mediation style that they employ with both of their twins? The sample included 28 pairs of kindergarten twins and their mothers. Children’s literacy was assessed individually. Maternal pedagogical beliefs and estimation of their children’s early literacy were assessed. Mother-child word writing interactions with each of the twins were videotaped. The results proved that along with sensitivity to the child’s literacy level, mothers of twins have a mediation style.
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Laura Astolfo (Brock U. ) John McNamara - Using measures of phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge to identify at-risk readers in Kindergarten: A follow-up in Grade Two.
This study represents a section within a larger longitudinal analysis in which the primary purpose was to design and evaluate a school-based tool to identify children at-risk for reading failure in kindergarten. This was a three-year longitudinal study that followed a cohort of children from kindergarten to grade three. 648 kindergarten children from three school districts in central Saskatchewan, Canada made up the sample for this study. In kindergarten, all participants in this study were measured for phonological processing and letter/sound skills. Results show that many children who have poor pre-reading skills display grade-appropriate skills in grade three. A smaller section of children who have poor pre-reading skills remain poor readers in grade three despite remedial instruction; this demonstrates the Matthew Effect (Stanovich, 1988). Interventions for children at risk for reading failure must take place at the earliest possible stage.
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Mei-lan Au (Hong Kong Institute of Education) Linda Siegel - The effectiveness of phonological awareness training in English reading among Hong Kong children.
Many research studies on English reading support that phonological awareness is crucial to reading success. This paper reports about a study which examined the effect of phonological awareness training in English reading among Hong Kong children who learn English as their second language. Participants were 5-year old children studying the last year of preschool education, the year before formal primary schooling. Children in the experimental group (184) received phonological awareness training for about 6 months while the children in the control group (166) were taught with their original English curriculum. Children in the experimental group performed significantly better in both reading¡Vrelated tasks (picture naming and word reading) and reading-related skills (rhyme detection and phoneme identification). The findings indicate that phonological awareness training is beneficial to the development of English reading skills among Hong Kong children.
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Diane August (Center for Applied Linguistics) Margarita Calderon, Maria Carlo, Michelle Nutall - Developing literacy in English-language learners: An examination of the impact of English-only versus bilingual instruction.
This study examined differences in broad reading outcomes (letter-word identification and passage comprehension) for three groups of fifth grade Spanish-speaking students: students instructed in Spanish only, students instructed in English; and students instructed first in Spanish and then transitioned into English-only instruction. Findings indicate instruction in Spanish followed by instruction in English benefits Spanish-speaking children. They perform as well in Spanish as students instructed only in Spanish and as well in English as students instructed only in English. However, this is not the case for students instructed in one language or the other. Without Spanish instruction, English-instructed students do not perform as well as the other two groups. Without English instruction, Spanish instructed students do not compare as well as the other two groups.
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Bettina Baker (U. of Pennsylvania Linguistics Laboratory) John Sabatini - A comparison of the effects of two phonologically-based, remedial reading programs for struggling readers from different language and ethnic backgrounds in low-income schools.
A study examined the effects of two phonologically-based interventions on struggling Spanish-speaking and English-speaking readers in grades 2 through 4. 246 children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatment conditions. Descriptive statistics, intercorrelations, and gain scores will be presented. Results show gain scores across both interventions for Woodcock Johnson III word identification, word attack, and reading fluency sub-tests in the range of an effect size of 1.0, and approximately .75 for passage comprehension. There were no significant differences in gains between interventions. Results will be presented to determine whether sub-sets of the sample showed a differential effect of intervention.
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Linda Baker (U. of Maryland) Mariam Jean Dreher - Balancing learning to read and reading for learning: Intervention effects on students’ achievement.
A primary goal of the intervention was to increase students’ ability to comprehend and use information text. Growth was assessed using the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test and researcher-developed tasks requiring students to read expository text and use the information to respond in writing to prompts. Reading motivation was also assessed. This paper reports the results of these assessments, administered in Grades 2, 3, and 4. Gates-MacGinitie scores improved steadily over time but did not differ across intervention conditions, nor did scores on reading-to-learn and motivation tasks. However, students in the information-books-plus-instruction condition were better able to use text-access features.
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Jennifer Balogh (Ordinate Corporation) John Strucker, Jared Bernstein, Isabella Barbier - Predictors of reading fluency.
In the simple view of reading (Gough et al. 1992), decoding and linguistic comprehension predict reading comprehension. Given the close relation between reading comprehension and reading fluency, we considered whether the theory generalized to reading fluency. To test this, we analyzed data from an experiment in which adults read aloud, repeated sentences, and named pseudowords. The results indicate that reading fluency is highly correlated with the fluency of repeating sentences. When repeat fluency was combined with weighted measures of decoding, there was a statistically significant increase in the correlation. Findings are discussed in terms of fluency’s role in reading theories.
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Timothy Bates (Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science) Anne Castles, Michelle Luciano, Margaret J. Wright, Max Coltheart, Nicolas G. Martin - What do genes tell us about reading?
Research is presented using the genetic independence of psychological processes to test competing cognitive models of reading. A model in which distinct genes exist for lexical and nonlexical processing is supported. Semantic knowledge and working memory processes are suggested to entail further distinct sources of genetics variance. Multivariate linkage analysis is presented as a tool for distinguishing genes which are specific for particular components of reading, and linkage data in our sample is used to demonstrate this. Finally, evidence from nonword repetition performance as a marker of SLI is presented, supporting genetic independence between oral and written language processing.
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Lisa Beall (U. of Maryland) Faith Morse, Linda Baker, Mariam Jean Dreher - Student book preferences and their links to achievement.
Although the primary purpose of this project was to increase students' ability to use and understand the "academic text" they are increasingly exposed to in the intermediate grades and beyond, a corollary purpose was to increase the amount of informational text students choose to read, given the established benefits of enriched world knowledge and vocabulary on comprehension. Accordingly, several measures of preference were collected including the type of books indicated as favorites and the frequency of choosing expository or narrative-informational books as gifts. This paper examines the relations between these preferences and student achievement, reading activity, and motivation to read.
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Nanci Bell (Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes) - The role of imagery and verbal processing in comprehension.
In 1993, Durkin said that comprehension had come to be viewed as “the essence of reading.” Years later the 2000 National Reading Panel (NRP) report listed comprehension as one of the five essential components of reading instruction. This presentation will involve a discussion of Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1971) as a theoretical basis for reading comprehension instruction that integrates mental imagery and verbal processing. Additionally, individual, single group pre/post, and comparative studies of students who are adequate decoders and poor comprehenders will be presented to illustrate the efficacy of developing mental imagery as a sensory-cognitive component in reading comprehension.
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Rebecca S. Betjemann (U. of Denver) Janice M. Keenan - Visual and auditory priming in Children with reading disabilities.
Priming is an important component of reading that can affect a child's ease of decoding and comprehension. We examined semantic, phonological/ graphemic, and combined (i.e., FLOAT - BOAT) priming in children with reading disabilities (RD) in both visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. Despite their disability, children with RD show significant phonological and phonological/graphemic priming, comparable to controls. Where they appear to show a deficit is in semantics; there is a trend for children with RD to show less semantic and less combined priming than controls.
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Gina Biancarosa (Harvard Graduate School of Education) - Revisiting reading speed: How sentence reading speed might reveal more about our students’ comprehension processes.
The current research sought to relate sentence reading speed to reading comprehension. Third grade children read and retold stories in which the protagonist is tricked. Children slowed down when reading a sentence challenging to situation-model construction, but only when this sentence came early in the story. When the sentence came later, children showed considerable variation in the speed with which they read it. Only in the latter case did their sentence-reading speed predict their ability to retell the story. Competing hypotheses for these results and implications for classroom assessment are discussed.
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Ulrike Biangardi (U. of Washington) Deborah McCutchen - Morphological processes in 5th and 8th graders’ word reading.
Previously we investigated whether morphological information aided English-speaking 4th graders in a lexical-decision- priming task. Results indicated that morphologically primed base words were recognized more quickly than orthographically and control primed base words. However, contrary to adults (Stoltz & Feldman,1995), no inhibition occurred when reading orthographically primed base words. Our current study investigates whether orthographically primed base words elicit inhibition effects in 5th and 8th graders. Preliminary results indicate that both grades performed similar to the 4th graders in our previous study on the lexical decision priming task.
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Jay Blanchard (Arizona State U. ) Kim Atwill, Karen Burstein, Jim Christie, Joanna Gorin, David Wodrich - An investigation of cross-language transfer in phonemic awareness of kindergarten Spanish-speaking children.
Phonemic awareness is considered a prerequisite for reading. However, issues surround its prerequisite status. One is cross-language transfer. This issue is of importance given the challenges facing children who must learn to read in a language different from the one spoken at home. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of studies on the issue (Manis, Lindsey & Bailey, 2004). This study investigated cross-language transfer of PA among 80 kindergartners in Spanish and English. Students were administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests and DIBELS in both languages. Correlation and regression analyses within a multi-trait, multi-method framework were conducted to investigate transfer effects.
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Donald J. Bolger (U. of Pittsburgh) Walter Schneider, Charles Perfetti - The development of orthographic knowledge: A cognitive neuroscience investigation of the self-organizing principles of the ventral visual cortex for reading.
This paper reports an fMRI study that investigates how cortical areas associated with visual word recognition, particularly the visual word form area (VWFA), are impacted when learning graphic forms including the native orthography. In the study, participants are semantically trained (given a context sentence) on words, digit-strings, and Chinese characters and then given a set of dependent measures to assess learning. Following training, participants are testing in an fMRI 1-back paradigm to examine the cortical response of the target cortical regions to trained stimuli compared to untrained stimuli (of high and low familiarity in the word and number conditions). Our goal is to understand how the brain is organized to process meaningful orthographic information
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Anna M. T. Bosman (U. of Nijmegen) Marion IJntema-de Kok, Tom Braams, Fred Hasselman - Reading disabilities, remediation, and the role of memory skills.
Two months after formal reading instruction had started, the reading and memory skills of a large group of Dutch-speaking first graders were assessed. Children who showed early reading disabilities (n = 54) received immediate remedial treatment. Children without reading disabilities served as a control group (n = 46). After six months reading and memory skills of all children were tested again. Children with reading disabilities had significantly lower memory skills than of those without, and the memory skills of children whose reading disabilities were successfully remediated were significantly better than of those who still had reading problems after treatment.
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Monique Bournot-Trites (U. of British Columbia) - Preventing reading difficulties in French immersion and Francophone schools through instruction in phonemeic awareness and phonics. ..
This paper presents the effects of systematic training in phonological awareness on reading in Grade 1 in French immersion and French schools in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This one-year study followed 117 grade 1 children (111 in French immersion and 13 in French L1 schools). Sixty-eight children, in the treatment group, were taught beginning reading skills using the Jolly Phonics method in French, and 43 were in the control group being taught without any systematic method. The experimental group did better in reading tasks than the control group, after controlling for non-verbal cognitive ability and language level prior to the intervention.
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Dawn Bramer (U. of Iowa) - Case study of a pre-school aged precocious reader.
Case studies of very young precocious readers present valuable opportunities to test hypotheses about the role of phonological awareness in reading acquisition. Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson (2000) presented the case of Maxine, a pre-school aged precocious reader who could decode pseudowords, but was not able to complete phonemic awareness tasks. Her case was used as a model to study another precocious reader, Jack, for one year beginning at age 2 years 6 months. Although similar to Maxine in many ways, Jack presented a contrasting and previously unreported pattern of extremely early reading acquisition including well-developed phonemic awareness and spelling.
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Lee Branum-Martin (U. of Houston) David J. Francis, Paras D. Mehta - Bilingual phonological awareness: Multilevel construct validation among Spanish-speaking Kindergarteners in transitional bilingual education classrooms.
The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks, including blending words, blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme elision, was examined via multilevel confirmatory factor analysis. Results showed that the PA tasks defined a unitary construct in each language both at the student as well as at the classroom levels. The results extend previous findings that PA tasks are unidimensional in each language and provide a framework for future comparisons of bilingual educational programs.
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David Braze (Haskins Laboratories) Einar Mencl, Whitney Tabor, Donald Shankweiler - Speaking up for vocabulary in interpreting reading skill differences in young adults.
We focus on young adults (16-24 years) emerging from the educational system with sub-optimal reading skills. A comprehensive test battery assesses reading and listening comprehension, decoding, vocabulary, verbal working memory, print experience. The hypothesis that reading comprehension converges on listening comprehension is found lacking. Both decoding and vocabulary play important roles in reading comprehension. Functional brain activity studies of this group shows that brain activity during a sentence comprehension task is modulated by sentence complexity, reader skill and modality (speech vs. print). We discuss how a specific connectionist model of lexical representation and lexical access accounts for these findings.
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Gail Brown (Sydney) Herbert Marsh, Rhonda Craven, Mary Cassar - An effective, theoretically-based and practical intervention for significant improvements in reading comprehension.
This presentation outlines the theoretical foundation and methodology for effective classroom instruction in question answering. Significant posttest reading comprehension performance favoured intervention students compared to controls completing year 5 reading programs. General education teachers implemented thirty lessons with whole classes. Measures included reading comprehension, question-answering and reading fluency, with some conclusions about their relationships. A theoretical foundation in information processing models was applied to the complex cognitive skill of question-answering. This foundation ensured the efficacy of the intervention. Future applications of information processing models will be presented.
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Hilary Brown (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) Sarah Mordell, Tracee Fancis, Alexandra Gottardo. - Cognitive predictors of reading ability in adolescents with learning disabilities.
The purpose of this study was to examine cognitive predictors of reading ability in adolescents with learning disabilities. Twenty-seven adolescents with formally diagnosed learning disabilities participated in the study. A variety of reading measures were administered to participants over several one hour sessions. The results show that the pseudoword phoneme deletion task predicted word and pseudoword reading, while a memory for sentences task predicted reading comprehension. Therefore, word and pseudoword reading are related to phonological awareness, while reading comprehension was related to syntactic processing. Word reading is driven by phonological awareness even in adolescents.
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Brian Byrne (U. of New England) Richard Olson, Sally Wadsworth, Robin Corley, Stefan Samuelsson, Peter Quain - Longitudinal twin study of literacy and language: The first three years.
In this paper we provide an update on a continuing longitudinal study of literacy development in a genetically sensitive design. We first report univariate and multivariate analyses of the genetic and environmental influences on Grade 1 decoding and comprehension measures, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and aspects of learning. Then we model progress from preschool and kindergarten to Grade 1 in these and related variables, tracing the interplay of genes and environment as children develop their literacy skills.
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Kate Cain (U. of Essex) - Reading comprehension failure: Profiles of individuals from different populations.
Some children develop age-appropriate word reading but their reading comprehension lags behind. I present profiles of the written and spoken language comprehension abilities from two groups of poor comprehender: children attending mainstream schools and children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Assessments included short-term and working memory, inference making, vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension, and understanding of figurative language. Although the skills assessed are related to reading comprehension in general, different patterns of strength and weakness were apparent suggesting that deficits in key comprehension skills are not necessarily present in all poor comprehenders, whether from a "normal" or clinical population.
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Claire E. Cameron (U. of Michigan) Carol McDonald Connor, Frederick J. Morrison - The impact of classroom organization on decoding skill growth in First Grade.
This study examined the impact of classroom organization on literacy skill growth in first-grade. The role of organization (i.e., a non-instructional activity including the amount of time teachers spent orienting for new activities and organizing for instruction) in decoding skill growth was explored, considering background factors and children's entering skills. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to examine this influence in 108 children nested within 44 first-grade classrooms. Amount and change over time in organization were significantly associated with decoding outcomes. Students demonstrated stronger decoding skill growth in classrooms that spent more time in organization early in the year, but which also sharply decreased time in this activity over the school year.
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Markéta Caravolas (U. of Liverpool) Karin Landerl - Phonotactic structure of words in children's native language specifically shapes the development of their phoneme awareness skills.
The hypothesis was investigated that the typical phonotactic structures of onsets and codas in children's spoken language specifically influence their awareness of these units. Czech, which permits many different frequently occurring complex onsets, but only a restricted diversity and frequency complex codas, was compared with Austrian German, in which the opposite is true. The phonotactic-input hypothesis was supported: while Czech (n= 43) non-reader school beginners showed better awareness of phonemes in complex onsets than in complex codas, the reverse pattern was obtained for their Austrian (n= 36) peers. Moreover, this language-specific pattern of awareness persisted to the end of first grade.
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Joanne F. Carlisle (U. of Michigan) Lauren A. Katz - Lexical quality of derived words.
This presentation focuses on the characteristics of words that influence the quality of the representation in memory. In theory, the lexical quality of a derived word might depend of the exposure the base word in different members of a word family, but the process might be influenced by the transparency of the word’s structure. Building on previous studies, we examine the relation of derived word characteristics on 4th and 6th graders’ performance on an oral morphology task and on a derived word reading task. Characteristics explored include frequency of the derived word itself (i.e., base word frequency and derived word frequency), frequency of family (e.g., family size, total frequency of family members, average family frequency, base word frequency), and transparency (i.e., phonological transparency). Results showed that our results support some previous findings (e.g., the relative importance of the derived word frequency, as compared to base word frequency), but not others. Differences in results might be attributable in part to research methods. However, in particular, we did not find a strong effect for family size. We discuss how high quality representations of derived words might come about, as well as educational implications based on the results.
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Maria S. Carlo (U. of Miami) Diane August - Predicting knowledge of low frequency English words that are cognates to Spanish: A study of 4th grade ELLs.
This paper describes a study of 4th grade Spanish speaking English Language Learners’ vocabulary knowledge. The study aimed to identify the sources of knowledge that influence the acquisition of word meanings for lexical items that have cognate status across Spanish and English and of noncognate lexical items. The results revealed that performance on cognate items was predicted by knowledge of Spanish orthography, breadth of vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and knowledge of derivational morphology in Spanish. These factors were not involved in the prediction of performance on the noncognate items.
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Julia M. Carroll (U. of Warwick ) James E. Clyne - The development of letter knowledge: A micro-genetic analysis.
A sample of 65 children were tested several times throughout their first year of school. At the start of the year their language skills and phonological awareness were measured, and at the start of the second term their learning skills were measured. Their letter name and letter sound knowledge was assessed once a month throughout the year, and invented spelling was assessed on three occasions. Language skills, phonological awareness and learning skills will be used to predict growth in letter knowledge through the year, and the relationship between all of these measures and spelling skill will be assessed.
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Chris Andrew Cate (U. of California at Santa Barbara) Jeff Sklar, Michael Gerber - Development of an instrument to test reading comprehension and memory—A pilot study.
This study will examine how well an instrument designed to measure both reading comprehension and memory concurrently correlates with separate standardized measures of both reading comprehension and memory. In a pilot study of 50 fourth grade students, the students will be given five different passages to read and will be asked 20 questions that test their comprehension of the passages and 20 questions that tested their working and long term memory. The Woodcock Johnson-III and will be used to correlate the pilot data.
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Chris Chase (Claremont McKenna College) Chinatsu Tosha, Joel B. Talcott - Meta-analysis of the visual magnocellular deficit model of dyslexia.
Many studies report dyslexics to have mild to moderate impairments processing visual information in their magnocellular (M) pathway. Recent narrative reviews have claimed that visual impairments are not a significant cause of development reading disorders and affect only a small portion of the dyslexic population, but a comprehensive analysis of this literature has not been made. In this study, a meta-analytic review of fifty-five studies involving dyslexia and M-function showed consistently large effect sizes under conditions that activate the M-pathway and weak effect sizes under conditions that did not. Results support the magnocellular deficit model of dyslexia.
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Chenxi Cheng (U. of Maryland) Min Wang, Shih-wei Chen - The role of morphological and phonological awareness in Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition.
This study investigates the roles phonological processing and morphological processing play in Chinese-English bilingual students’ reading acquisition. Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were conducted to test students’ morphological awareness, phonological awareness, oral vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension. The results showed that, after the impact of Chinese-based predictors has been accounted for, English morphological awareness of compound structure contributed unique variance to both real word reading and reading comprehension in Chinese, thus suggesting the presence of morphological awareness transfer. The backward transfer from English L2 to Chinese L1 is hypothesized to have resulted from higher level of English proficiency compared to Chinese among the subjects.
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Penny Chiappe (U. of California, Irvine) Bettina P. Baker - Predictors of response to reading intervention in English for struggling Latino/a readers.
This study examined 192 struggling readers’ response to intervention as a function of language background, type of intervention, and basic cognitive and linguistic processes. 57 Caucasian native English speakers, 72 Latino/a children with experience reading in Spanish, and 63 Latino/a children who learned to read only in English were tutored in one of two intervention programs. Although both interventions led to significant growth on measures of decoding, word attack and reading comprehension for the three groups, Spanish readers tended to show the greatest growth. Phonological processing and oral language skills' contributions to response to intervention were examined.
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Naya Choi (Seoul National U. ) An-jin Yoo - Predictors of Korean preschooler’s words and sentences reading.
The purpose of this study was to explore the predictors of preschoolers’ reading abilities, in connection with the nature of the Korean alphabet ’Hangul’. The data collected from 204 preschoolers showed that alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, writing, and concept of words were correlated to reading abilities. Regression analysis revealed that consonants recognition and naming, finger-point reading, phoneme substitution, and level of writing could predict reading, with a little difference in relative importance between reading of real words, pseudo words, and sentences. It was implicated that individual differences rather than chronological age counts more in preschoolers’ reading development.
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Ka-yan Karen Chong (Chinese U. of Hong Kong) Him Cheung - The effect of Mandarin Pinyin learning on phonological awareness development and English reading in Hong Kong ESL learners.
The present study aimed to find out how learning Mandarin Pinyin, a transparent phoneme-to-grapheme writing system, would affect phonological awareness development across languages and English reading in a group of Hong Kong ESL readers. A group of primary one children learning Mandarin with Pinyin were compared against another group who learn Mandarin but not Pinyin. Children were measured both before and after the 4.5 months intensive training. This allows us to examine the effect of a transparent phonological script in isolation of the spoken language, as well as the possibility of phonological awareness transfer in a pair of foreign languages.
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Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow (Chinese U. of Hong Kong) Catherine McBride-Chang, Richard K. Wagner, Andrea Muse - Associations of morphological awareness to vocabulary development in English.
Tasks of speeded naming, phonological awareness, word identification, nonsense word repetition, and vocabulary, morphological structure awareness and morpheme identification, were administered to 115 kindergartners and 105 second graders in the United States. After the variance contributed by the phonological processing and reading variables was controlled, morphological structure awareness and morpheme identification together predicted an additional unique 10% of variance in vocabulary knowledge. Both measures of morphological awareness were uniquely associated with vocabulary knowledge. Results highlight the importance of different facets of morphological awareness, as distinct from phonological processing skills, for understanding variability in early vocabulary acquisition.
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Eva Man Ching Chow (U. of Hong Kong) Connie Suk Han Ho - Paired associated learning among Hong Kong Chinese dyslexic children.
Vocabulary learning is important in language learning and the growth in vocabulary links closely to reading competency and school progress. Due to the poor performance of dyslexic children in both productive and receptive; vocabulary, the present study aims at investigating the underlying causes of poor vocabulary development among Chinese dyslexic children. One aspect of vocabulary learning, paired associate learning will be investigated. 30 Chinese dyslexic children, 30 chronological age controls and 30 reading level controls will be recruited. It is expected that dyslexic children will show difficulties in forming verbal associations in paired associate learning.
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Carol A. Christensen (U. of Queensland ) Dian Jones - The impact of orthographic-motor integration of children’s ability to learn to spell.
Orthographic-motor integration is the ability to integrate orthographic knowledge with motor activity required in handwriting. In this study, 30 Grade 1 teachers were divided into two groups and given 1 hour professional development. The control group covered general written language. The experimental group discussed ways to teach orthographic-motor integration. Post test was conducted after one year and a delayed post test was administered two years after the professional development. There were no differences at pretest. However, at both post and delayed post tests the experimental group wrote significantly more text (approximately twice as much) and spelled significantly more words correctly.
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Allan S. Cohen (U. of Georgia) Noel Gregg - The long-term impact of test accommodations on reading test performance.
The impact of test accommodations on reading test performance will be investigated on a sample of students taking a statewide examination. This study will employ a new method for detection of differences in use of cognitive strategies by latent groups of examinees. Previous work with this methodology indicates it can provide rich information about children’s use of cognitive strategies based on their achievement test performance. In this study, we extend this method to a longitudinal analysis of reading test performance with an eye toward better understanding how the use of test accommodations affects children’s reading achievement over time.
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Carol McDonald Connor (Florida State U. ) Frederick J. Morrison - Individual students’ differences in response to preschool literacy instruction: Effects on vocabulary, alphabet and letter-word recognition skill growth.
This study examines preschool teachers’ (n = 34) literacy instruction and its effect on student’s (n = 157) early literacy skill development, specifically vocabulary, alphabet and letter/word recognition. On average, teachers spent 13 minutes per day explicitly focused on literacy-related activities with amounts ranging from 0-65 minutes per day. Time in both small-group and whole-class teacher-managed-code-focused activities (e.g., labeling letters, rhyming) and teacher-managed-meaning-focused activities (e.g., teacher read aloud, discussion) predicted students’ vocabulary and early reading skill growth. However, the effect of instruction depended on students’ entering vocabulary and reading skills; there were child-by-instruction interactions. Implications will be presented.
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Nicole J. Conrad (Brandon U. , Manitoba) - Examining the relation between reading and spelling: A training study.
Children participated in a training study examining the benefits of two types of practice with common orthographic patterns. Training consisted of either repeated reading or repeated spelling of words with shared orthographic patterns. The question was whether training in one skill transferred to the other skill. Results indicated training in both skills transferred to the other skill; however, this transfer was word specific. Trained words were read or spelled better than new words. Although generalization to new words with trained units occurred within a skill (reading to reading), there was little generalization to new words across skill (reading to spelling). Results are related to the development of orthographic representations.
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Kathleen H. Corriveau (Harvard Graduate School of Education) Elizabeth S. Pasquini, Usha C. Goswami - Rhythmic processing in specific language impairment.
Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) often have co-morbid reading problems, although the underlying reasons for this co-morbidity are unknown. A recent auditory processing theory suggests that children with reading problems show deficits in phonological processing due to insensitivity to rhythmic aspects of auditory signals. This study examines whether expressive and receptive rhythmic deficits are characteristic of SLI children. Twenty-one children with SLI, 21 age-matched controls and 21 language-matched controls received phonological awareness, language, reading, spelling and rhythmic perception and production tasks. Results indicate a clear rhythmic deficit in SLI with severity linked to language and reading problems.
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Holly K. Craig (U. of Michigan) Julie A. Washington, Stephanie L. Hensel, Erin J. Quinn - Oral language differences between able and struggling African American readers.
This study compared the dialectal and non-dialectal oral language skills of approximately 200 first through fifth grade African American elementary grade students designated as able or struggling readers based on standardized tests of reading achievement. The groups differed significantly in rates of African American English (AAE) feature production. The able readers were dialect shifting toward Standard American English and also demonstrated better non-dialectal oral language skills than the struggling readers. Findings are discussed in terms of the positive relationships between strong linguistic skills and reading achievement for African American elementary grade students.
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Jennifer G. Cromley (U. of Maryland) Roger Azevedo - Coordinating think-aloud data with the DIME model of reading comprehension.
As part of a larger model-fitting project, we collected think-aloud protocols and a free recall protocol from 44 9th grade students while they read a history text about the American Revolution. We coded participants' verbalizations for accurate and inaccurate use of five variables-background knowledge, inference, strategies, vocabulary, and word reading. Spearman rank correlations on the proportion of verbalizations for each variable were strongly consistent with the Direct and Inferential MEdiation model of reading comprehension. Students with high scores on a comprehension measure were also more accurate in their use of all five variables.
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Virginia Cronin (George Washington U. ) - The double-deficit hypothesis and nonword reading.
Nonword reading is thought to assess phonological knowledge. This longitudinal study examined the hypothesis that nonword reading also involves the development of automaticity. Children were categorized into Wolf and Bowers’ double-deficit groups by preschool and kindergarten rhyme discrimination and picture naming. Woodcock tests of word identification, work attack, and passage comprehension were given from the spring of kindergarten to the fall of grade 2. Although the low naming group was similar to the no-deficit group in phonological awareness, they developed nonword reading like the low phonological group. It was concluded that fluent nonword reading depended on the development of automatic grapheme-phoneme connections..
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Todd Cunningham (OISE/UT) Esther Geva - The effects of reading technologies on literacy development of ESL students.
One hundred ESL students between grades 4 to 6 participated in a pre-intervention-post test design study evaluating the effects of two reading remediation technologies in comparison to regular ESL instruction on literacy skill development. The first technology listens to students read, and gives feedback on misread words. The second technology displays stories on a computer screen while it reads the text to students. Due to the unique approach of each technology, different types of literacy skill gains are expected, and it is predicted that the literacy skill gains will be greater for students using technology than for students receiving regular ESL instruction.
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Laurie E. Cutting (Kennedy Krieger Institute/Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) Hollis Scarborough - Prediction of reading comprehension: Relative contributions of word recognition, fluency, and cognitive-linguistic skills can depend on how comprehension is measured.
Research has demonstrated that decoding/word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension (RC); nevertheless, it may not be sufficient. Although effects of other influences (e.g., fluency/rate, oral language) have been demonstrated, few studies have simultaneously examined their contributions and most have used a single or composite RC measure. To examine various predictors' influences on different RC measures, 70 children ages 7-14 were administered three RC tests, as well as measures of decoding/word recognition, fluency/rate, phonological awareness, memory, oral language, and IQ. Results confirmed that decoding/word recognition is a strong limiting factor on RC and that both fluency/rate and oral language contribute additionally to RC. When the RC measures were analyzed individually, the predictors' contributions varied, suggesting the need for multiple comprehension assessments.
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Daniel Daigle (Université de Montréal) Françoise Armand, Elisabeth Demont, Jean-Emile Gombert - Implicit learning of French morphological rules in deaf readers.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate morphological treatment acquired through implicit learning in deaf readers of French. Experimental computerized material constituted of pairs of multimorphemic pseudo-words respecting the construction rules of French words (e.g. donnage) or not (e.g.dentage). Subjects were asked to determine which of the two pseudo-words was the most probable in written French. Results show that most subjects demonstrate knowledge of word construction rules because they select more often pseudo-words that respect those rules. The results are discussed in terms of implicit learning of knowledge that contributes to word recognition.
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Dana David (Queen's U. ) Yolanda Yuen, John R. Kirby, Katharine Smithrim, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Does musical rhythm predict reading ability in the primary grades?
Rhythm production in 53 Grade 1 children (mean age = 76.1 months, SD = 3.4 months) was investigated as a possible predictor of reading ability one year later in Grade 2. Correlations and hierarchical regression analyses were run, controlling for shared variance with phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS). Rhythm was significantly correlated with both PA and NS. Rhythm also significantly predicted reading ability, however once PA was controlled for, it did not. When NS was controlled for, rhythm uniquely predicted reading ability one year later. Implications for rhythm production as an early predictor of reading ability are discussed.
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Claire Davis (Haskins Lab) Peter Bryant - Causal connections in the acquisition of an orthographic rule
In a longitudinal study Frith's causal hypothesis that children first learn orthographic knowledge through reading and then later through spelling was tested. Children from Years 2 and 3 were tested on three occasions over a two-year period of time on their reading and spelling of pseudo-words that conformed to the conditional 'final -e' rule. Results from cross-lagged panel correlation analyses showed that, consistent with Frith's hypothesis, the children's success in reading final -e words was a causal determinant of their learning to use these words in spelling, both in the 7- to 8-year period and in the 8- to 9-year period.
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Marina Davydovskaia (Queen’s U. ) Vincent Goetry, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Orthographic differentiation between first and second language in the reading and spelling of French immersion students.
Literacy development implies computation of statistical information on written words (e.g., no geminate vowels in French). Bilingual children are challenged with the need to build functionally independent orthographic lexicons in order to compute language-specific statistical knowledge (especially with contrastive languages, e.g. English, but not French, allows geminate vowels, e.g. "seed"). First-, second, and fourth-graders schooled in French Immersion were examined with various tasks assessing orthographic differentiation ability. The findings suggest that orthographic differentiation of bilinguals' two languages explain their reading and spelling in the two languages.
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Elise de Bree (Utrecht U. ) - Word stress production in young children at risk for dyslexia.
A deficit in phonological representations is widely acknowledged as a cause of dyslexia. However, the acquisition of phonological skills that influence the construction of these phonological representations has not received much attention. The present study addresses the acquisition of word stress in Dutch children at risk for dyslexia. Results of a non-word repetition stress task show that three-year-old at-risk and control children are still in the process of acquiring Dutch word stress. However, the at-risk group more often alters targets with irregular and prohibited word stress to regular stress realisations than the control children. The results suggest a delay in their word stress development.
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Maria T. de Jong (Leiden U. )Adriana G. Bus - Pattern detection in book reading sessions.
Book reading has the potential to familiarize children with stories and, more than any other language situation, with complex language. We focused on parent reading behavior and used Theme (Noldus) for detection of (complex) patterns. We found support for the hypothesis that 3-year-olds’ active participation and learning strongly depended on the parental ability to bridge the discrepancy between the child’s world and the world of the book. Second, that it is of the utmost importance that adults capitalize on intimate knowledge of their child’s personal world. Lastly, that the adults’ agenda seems to be the maintenance of discourse rather than teaching their infants.
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Maria De Palma (The Hospital For Sick Children) Jan C. Frijters, Meredith Temple, Karen A. Steinbach, Maureen W. Lovett - Translating research into practice: Generalizability of multiple component intervention effects for children who are English language learners.
127 reading disabled children were randomly assigned in small groups to one of two 105-hour research-based reading interventions (PHAST Decoding Program; PHAST Decoding + Comprehension Program) or to a 105-hour control condition (school-based special education reading program). Classes were taught by community-based teachers trained by special research teachers. Remedial outcome programs were evaluated separately for English as a first language (EFL) children versus English Language Learners (ELL). The research-based reading programs produced significant gains relative to the special education control condition on decoding, word identification and passage comprehension measures. ELL and EFL students made equivalent gains following the interventions.
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S. Hélène Deacon (Dalhousie U. ) Lesly Wade-Woolley - Developing bilinguals: How the relationship between morphological awareness and reading changes as language skills increase.
This study follows six-year-old English speaking children in a French immersion programme, as they become bilingual. This research focuses on the role of morphological awareness in reading development. Results show that Grade 1 English (but not French) morphological awareness is related to Grades 1 to 3 reading in French and English, after controlling for phonological awareness and vocabulary. By Grade 2, both English and French morphological awareness are related to Grade 2 and 3 reading in both languages. Morphological awareness may depend, atleast in part, on vocabulary knowledge. Results will be discussed in context of current theories of reading development.
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Maureen Dennis (Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto) Joelene Huber Okrainec - Idioms as a tool for understanding configurational and compositionallanguage and reading comprehension: Evidence from children with spina bifida.
Idioms are non-literal phrases with a figurative meaning variably derived from literal word meanings. Decomposable idioms, in which the individual lexical items bias a figurative meaning (talk a mile a minute), require little context for interpretation. Non-decomposable idioms, in which the figurative meaning is syntactically and lexically frozen (kick the bucket), are context-dependent. We report: 1) selective impairment of context-dependent, non-decomposable idioms in children with spina bifida, a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with poor comprehension; 2) the relation between decomposable and non-decomposable idioms and reading comprehension; 3) the implications of the data for current theories of configurational and compositional language comprehension.
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Alain Desrochers (U. of Ottawa) Glenn Thompson, Frederick Grouzet, Pierre Cormier - The development of graphemic knowledge through the primary grades: evidence from French.
Canadian French-speaking children, in Grade 1 through 6 (N = 810), were asked to sound out 62 individual graphemes. The results indicated that (a) single-letter graphemes were mastered by the end of Grade 1, (b) performance with single-letter vowels + diacritics did not reach mastery at the end of Grade 1 but improved subsequently, and (c) performance with multiple-letter increased linearly from Grade 1 to 3 and leveled off before reading mastery until the end of Grade 6. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) highlighted 6 difficulty factors in grapheme sounding (e.g., their frequency in print). Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.
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Vassiliki Diamanti (U. College London) Nata Goulandris, Ruth Campbell, Morag Stuart - Spelling of derivational suffixes in Greek children with and without dyslexia.
This study investigated the ability of Greek-speaking children with and without dyslexia to spell derivational suffixes. Twenty-three 10-13 year-old dyslexic children, twenty-seven reading-level and twenty-three age-level-matched children were asked to spell a series of nouns and verbs in dictated sentences, as well as pairs of words comprising nouns and adjectives. Results showed that children spell more accurately the suffixes of nouns than those of adjectives and verbs. Additionally, dyslexic children are less accurate spellers than same and younger age control children. It is suggested that dyslexics have weaknesses in grasping the morphological rules of the Greek orthographic system and applying this knowledge in the spelling of word suffixes.
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Alicia Díaz (U. of La Laguna) Juan E. Jiménez - Assessment of academic performance of Spanish young adults with reading disabilities and young adult normal readers.
The purpose of this research was to investigate the differences between Spanish-speaking secondary grade students with reading disabilities and Spanish-speaking secondary grade students without reading disabilities in academic performance. In order to assess the academic performance we used the Spanish version of the standard and supplemental battery WJ-R Test of Achievement (Woodcock and Muñoz-Sandoval, 1996). This batteries consist of eighteen tests, each measuring various aspects of scholastic achievement. MANOVA were conducted to evaluate differential performance between the groups on the measures of interest. The present study provides evidence that demonstrates that the group with reading disabilities had a lower performance in the academic tasks than the groups of students without reading disabilities.
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Sotirios Douklias (U. of Essex) Jackie Masterson, Rick Hanley - Cognitive factors underpinning poor reading ability in Greek: A group study in a transparent language.
The study investigates the cognitive processing of poor and good readers who are speakers of Greek (a transparent writing system). 125 primary school students (grades 3, 4, 5) were tested on semantic, phonological and syntactic awareness tasks. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of features of written Greek on processes involved in reading, in an attempt to improve our understanding of dyslexia. The first set of results, based primarily on reading and spelling of words and non-words will be presented. The results showed that although the poor readers were significantly slower than the control readers on reading speed, they achieved high word and non-word reading accuracy. It seems that the consistency of the Greek writing system facilitates this high level of accuracy.
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Mariam Jean Dreher (U. of Maryland) Linda Baker - Balancing learning to read and reading for learning: Infusing information books into primary-grade classrooms.
Many students experience difficulty in fourth grade when there is an increased emphasis on reading to learn, a skill for which they are not well prepared in the earlier grades. This symposium presents the results of a 3-year study, beginning in 2nd grade and following children through 4th grade, of whether a classroom intervention that enhances children's experience with information books increases reading achievement and engagement. The five papers focus on different aspects of this project. This first paper explains the rationale and procedure for the study and reports classroom library data documenting available books before and after the intervention.
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Lois G. Dreyer (CUNY) Linnea C. Ehri, Bert Flugman - Reading rescue: First-Grade tutoring facilitates reading acquisition in struggling readers.
We examined the effects of a one-to-one literacy intervention with low-achieving bilingual, low SES first graders (N = 63) in an urban school system. The program emphasized word reading and spelling skills, practice in controlled vocabulary stories, and comprehension monitoring. At year¹s end, the experimental group reached average levels of performance and significantly outperformed matched controls (N = 60) in their own schools on measures of word identification, decoding, and reading comprehension. They also outperformed a control group drawn from comparable schools. Findings reveal the success of a cost-effective tutoring program that makes use of personnel in the school.
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Susan Dunlap (U. of Pittsburgh) Ying Liu, Charles Perfetti - Incidental Reading in L2, L1, and L0: An ERP Study of Chinese and English.
We investigated whether level of familiarity with a language contributes to the automaticity of word reading. We measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to the passive viewing of Chinese and English items by 12 Chinese-English bilinguals and 12 native speakers of American English. Participants counted geometric symbols (triangles) interspersed in a series of words and nonwords in each language, while electrical brain activity was recorded using a high-density Geodesic Sensor Net. We predicted early ERP components sensitive to word form recognition and to lexicality in the language(s) known to the participants.
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Linnea C. Elbro (U. of Copenhagen) - As cheap as dirt, dust or what? The importance of lexical unit size for the quality of the phonological representations in dyslexia.
An underlying cause of dyslexia may be poor quality of phonological representations of lexical items. The nature of this poorness is far from known. One possibility is that phonological representations are somehow underspecified, i.e., each phonological segment is not fully specified. Because of redundancy, one would then expect that long phonological representations (similes, idioms and proverbs) are more vulnerable than short ones. This possibility was studied in a comparison of dyslexic and normal readers matched for basic vocabulary.
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Carsten Elleman (Vanderbilt U., Nashville) Jane Lawrence, Natalie Olinghouse, Jan Vining, Emily Bigalow, Donald Compton - Predicting struggling reader’s responsiveness to reading comprehension instruction.
There is renewed interest in matching reading interventions to child characteristics in order to optimize treatment responsiveness. Sixty-eight 3rd – 5th grade struggling readers participated in one of three different 25-lesson reading interventions. Groups of struggling readers were assigned to either: 1) decoding only, 2) decoding + traditional (TRAD) comprehension, or 3) decoding + reciprocal teaching (RT) instruction. Employing an ATI approach we predicted responsiveness using treatment group, child attributes (e.g., vocabulary, IQ, word ID skill), and the interaction between the two. Results suggest that child attributes differentially predict responsiveness across the TRAD and RT interventions, suggesting the existence of ATI’s.
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Amy Evans (U. of Guelph) - Phonological awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge.
The study examines children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowledge and the interrelationship between letter sound and name knowledge, and phonological awareness. Kindergarten children (n = 149) were assessed for these variables plus cognitive ability (RAN, non verbal ability, receptive vocabulary and short-term auditory memory). Knowledge of letter sounds was better for vowels and for letters with consonant-vowel names, than for those with vowel-consonant names or names not corresponding to their sounds. Knowledge of letter sounds corresponding with the respective name was regressed on gender, family income, cognitive abilities, and knowledge of letter sounds not corresponding with the name as a control for instructional influences, and finally phonological awareness. As the last step, phonological awareness predicted additional variance.
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Fataneh Farnia (OISE/UT) Esther Geva - Reading fluency: A prelude to reading comprehension? A growth curve study of ESL and EL1 students.
There is no systematic longitudinal research on similarities and differences in the growth patterns of reading fluency in ESL and English as L1 children. Not much is known either on how variations in underlying cognitive, linguistic, and reading factors at entry point (i.e., Grade 1) relate to growth in reading fluency in L1 and ESL students up to Grade 6, and how reading fluency growth patterns relate to growth in reading comprehension. A growth curve modeling approach was utilized to determine an appropriate growth model for the longitudinal data, and to quantify and describe change at the individual level.
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Iuliana Faroga (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) A.Gottardo, P. Chiappe - Engish reading strategies in Spanish-speaking first graders.
How do low-achieving Spanish-speaking children acquire English via immersion? How do they learn to read proficiently in English? This study examined the hypothesis that English (L2) reading proficiency for 60 six to seven year-old students, who spoke Spanish as their first language (L1), was predicted by large-unit spelling-sound. A difference between measures of small-unit correspondences (GPC1 and GPC2) was predicted as well. The results show that the 60 children were not using any known reading strategies. Future research will examine oral language skills as mediators for reading proficiency.
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Lee Farrington-Flint (De Montfort U., Leicester) Clare Wood - Strategy variability among beginning readers.
What kinds of strategies do children employ in beginning reading? Do children show variability in their strategy choices? In the study, the types of strategies children use in beginning reading, and the possibility of identifying individual differences in strategy choice was examined. A group of 67, 5-to-6 year-old beginning readers were given an experimental nonword reading task and the accuracy, speed and frequency of each self-reported strategy was recorded and then analysed. Children showed great variability: 7% of children used one strategy whereas 33% used two, and 60% used three or more strategies. These strategies included making analogies, sounding out and blending together phonemes, and guessing the answer. Cluster analysis also identified 3 qualitatively distinct groups (efficient group, less efficient group and inaccurate strategy group). The sophistication of strategy choices was, furthermore, dependent on their levels of vocabulary, single word reading, and letter identification. The findings illustrate the importance of studying individual differences in children's strategy choices in the context of word reading.
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Lauren Figueredo (U. of Alberta) Connie Varnhagen. - Didn’t you run the spell checker? Effects of writer background about proofreading practices and error type on the perception of writers.
We investigated expectations regarding the writer’s responsibility to proofread text for spelling errors when using a word processor. Undergraduates were asked to read an essay and then rate both the author and the essay product. We manipulated error type and the background information provided about the author. We found that participants’ ratings of the author’s abilities and their product suffered when the essay contained spelling errors. Further, participants reported that they would be most likely to blame the writer rather than the spell checker for spelling errors contained in the text. Results suggest that perceptions of both the author’s abilities and their written products can be affected by spelling errors. Further, even when supportive tools are available, the responsibility for producing error-free text remains with the writer.
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Alexis Filippini (U. of California Santa Barbara) Michael Gerber - Project La Patera: Relationships between English learners' performance on kindergarten and third grade reading measures.
Project La Patera began in July 2000 with a cohort (N=377) of Spanish-speaking kindergarteners in three school districts and twenty-three (23) classrooms. La Patera investigated long-term effects on English word decoding of intensive direct instruction in Spanish on phonological processing skills for the bottom performing 20% of its sample. La Patera was a three-year project, and was the first federally-supported large-scale, field-based longitudinal investigation to identify and conduct intensive phonological skills’ interventions for at-risk preliterate Spanish-speaking children. In 2003-2004, follow-up data was collected on over 100 participants in the sample, which is presented in this paper.
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Jill Fraser (U. of Manchester) Gina Conti-Ramsden - Reading and language disorders: Two sides of the same coin?
This poster will present findings investigating the overlap between language and reading impairments in children. Three groups of children took part in the study; one group exhibited language difficulties but reading remained unaffected. A second group presented with difficulties in both reading and language, and the final group only manifested reading difficulties. Performance of the three groups was compared on measures of reading comprehension, spelling, phonological awareness, vocabulary, morphology and short-term memory. The results show a separate pattern of impairments for each group with the reading and language impaired group showing the greatest amount of difficulties across all tasks.
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Jan C. Frijters (Brock U. ) M. De Palma, R. W. Barron,. M. W. Lovett - Motivation as a moderator of response to remedial reading instruction: A (modifiable) aptitude x treatment interaction.
This paper presents a comprehensive and multifaceted view of the self-reported motivation of reading-disabled (RD) children who participated in intensive small-group remedial intervention. Three sub-domains of motivation (i.e., interest, sense of competence, and perceived effort) were measured at multiple time points, with item content tailored to the dominant activities of the intervention as they unfolded. The paper presents motivation as an individual difference aptitude, but also as a fluid person-level factor that can change during intervention. Motivational profiles were identified among the RD children that moderated treatment outcome, determined rate of skill growth, and were themselves changing as intervention progressed.
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George K. Georgiou (U. of Alberta, Edmonton) Rauno K. Parrila - Rapid naming speed components and reading acquisition from kindergarten until grade 2: A follow-up study.
This study examines (a) how three RAN components – articulation time, pause time, and consistency of pause time – assessed in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 predict reading accuracy and fluency in grade 2, and (b) how the RAN components develop from kindergarten to grade 2. Fifty-three children were administered RAN tasks in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2. Word reading and reading fluency were assessed in grade 1 and grade 2. Sound files of kindergarten and grade 1 RAN responses have been analysed (reported in Georgiou & Parrila, 2004) and grade 2 RAN responses are currently being analyzed.
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Ellen Gerrits (U. Hospital Maastricht) M. Derksen - Speech perception and phonological processing in reading-impaired children.
There is a growing consensus that developmental dyslexia is caused by a phonological processing deficit. This phonological deficit again is hypothesised to be attributed to a subtle speech perception disorder. To assess the nature of the phonological processing deficit we studied the relationship between phoneme perception, phonological encoding, and phonological awareness. The participants were 8-year-old Dutch children with severe reading difficulties and age-matched average readers. The findings of this study showed that the poor readers' phonological encoding and phonological awareness were impaired but that there was no indication of a (subtle) speech perception disorder.
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Russell Gersten (Instructional Research Group) Madjavi Lavanthi, Joe Dimino, Jonathan Flojo. - Measuring implementation of the vocabulary and comprehension components of Reading First at the classroom level: First steps.
This presentation describes the strengths and weaknesses of two approaches for assessing classroom implementation of Reading First. The first system used a Likert rating scale and consisted of 29 items; the second was a frequency scale consisting of 24 items, but only addressing the domains of comprehension and vocabulary. We will discuss the relative advantages of each approach, and also argue that either would be useful for formative evaluation purposes and could be used by literacy coaches to target areas of emphasis for both individual teachers and for entire schools or clusters of schools. For example, the fall 2004 data demonstrated infrequent use of most of the recommend practices from the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) in the areas of comprehension in vocabulary in approximately three-fourths of the sample of classrooms.
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Esther Geva (OISE/UT) Michal Shany - A comparison of reading fluency development in children of Ethiopian immigrants and non-Immigrant children learning to read Hebrew.
The development of Hebrew reading fluency in Ethiopian and Non-Ethiopian Israeli children in grades 1,2, and 4, all coming from similar (low) SES, was targeted. No significant differences were found on phonemic awareness, and basic reading skills in Hebrew. However, there were significant grade effects, and significant group effects (Ethiopian vs. Non-Ethiopian) on each of the 3 fluency indices (RAN letters, isolated word, text). However, the language group effect vanished by grade 4. Both groups performed significantly more poorly than the national norms. Reading fluency development in at-risk children is better understood when cognitive, language proficiency, and familial factors are considered.
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Karen Ghelani (Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto) Rosemary Tannock - The relationship between inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms and reading skills.
This study examined reading comprehension and reading-related abilities in adolescents with ADHD and /or Reading Disabilities (RD). The study also explored the contribution of inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms to reading difficulties. High levels of inattention are documented in individuals with RD as well as those with ADHD. The study included 96 adolescents (ADHD, RD, ADHD+RD, and controls). The results of the study suggest that inattentive symptoms rather than hyperactive/impulsive symptoms are predictive of performance on reading comprehension and reading-related tasks. These results highlight the importance of examining inattention as a risk factor in the development of reading difficulties.
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Calvin Gidney (Tufts U. ) Andrea Marquant, Maryanne Wolf, Robin D. Morris & Maureen W. Lovett - An examination of African-American and European-American children with reading disabilities.
In an earlier pilot study by our group, the performances of 52 young African-American disabled readers on reading and language batteries (WRMT-R, WRAT, RAN, PSB) were compared to a sample of 52 European-American disabled readers (N=104) matched for age, IQ, and SES. Analyses of the data indicated first that there were no differences between the two groups on measures of naming speed but that, controlling for age, SES, and IQ, African-American students performed significantly less well on phonological tasks than their matched European-American counterparts. Subsequent classification of the young readers into the dyslexic subtypes of the Double Deficit Hypothesis revealed that 83% of the African-American children could be classified as having some form of phonological difficulties while only 32% of European-American students could be classified as having difficulties in phonology. In the current study we will present a replication of these analyses with 280 subjects in an ongoing NICHD study.
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Barbara K. Given (George Mason U. ) - Investigating double deficit theories of dyslexia at the middle school level.
Several double-deficit theories of dyslexia have been advanced, but most data supporting them were gathered with elementary-aged youngsters. In this study, the following double deficits were investigated with middle school students: phonological awareness and rapid naming; phonological processing and listening comprehension; phonological processing and visual recognition. Eighty-three middle-school readers below the 29th percentile on a reading comprehension test were given a full battery of psychometric measures. Their scores were analyzed for deficits in the areas noted above. It was determined that no single double-deficit theory accounted for the majority of reading deficits in this small sample.
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Vincent Goetry (Queens’s U. ) Philippe Mousty, Régine Kolinsky - Do different linguistic inputs promote different patterns of metaphonological development? Longitudinal evidence from French and Dutch.
This longitudinal research examined whether metaphonological development is modulated by the salient characteristics of the phonological input, by comparing French-schooled and Dutch-schooled monolingual and bilingual children. The monolingual results show cross-linguistic differences consistent with the salient phonological structures of the two languages (better syllable awareness in French, better rime awareness in Dutch). However, the bilinguals' results were influenced only by the salient phonological characteristics of their instruction (second) language. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences in phonological awareness do not result directly from differing phonological inputs, but from the analytical acquisition of phonological representations at school.
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Zhiyu (Ellen) Gong (McMaster U. ) Betty Ann Levy - How to improve preschooler's visual/orthographic knowledge during storybook reading.
In this study we explored the use of animated storybooks to guide the acquisition of print concepts by four-year olds. Children's attention was drawn to the print by an animation that was synchronized with the voice reading the story. Print violations were cued and required the child's response. These manipulations were contrasted with presentation of the print and voice alone. Results showed that four-year-olds' knowledge of acceptable print improved after just 6 days of exposure to the animated texts. These children also improved on letter knowledge, even although this was not part of the training.
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Nina Goodman (Fordham U. ) Joanna Uhry - Word-reading strategy use by English-speaking first-graders learning Hebrew as a second language.
This study compares English and Hebrew word-reading strategies used by English-speaking first-graders learning Hebrew as a second language. Strategy use is identified through miscue analysis and student self-reporting during and after reading. Initial data suggest that while students transfer some strategies from English (L1) to Hebrew (L2), there are specific L1 strategies which are not successful when reading a second language with a different orthographic structure. Strategy instruction is examined in English and Hebrew, for the same students, and compared to student strategy use in both languages.
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Alexandra Gottardo (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) Esther Geva - A comparison of English reading development in young bilingual children from at-risk groups.
Nonverbal reasoning, English reading, oral language and phonological processing skills were compared in Portuguese-English and Spanish-English children in kindergarten. The Portuguese-speaking children belong to a well-established minority group while Spanish-speakers are more recent immigrants to Canada. The groups differed on measures of L2 vocabulary and grammatical proficiency with the Portuguese-speakers having better oral English skills. No other differences were significant. Hierarchical regression analyses show that components of phonological processing (e.i. phonological awareness, rapid naming) account for unique variance in reading. Kindergarten predictors of Grade 1 reading will also be examined. Findings are discussed in terms of demographic variables and L1 exposure.
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Noel Gregg (U. of Georgia) Chris Coleman, Mark Davis, Al Cohen - Written discourse complexity – A multidimensional analysis.
We investigated specific word, sentence, and text-level features used in the expository writing of college writers with and without dyslexia (n= 180). Corpus-based analysis, holistic ratings, error analyses, and feature counts were used to examine the lexical complexity, spelling errors, syntactic elements, and text structure of the writing samples. The interaction of verbosity and quality with word, sentence and text features was examined through structural equation modeling. In addition, a comparison of ratings based on hand written and word-processed versions of essays was made.
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Barbara Gunn (Oregon Research Institute) Anthony Biglan, Keith Smolkowski, Carol Black, Jason Blair - Fostering the development of reading skill through supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic students.
This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for K-3 students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were randomly assigned to receive supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed at baseline, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the intervention, treatment students performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of decoding, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Two years after instruction ended treatment students showed significantly greater growth in oral reading fluency.
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Louise Miller Guron (U. of Cambridge) Usha Goswami - Rhythm detection, phonological awareness and word reading in Swedish children.
Reading difficulties across languages are characterised by deficits in phonological representation. Recent studies of English and French children have found evidence that individual differences in auditory tasks requiring amplitude envelope rise time processing explained significant variance in phonological processing skills. In a study of 54 Swedish speakers aged 8-10 years, relations between auditory processing and phonological processing were explored. Here it was found that individual differences both in rise time processing and in intensity and duration processing explained significant variance in phonological processing tasks and in spelling. These results are discussed with reference to the phonological characteristics of English and Swedish.
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Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma (U. of Jaén) - Rules for lexical stress assignment in Spanish: A study with adults and children.
This paper aims to investigate the rules through which lexical stress is assigned during reading. In Spanish lexical stress is completely predictable from orthography. Therefore, readers may use orthographic cues to assign lexical stress in reading aloud. In order to investigate such a possibility a nonword task was used with adults and children. Preliminary results showed that subjects assigned the stress by analogy to others words. Moreover, they used the orthographic and phonological cues which point out the stress in Spanish. These findings show that lexical prosody is related to both orthographic and phonological lexical information. This suggests that the performance on nonword reading tasks could be another way of measuring prosodic sensitivity.
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Jerry A. Hall (Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, Dallas) Jeremiah Ring, Jeffrey L. Black - Relationship between reading motivation and reading intervention effects in children with reading disability.
This study examined the self-reported motivation for reading in 137 reading-impaired, 3-5th grade students receiving an Orton-Gillingham based reading intervention program. This study examined changes in reading motivation during intervention, effect of baseline motivation on intervention gains, and relationship between intervention gains and changes in motivation. Analysis indicated statistically significant gains after intervention in reading measures, but not reading motivation. No reliable correlation was found between baseline motivation factor scores and gains on reading measures. A reliable correlation was seen between nonword decoding gains and motivation gains. The nature of the relationship between motivation and treatment effects remains to be determined.
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Ellen Hamilton (U. of Michigan) Twila Tardif, Paul Fletcher, Weilan Liang, Zhixiang Zhang, Virginia Marchman, Jiayin Wu - Size matters: The efficacy of phonological neighborhoods as a measure of phonological representations.
Well-specified phonological representations are critical for successful reading. However, there is little consensus about how or when these representations develop. One reason for the continuing debate is the wide-variability in methodological approaches. In the current study, we investigate the effect of different methodological decisions on how sound properties appear to influence children’s word knowledge in a sample of over 1500 8-to-30-month-old English-speaking children tested on the MacArthur CDI. Through this comparative approach, we may help reconcile the differing views on the role of phonological development in word learning, a result with direct implications for later reading development.
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Bridget Hamre (U. of Virginia) Robert Pianta - Large-scale observation of early education classroom settings: Are classrooms part of readiness?
Drawing from several large-scale observations of classroom settings from pre-k through third grade, this presentation will focus on what we know about the experiences of children in these settings in terms of instructional quality and practices and aspects of socioemotional support for learning. As a set, these findings are the largest compilation of observations in early education classrooms in the US and provide a comprehensive view of the extent to which schools and classrooms are "ready" for children. Results will be reported also for the associations of observed quality and practices with the use of curricula, teacher qualifications, and a number of related structural, policy-relevant features of schooling.
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Julie Hansen (Queensland U. of Technology) Eunice Van Veen - Are specific reading comprehension problems specific to reading? A test of the simple view of reading.
Children’s syntactic ability, complex memory span and prosodic sensitivity have been identified as skills that predict their reading comprehension. This study examined whether these skills make a unique contribution to reading comprehension, beyond their importance in language comprehension. Fifty-nine fourth grade students completed tests of reading and listening comprehension, word-reading ability, syntactic competence, complex memory span, and prosodic sensitivity. The results support Gough’s simple view of reading. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, while syntactic proficiency was a strong predictor of reading comprehension, the role of syntactic competence in reading comprehension was explained by its more general role in language comprehension.
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Lesley Hart (Yale U. Child Study Center) Elena L. Grigorenko - A study of spoken and written language disorders in an extended pedigree.
This proposal describes our preliminary studies aimed at clarifying the phenotypic and etiological overlap between disorders of spoken and written language (DSWL). We will describe the manifestation of DSWL in a small, isolated population in Northern Russia with a unique genetic profile, and a high incidence of DSWL. Our preliminary studies in the referred isolate (1) revealed that a large portion of this isolated population are related to each other through one extended pedigree and (2) provided initial behavioral data capturing specifics of manifestation and severity of language disorders in this isolate; and (3) provided a basis for formulating a hypothesis that the disorders have genetic bases.
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Fred Hasselman (Radboud U. , Nijmegen) Ludo Verhoeven, Saskia de Graaff - Learnability of grapheme-phoneme connections in kindergarten as a predictor of reading development in Grade 1: A study of children with a genetic risk for dyslexia.
Children who were genetically at risk for dyslexia (n=30) received an intervention during kindergarten and were followed until the end of Grade 1. The intervention consisted of a computer program in which grapheme-phoneme correspondences were taught. A strong relationship between children's performance during the intervention and their reading skill in Grade 1 was found. Two important predictors proved to be the amount of trials needed before a letter was learned and the actual learning curves which plotted performance throughout the intervention.
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Stefan Hawelka (U. of Salzburg) Christine Huber, Heinz Wimmer - Is impaired reading speed caused by a deficit in the simultaneous processing of multiple visual elements?
This hypothesis was examined by estimating the recognition threshold for each of the elements of digit and letter arrays with each array presenting 5 elements. Our participants were German adults with a history of reading impairment and matched nonimpaired readers. Nonimpaired readers exhibited parallel processing of all elements as evident from flat or M-shaped position thresholds curves. Speed impaired readers gave little evidence for this parallel processing and exhibited much higher thresholds for both digit and letter arrays. The multi-element processing deficit of the impaired readers was independent from their performance on a phonological speed task.
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Heather Hayes (Washington U. in St. Louis) Rebecca Treiman, Brett Kessler - Children use vowels to help them spell consonants.
In this study, we investigated children’s use of vowel context to help them spell consonants. We examined children’s understanding that some consonants are doubled depending on the preceding vowel, and that the spellings of some initial consonants depend on the following vowel. Children as young as second grade showed a sensitivity to vowel context in spelling final consonants, and this sensitivity increased with age. Second graders also used vowels to help them spell initial consonants. Surprisingly, this effect was as strong for second graders as for adults. Results suggest that even novice spellers take advantage of contextual clues in spelling.
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Denyse Hayward (U. of Alberta) Troy Janzen, J.P. Das - Comparisons between cognitive-based and phonetic-based reading remediation with a Canadian First Nations children.
Cognitive-based and phonetic-based reading remediation programs were compared for improvement in word reading and information processing with a cohort of Grade 3 First Nations students. Results showed statistically significant within group differences pre- and post but no significant differences between groups nor significant interactions. However, evidence for clinically meaningful gains in reading were found for both of the remediation groups compared to the control group. Results are discussed with respect to the non-significant findings along with future research directions.
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Annemarie Hindman (U. of Michigan) Frederick J. Morrison - Multiple variables in book reading with young children: Impacts of language use, child skills, and instructional context on early literacy outcomes.
Research suggests that reading books with young children can support the development of early decoding and comprehension skills, but the degree to which book reading actually impacts learning is widely debated. The purpose of this study is to explore multiple contextual and individual factors that impact children's learning from book readings. Examination of book readings both at home and school for 180 preschool children suggest that parent-child readings focus on and build decoding skills, while teacher-child book readings focus on an build comprehension skills. Children's literacy skills also affect the influence of book-related adult talk on their literacy outcomes.
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Connie Suk-Han Ho (U. of Hong Kong) David W. Chan, Kevin Chung, Suk-Han Lee, Suk-Man Tsang - The relevance of a modified dual-route model of subtyping for developmental dyslexia in Chinese.
The present study examined whether a revised version of the dual-route model was applicable to understand the varieties of developmental dyslexia in a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. Three groups of Chinese children (dyslexics, chronological age controls, and reading level controls) were tested on Chinese exception word reading, pseudoword reading, novel word learning, and some phonological and orthographic skills. We expect to find a strong link between lexical dyslexia and orthographic deficit, but a weak one between sublexical dyslexia and phonological deficit in Chinese. Given the morphosyllabic nature of Chinese, a higher proportion of lexical dyslexia than sublexical dyslexia is also expected.
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Tiffany Hogan (U. of Kansas) Rochelle Harris - Reading development in a first and second language: The case of French immersion in an urban school district.
This study investigated native language, English, and second language, French, reading skills longitudinally in 65 children enrolled in a French immersion program from 1st to 5th grades. Results showed that English and French reading skills were stable across time although children with poor 1st grade French reading skills from low income families were most likely to leave the school by 5th grade (N=25). Of those children who stayed (N=40), 1st grade English phonological awareness and rapid naming skills predicted English reading, whereas only English phonological awareness predicted French reading. The theoretical and clinical implications of these findings will be discussed.
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Andrew John Holliman (Open U. ) Clare Wood, Kieran Sheehy - The role of metrical stress sensitivity in the development of phonological awareness, reading ability, and spelling ability, in a group of beginning readers.
Stress sensitivity, a form of speech rhythm may influence phonological awareness and literacy development (Black & Byng, 1986; Gutierrez-Palma, 2004; Wood, 2004). Eighty reception-age children with good and poor phonological awareness were compared for their reading ability, spelling ability, and their metrical stress sensitivity. The research hypothesis posited whether metrical stress sensitivity could discriminate between beginning readers with good and poor phonological awareness and their reading ability. Results are pending. If results support the hypothesis, these findings would add to the under-researched literature that suggests the important role of metrical stress sensitivity in the development of phonological awareness and literacy development.
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Michelle Hosp (U. of Utah) John Hosp, Janice A. Dole - Reading First teachers’ use of instructional time and Its relation to reading achievement.
While research derived from national reports advise a number of recommended instructional practices that have been shown to affect reading achievement, the extent to which these practices are being implemented in American classrooms is relatively unknown. In fact, relatively little research has been conducted on what teachers teach in their reading and language arts classrooms and how that teaching gets done. Additionally, little is known about the total effects of teaching different reading and language arts activities on reading achievement. For this study, an observational instrument was developed to determine the reading and language arts instruction of K-3 teachers, the amount of time they spend on various activities, and how these activities relate to reading achievement.
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Elizabeth Howard (Center for Applied Linguistics) Cate Coburn - A developmental investigation of cross-linguistic spelling errors in Spanish/English bilingual students.
Research has documented the presence of Spanish-influenced errors in the English spellings of Spanish/English bilingual students. The purpose of this longitudinal study, which involved 220 two-way immersion students, was to investigate the developmental progression of these cross-linguistic errors and to test for their potential effects on English reading comprehension. Findings based on the first three years of data collection (grades 2-4) indicate that these errors generally extinguish themselves over time without any targeted intervention and are not predictive of English reading comprehension beyond second grade.
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Charles Hulme (U. of York) Markéta Caravolas, Gabriela Málková, Sophie Brigstocke - Phoneme isolation ability is not simply a consequence of letter-sound knowledge.
Two studies investigated whether knowledge of specific letter-sound correspondences is a necessary precursor of children’s ability to isolate phonemes in speech. In both studies, Czech and English children reliably isolated phonemes for which they did not know the corresponding letter. These data refute the idea that phoneme manipulation ability can only develop as a consequence of specific orthographic (letter-sound correspondence) knowledge.
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Jacqueline Hulslander (U. of Colorado, Boulder) Richard Olson, Chelsea Trinka, Sophia Zavrou - A reading-level match comparison of fluency and comprehension for continuous text.
Reading disabled children and younger, isolated-word-reading matched controls were compared on reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension in stories. The results suggest greater world-knowledge and increased processing speed associated with age allows reading disabled children to compensate for deficits in word-level reading skills when measured on comprehension, reading speed, and overall accuracy. However, the quality of their reading mistakes does differ from controls; they tend to avoid phonological decoding strategies by making more real word substitutions and make phonetically less accurate nonword substitutions. Controlling forword reading, comprehension was not influenced by RAN or any of the word-level reading skills, but RAN was correlated with reading fluency.
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Florian Hutzler (Freie Universität Berlin) Arthur M. Jacobs, Marcus Conrad - Constraining future models of reading: The effect of first syllable-frequency in eye movements & event related potentials.
In two studies, the inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency during reading and visual word recognition was explored for the German orthography. Using an eye movement paradigm, the task specificity (naming vs. lexical decision) of the syllable-frequency effect was investigated in three experiments in the first study. In a second study, event related potentials were used to explore the time course of the first syllable-frequency effect, revealing its’ prelexical nature - a result that was also confirmed by a novel, item-based analysis of ERP data. Implications of the present studies’ findings for computational models of reading are discussed.
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Kumiko Inutsuka (OISE/ U. of Toronto) - Component skills of reading in English for adult second language readers.
This study assessed the second language skills related to reading (oral language proficiency, phonological and orthographic processing), first language reading skills (reading comprehension, word recognition, phonological and orthographic processing), and cognitive skills (rapid automatized naming, working memory, and non-verbal intelligence) of 47 adult second language readers of English from a non-alphabetic language background (Japanese). The results will be discussed in terms of what skills can predict the English reading performance (reading comprehension and word recognition) of adult non-alphabetic second language readers and which of their first language skills are transferable across languages.
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Nancy Ewald Jackson (U. of Iowa) Susan E. Dunn - Good and poor readers who are good or poor spellers read Scientific American.
Scientific texts may be especially difficult for adult readers with poor decoding ability. Three small groups of U. students (total N = 14) were selected for extreme combinations of spelling (a proxy for word decoding) and ACT Reading scores. They were given tests of component reading skills, reading comprehension, and intelligence. After demonstrating their lack of prior knowledge of the topic, the students silently read several paragraphs from the beginning of a difficult Scientific American article about functional glycomics. The groups were compared on reading speed, persistence, looking back to prior paragraphs, and accuracy of their oral summaries.
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Troy Janzen (Taylor U. College, Edmonton) J.P. Das - Cognitive processing, speed of articulation and reading: A study with a Canadian Native Children.
A sample of 85 Canadian First Nations (FN) children were assessed for their reading ability (word identification and attack), articulation speed, and ability to process information using the Planning, Attention, Successive and Simultaneous (PASS) model of intelligence. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of cognitive processes as they relate to reading problems within this cultural group. Results confirmed that this sample had relative and normative weaknesses on successive processing and that these were related to and predictive of word identification and attack scores. The typical subtypes of reading problems (single and double deficit) were found.
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Debra Jared (U. of Western Ontario) Pierre Cormier, Betty Ann Levy, Lesly Wade-Woolley - The development of reading fluency in native English speakers enrolled in French immersion.
We will present results from a longitudinal study of English-speaking children who are enrolled in early French Immersion programs and who are learning to read in French and English simultaneously. Children were tested on a large battery of measures in the Spring of 2002 when they were in Kindergarten, and their reading accuracy and fluency in English and French as well as their receptive oral French has been assessed each Spring since then. We will present data concerning Kindergarten predictors of reading fluency in each language, correlations of reading fluency across languages, the relationship between L2 oral language proficiency and L2 reading fluency, and the relationship between out-of-school reading in each language and reading fluency.
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Juan E. Jiménez (U. of La Laguna) - Are there differences in phonological processes between illiterate adults and dyslexic children?
The assessment of phonological awareness has included different tasks but the complexity of syllable structure has not been controlled. The main purpose of the study reported here was to investigate the relative importance of complexity of syllable structure and task differences in measuring phonological awareness in children and low literacy adults.
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Carol A. Johnson (U. of Cambridge) Usha C. Goswami - Phonological skills, vocabulary development and reading development in deaf children with cochlear implants.
In a three year study, we are following the reading progress of deaf children. We investigate whether cochlear implantation has a positive effect on the development of phonological representations and whether this will, in turn, affect reading development. We are comparing two groups of implanted deaf children with a hearing aid group and with hearing controls. Second year data indicate that three variables, vocabulary, rhyme awareness and speechreading, show strong and independent associations with single word reading even after controlling for age and IQ. These data support our hypothesis that deaf children develop phonological awareness and use these skills to acquire literacy.
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Rhona S. Johnston (U. of Hull) Joyce E. Watson - Synthetic phonics teaching reduces the disadvantage in reading and spelling shown by children from poor socio-economic backgrounds.
We carried out a 7 year longitudinal study of the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics programme in teaching reading and spelling to around 300 children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. No significant difference was found between the advantaged and disadvantaged children in word reading and spelling until the end of the seventh year at school. However, in another study, where children were taught by the analytic phonics method, it was found that the children from disadvantaged homes had lower word reading and spelling skills than the children from advantaged homes by the end of the second year at school.
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R. Malatesha Joshi (Texas A & M U. ) P. Prakash, N. Surendranath - Are reading disabilities orthography specific? Evidence from bilinguals.
Are reading disabilities orthography specific or is it a constitutional problem that cuts across writing systems is the question investigated in this presentation. We present two cases MS and VN who had reading disability in two languages, English and Kannada. MS showed good decoding ability but his comprehension was poor in both the languages. The performance of VN, on the other hand, was below average on decoding tasks but his comprehension was adequate in both the languages. These two cases lend support to the view that reading disability cuts across writing systems and is not orthography specific.
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Janina Kahn-Horwitz (U. of Haifa) Joseph Shimron, Richard Sparks - Predictors of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) spelling development.
In an effort to identify the major factors that affect success in spelling of a foreign language, this study examined which Hebrew and English literacy-related variables predict EFL spelling in 4th and 9th grade. The study assessed predictability value of phonological and morphological awareness, orthographic ability, word recognition and word attack, measured in Hebrew, as well as knowledge of letter sounds and names, word recognition and word attack, naming speed, working memory and semantic knowledge, measured in English. Stepwise hierarchical analyses showed that knowledge of English letter sounds and names strongly predicted early EFL spelling; and EFL word decoding strongly predicted advanced EFL spelling. Qualitative analyses of spelling samples showed distinct developmental stages amongst strong versus weak spellers. Weak spellers exhibited L1 interference in EFL spelling.
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Dafna Kaplan (Tel Aviv U. ) Dorit Ravid - The connection between reading comprehension and linguistic knowledge.
The study examines the connection between reading comprehension and linguistic knowledge in Hebrew. 112 4th, 7th, and 11 graders and a group of adults, all monolingual speakers of Hebrew with no learning or reading disabilities, were administered a battery of 20 morphological, syntactic and morpho-syntactic Hebrew tasks. They also read 6 narrative and expository texts and answered comprehension questions about them. Results indicate that linguistic knowledge contributes to reading comprehension over and above the effect of age and school grade. Stepwise regressions found several of the syntactic and derivational tests to have more contribution than others in explaining reading comprehension.
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Jenay L. Karlson (U. of Michigan) Abigail M. Jewke, Frederick J. Morrison - Fact or fiction? Gender differences in early literacy and learning.
This study explores gender differences in children’s learning from preschool through fifth grade in order to identify (1) when such differences emerge, (2) in what areas of learning—language, literacy, numeracy, and self-regulation, and (3) how the results change over time. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Childhood and Youth (N=831) were analyzed for gender differences in language, literacy, numeracy, and self-regulation from preschool through the elementary grades. Results indicated a general trend beginning in preschool favoring girls over boys, yet this advantage dissipated over the elementary grades.
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Angela Katenkamp (U. of Maryland) Adia Garrett, Linda Baker - Opportunities to read in the classroom: Observations of reading activities in Grades 2-4.
This paper examines children’s reading activities in three schools within the same school district. Differences in practices among the schools and changes in instructional practices from second to fourth grade are addressed. Practices of interest include how often teachers read aloud to their students and what types of materials students read (e.g., fiction vs. non-fiction). Relations among reading practices, achievement, and motivation are discussed. For example, it was found that the frequency of choral reading during reading group instruction in the fourth grade was negatively related to comprehension scores.
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Janice M. Keenan (U. of Denver) Rebecca S. Betjemann, Laura S. Roth - Inferencing in reading & listening comprehension in reading disability, comprehension deficit, and ADHD.
Making inferences is an important component of comprehension; so comprehension tests often include inferential as well as literal questions. We used two tests to evaluate inference skill in three populations with learning disabilities: reading disability, comprehension deficit, and ADHD. We find no evidence for a specific deficit in inferencing in any of the groups. We contend that such results are not surprising because from a theoretical perspective, there is not a sharp distinction between literal and inferential processing, and from a measurement perspective, there is a confounding of question type with specific information.
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Nenagh Kemp (U. of British Columbia) - Discreet is to disgression: Adults’ spelling of base-derived relationships.
According to traditional spelling development models, English spellers learn to represent simple morphological relations by late childhood. However, the present study showed that even U. students have problems maintaining the spelling of base words in simple derived forms (e.g., orphan-orphanage). Further, participants made errors in spelling morphological endings (7% error rate, e.g., orphan-orphanidge), and in applying syllable-joining rules (33% error rate, e.g., slip-slipage). Instructions emphasising base-derived relations led to greater success in preserving base spellings (88% success) than no instructions (81% success). Morphological relations are not represented consistently even in educated adults’ spelling, but emphasising such relations can improve performance.
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John R. Kirby (Queen’s U. ) Jennifer Dawson, Jennifer Currie & Rauno Parrila. - Family literacy, phonological awareness, and naming speed in reading development.
In this four year longitudinal study we investigated the role of familiy literacy, in conjunction with phonological awareness and naming speed, in contributing to reading development. We selected 214 kindergarten children to fit the 4 groups of the double deficit theory (phonological deficit, naming speed deficit, double deficit, and no deficit) and tracked these children’s literacy development to grade 3. In kindergarten, we asked the children’s parents to complete a questionnaire about their family literacy and socioeconomic status. This questionnaire yielded 3 factors (SES, Books in the Home, and Home Teaching). Phonological awareness and naming speed predicted reading development as expected, after controlling for intelligence. The only family literacy factor to account for further variance was Home Teaching, suggesting that parents’ efforts to teach basic reading skills prior to school entry have a positive effect. The family literacy characteristics of the 4 double deficit groups were related to their deficits, the double deficit having the least family literacy advantages and the no deficit having the most.
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Ofra Korat (Bar-Ilan U. ) - How accurate can mothers and teachers be regarding children's emergent literacy development in different socioeconomic groups?
Mothers’ and teachers’ attributions of 94 kindergateners' emergent literacy level were investigated. Children were recruited equally from high vs. low SES schools. Children’s emergent literacy (e.g., letter names, word recognition, CAP) was measured; mothers evaluated their own children and 21 teachers evaluated these same children in their kindergartens in the same domains. Results show that teachers' attributions of the children's emergent literacy level were higher than those of their mothers. Furthermore, children’s emergent literacy level is related most strongly to teachers’ attributions, followed by the children’s SES, and then to maternal attributions. The implications of these findings are discussed.
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Richard Kruk (U. of Manitoba) - What visual attention can and cannot tell us about reading acquisition in children.
Relationships among reading ability, visual motion detection sensitivity, visual attention, and phonological skills were examined in a cross-sectional sample of children from Kindergarten to Grade 3. Although evidence of developmental change was found in reading, visual, and phonological measures, none of the visual sensory and attentional measures were found to predict basic reading ability once phonological and rapid naming abilities were controlled. The results support an interpretation of visual attention allocation based on a spotlight-of-attention explanation, but indicate the limit of the utility of basic visual sensory measures as predictors of basic reading abilities in children in early elementary years.
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Melanie R. Kuhn (Rutgers Graduate School of Education) Paula Schwanenflugel, Lesley Morrow, Deborah Woo - Scaling up fluency oriented reading instruction (FORI) - A pilot study.
This paper will discuss the fourth-year of a study, funded by the Interagency Educational Research Initiative (IERI), designed to assist learners in becoming fluent readers. The intervention was scaled-up at 25 second-grade classrooms in New Jersey, Illinois, and California. Students were assessed 3 to 5 times over the school year using a series of maze passages and the TOWRE (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte,1999). We will report on the results of these measures and discuss the ways in which the findings contribute to our understanding of how students make the transition from a decoding focus to automatic, expressive reading.
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Fiona E. Kyle (U. of Cambridge) Margaret Harris - Reading development in deaf children: the importance of speechreading and vocabulary knowledge.
This poster will present the data from a 3-year longitudinal study investigating the developmental trajectory of reading and spelling ability in 29 deaf children. At the initial assessment, the deaf children were aged between 7- and 8-years-old. They were seen every twelve months and given a large battery of literacy and language-based tasks. Converging evidence was found to suggest that early vocabulary knowledge and speechreading ability were causal determinants of later reading ability. Furthermore, an analysis of good and poor readers suggested that both speechreading and vocabulary are important skills for reading ability in deaf children but that, on their own, neither is sufficient and a combination of both is necessary.
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Christiane S. Kyte (U. of Toronto) Carla J. Johnson - A comparison of phonological recoding and visual processing in orthographic learning.
The objective of this research was to explore whether orthographic learning occurs as a result of phonological recoding, as proposed in the Self-Teaching Hypothesis. Fourth- and fifth-grade students performed lexical decisions for words and pseudowords under two conditions: 1/ concurrent articulation, presumed to promote primarily visual processing, and 2/ read aloud, presumed to promote phonological recoding. One day later, orthographic learning of pseudowords was evaluated with orthographic choice and spelling posttests. As predicted, phonological recoding of pseudowords yielded substantially greater orthographic learning than visual processing. The research confirmed the critical nature of phonological recoding in developing an orthographic lexicon.
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Adele Lafrance (OISE/UT) Esther Geva - Longitudinal predictors of spelling performance in ESL and L1 children.
Sixty-eight L1 and 129 ESL students from different Boards of Education in Metropolitan Toronto were assessed on a vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, and phonological processing skills from Grade 1 through Grade 6. Resultsof a hierarchical regression showed that Grade 1 phonological awareness and naming speed were unique statistical predictors of Grade 6 spelling performance in L1 children. Similarly, in the ESL group, all three phonological processing variables (phonological awareness, phonological memory, and naming speed) were unique statistical predictors of later spelling performance. In both groups, early vocabulary and non-verbalreasoning abilities were not uniquely predictive of later spelling performance.
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Karin Landerl (U. of Salzburg) Pieter Reitsma - Phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of vowel duration spelling in Dutch and German.
Spelling of vowel duration has been demonstrated to be difficult to acquire in both, Dutch and German, but the reasons for these difficulties may be different in the two orthographies. In Dutch, vowel duration spelling is phonologically consistent but causes morphological inconsistency, that is the complex phonological rules lead to different spellings of stem morphemes in different word forms (e.g., paar – paren). In German, representation of vowel duration is phonologically highly inconsistent, but morphologically consistent. Contrasting the two orthographies made it possible to examine the role of phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of one and the same orthographic feature.
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Annukka Lehtonen (U. of Oxford) Rebecca Treiman - Training effects in adults' use of different-sized phonological units.
Earlier work (Lehtonen & Treiman, 2004) showed that consonant sonority influences adults’ judgements about letter-phoneme relationships in a spelling segmentation task. For example, people often group the l of milk with the preceding vowel rather than the following consonant. The present study aimed to examine the flexibility of adults’ strategies. Prior to the spelling segmentation task, one group did a phoneme counting task while another counted words in sentences. The experimental group produced significantly more phoneme-based responses and fewer onset-rime responses than the control group. This suggests that adults’ strategies in tasks tapping phoneme-letter knowledge are flexible and easily modified.
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Che Kan Leong (U. of Saskatchewan) - Children’s understanding of inflected word forms affects their word reading and spelling.
The present study of 141 grades 4, 5 and 6 Canadian children writing to dictation 24 sentences sampling 90 lexical items in 10 categories of inflection in English aimed at testing the effects of these categories on word reading and spelling. These 10 categories were shown to have high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from .639 to .901), were fairly homogeneous as shown by a principal component analysis, and predicted word reading moderately and spelling of exception words highly. In particular, the consonant doubling task explained a substantial amount of individual variation in exception word spelling. These results and the analyses of the spelling errors are discussed in relation to ruled-based and frequency-based approach in learning to read and spell words.
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Nonie K. Lesaux (Harvard ) Amy C. Crosson - Spanish-speakers’ reading comprehension in English.
The purpose of the study was to examine the degree to which native and second language oral language skills and word reading ability predict specific aspects of English reading comprehension performance in the middle elementary years. A sample of third graders enrolled in an urban, public school district in the pacific northwest U.S. was assessed using a battery of language and literacy measures in Spanish and English. Correlation analyses and linear multiple regression will be conducted in order to examine the relationships among, and relative influence of, English and Spanish language and literacy skills to English reading comprehension.
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Dilys Leung (Dalhousie U. ) S. Hélène Deacon - Young children’s use of morphemes to spell inflections and derivations.
This study will investigate 6-, 7- and 8-year-old children’s use of morphological information when spelling inflections and derivations. Children will be asked to choose the spelling for the same word-final sound sequence in 3 types of words: inflected (–er; e.g. smarter); derived (–er and –or; e.g. teacher and director); and one-morpheme (–er and –or; e.g. number and author). Data collected January to March (2005) will provide insight into the extent to which young children use morphemes to spell. Results will be discussed in the context of current theories of spelling development.
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Iris Levin (Tel Aviv U. ) Sivan Shatil-Carmon, Ornit Asif-Rave - Letter names and letter sounds: learning, reciprocal facilitation and promotion of word recognition.
Kindergartners were trained to name letters and to provide the sounds that these letters stand for, in two sequences: names or sounds learnt first. Israeli children are more advanced in naming letters and letter names facilitate their learning of sounds. However, after training children retained sounds of letters more than names. A cross facilitation emerged – names assisted the learning of sounds and vise versa. Learning of names and of sounds promoted similarly word reading. Children needed less training to recognize words that started with sounds of their initial letters. Results are surprising from several perspectives and require reconsideration of the relative significance of the knowledge of names vs. sounds of letters.
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Orly Lipka (U. of British Columbia) Linda S. Siegel - English syntactic awareness skills of children with ESL: The case of children who speak Chinese and Slavic as first language.
Children who speak Chinese as a first language performed significantly more poorly than native English speakers and children who speak Slavic as a first language on syntactic awareness task in English. The Slavic language group performed as well as the native English speakers. Positive transfer occurred when first language as Slavic had a more heavily inflected structure, or when grammatical forms were more common in the first language than the second language. Negative transfer occurred when first language as Chinese had less inflections or when grammatical forms were less common in the first language than the second language.
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Deborah G. Litt (Trinity U. ) - Trends in phonological awareness, rapid naming, and reading acquisition among Reading Recovery-eligible first graders receiving regular instruction.
As part of a larger study on the incidence and influence of deficits in phonological awareness and rapid naming among Reading Recovery children, data was collected on a small sample (N=14) of children eligible to receive Reading Recovery in 2001-2002, but denied due to insufficient space. These data will be shared and compared to the assessment data obtained on the children who received the intervention.
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Linda J. Lombardino (U. of Florida) R. Jane Lieberman, Jaumeiko Brown, Chien J. Wang - Assessing spoken and written language knowledge in young children.
This paper presents a theoretical model of language and literacy and results from performance on tasks that differentiate young children at-risk for developing dyslexia from young children at-risk for developing broader-based literacy and language disabilities. The investigators administered these tasks to children in pre-kindergarten through first grade and are now engaged in national standardization of the tasks. There are twelve main tasks, including : letter knowledge, phonics knowledge, rhyme knowledge, sound categorization, sight word recognition, elision, invented spelling, basic concepts, parallel sentence production, receptive vocabulary, storytelling/listening comprehension and word relationships. Supplemental tasks include: Book Handling, Print Concepts, and Rapid Naming. Standardization will be discussed relative to how well these domains differentiate a) normally developing students and b) children with diagnosed speech and language deficits or children who present with high risk factors for reading deficits at three grade levels: preschool, kindergarten, and first grade.
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Christopher J. Lonigan (Florida State U. ) JoAnn M. Farver, Beth M. Phillips, Jeanine Menchetti - Outcomes of an emergent literacy curriculum in Head Start: Children’s response to intervention.
In this study, 32 Head Start centers, serving approximately 800 3- to 5-year-old children in Tallahassee, FL and Los Angeles, CA, were randomly assigned to either a research-based pre-literacy curriculum that focused on vocabulary, phonological awareness, and print knowledge or a “business as usual” condition (typically High Scope). Overall impact analyses indicated substantial effects of the pre-literacy curriculum. Children varied considerably in terms of age, ethnicity, and family background characteristics (e.g., mono- vs. bilingual). The focus of this presentation will be on identifying the impact of these child and family characteristics on growth in children’s early literacy and language skills.
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Elizabeth P. Lorch (U. of Kentucky) Richard Milich, Kristen S. Berthiaume, Paul van den Broek. - Story comprehension in children with ADHD: Research findings and treatment implications.
Although academic problems are well documented for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), there is little information about how these children comprehend and remember complex, interconnected information such as that represented in stories. Our recent line of research indicates that these children have more difficulty than their nonreferred peers utilizing causal relations and the goal structure of a story to create a coherent representation. Traditional interventions that focus on increasing on-task behavior may not address deficits in processing complex information represented in story comprehension. Treatments targeting the specific deficits exhibited by children with ADHD need to be investigated.
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Frank Manis (U. of Southern California) Kim Lindsey - Reading comprehension and fluency in 2nd-5th Grade English language learners.
We studied the development of English and Spanish reading skills from first through fifth grade among a group of Spanish-speaking children who had limited English language skills at the outset of instruction. Analyses focused on relationships between predictors in Spanish and English in grades K-1 and reading achievement (comprehension, accuracy and fluency) in English and Spanish in grades 2, 3 and 5. The principal findings are that comprehension and fluency were predicted by similar variables across the two languages (print knowledge, rapid naming and phoneme awareness), with the exception of vocabulary, which appeared to be language specific.
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Sandra Martin-Chang (Mount Allison U.) Betty Ann Levy - Word acquistion and retention during isolated word and context training.
According to the whole language philosophy, reading accuracy is maximal in context. Here, learning trajectories and retention rates were compared during context training and isolated word training. Results show that more items were learned in context than in isolation. After one week, words trained in context were read more accurately in a new passage than words trained in isolation. However, contradicting the whole language premise, accuracy declined when words trained in isolation were presented in context during retention; words were being read in isolation that could not read in context. Theoretical implications are discussed in relation to transfer appropriate processing.
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Linda H. Mason (U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) - A components analysis of a multiple strategy instructional approach for self-regulating expository reading comprehension and informative writing.
A group experimental design components analysis study was conducted with 90 4th-grade students with and without conditions: (1) self-regulated reading comprehension strategy instruction, (2) self-regulated reading comprehension plus writing strategy instruction, and (3) comparison non-treatment control. Student pre-test, post-test, short- and long-term maintenance performance was measured with the TORC-3, QRI-3, TOWL-3, and oral/written retells completed following reading an authentic Science or Social Studies text passage. Data will be analyzed using ANOVA with repeated measures and effect sizes calculated for significant findings.
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Jennifer McTaggart (U. of Guelph ) Jan C. Frijters, Roderick W. Barron - Early reading motivation: Children’s interest in reading in kindergarten predicts reading interest and skill in Grade 3.
Early interest in reading was measured by asking Kindergarten children to report whether or not they liked a depicted literacy activity and by how much. Kindergarten interest in reading accounted for unique variance in grade 2/3 reading interest and word reading skill when phonological processing, vocabulary, and home literacy environment were controlled. Kindergarten interest in reading was not related to grade 2/3 interest in math or math skill. These results indicate that early interest in reading is domain specific, persists over several years, and predicts word reading skill longitudinally but the origins of such interest remain to be identified.
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Jon F. Miller (U. of Wisconsin-Madison) Aquilles Iglesias, John Heilmann - Relationship between oral language and reading skills in English language learners.
This study examines the relationship between oral narratives and reading in bilingual children. Children kindergarten through third grade participated (N = 561) in the cross-sectional study. Omnibus regression analysis revealed that all three oral narrative measures significantly predicted reading scores accounting for 32% of the variance. Separate regression analyses for each grade documented unique regression models at each grade, with no relationship to reading at K, syntax at 1st, vocabulary and syntax at 2nd and syntax and narrative structure at 3rd. Analyses of the longitudinal data set of 1450 children will test the models derived from the cross-sectional data.
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Ranjita Mishra (U. of London.) Rhona Stainthorp - The relationship between performance on P-Centre tasks, phonological awareness, word reading and spelling in Oriya and English.
The relationship between ability to extract the suprasegmental attributes of the speech stream, phonological awareness word reading and spelling in Oriya and English was investigated. Participants were 9 year old children learning to read in both Oriya and English. Suprasegmental attributes were measured by the P-centre tasks in which Amplitude Modulation (AM) were varied to affect the perception of distinct, discrete "beats" in the auditory stream. Results indicated that the perceptual centre tasks did not have the same relationship with literacy in Oriya as has been found in English.
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Maya Misra (Pennsylvania State U. ) Tamar Katzir, Maryanne Wolf, Russell A. Poldrack - An fMRI Study of component processes in reading: Bridging clinical practice and neuroscience research.
Clinical measures used to evaluate phonological analysis, orthographic processing, and naming speed were adapted for use in the MRI scanner to identify neural correlates of these reading subskills. In the first task, initial phonemes of picture names were compared. In the second task, participants decided which of two homophonic letter strings was a real word. In the third task, participants covertly named letters or pictures in a serial array. Results from 12 normal adults showed that the measures targeted overlapping, but distinct, neural areas within a reading network. Implications of these results for theories of reading disability will be discussed.
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Sarah Mordell (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) Tracee Francis, Alexandra Gottardo - Determinants of reading skill in adolescents readers with LD: Support for a reciprocal relationship.
Thirty-five adolescents (11-17 years) who were diagnosed with a learning disability (LD) completed standardized and experimental measures of reading, phonological processing, working memory, oral language proficiency and nonverbal reasoning. Based on their reading scores, the participants were separated into two groups (low & high). No group differences were found for phonological processing and nonverbal reasoning. Significant differences were found for vocabulary and reading comprehension. Differences in reading skill in adolescents with LD are influenced by skills developed through reading experience than by cognitive abilities. Vocabulary may act as a compensatory mechanism for impaired word decoding performance in older readers. These findings have implications for exposure to print for students with LD.
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Jack Mostow (Carnegie Mellon U. ) Joseph Beck - Micro-analysis of fluency gains in a reading tutor that listens.
Fluency growth is essential but imperfectly understood. By using automatic speech recognition to listen to children read aloud, Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor provides a novel instrument to study fluency development. During the 2003-2004 school year, hundreds of children in grades 1-4 used the Reading Tutor, which recorded them reading millions of words of text. Automated measures of reading performance include whether the student clicked on a word for help, how long the student hesitated before reading the word, and whether the speech recognizer accepted it. We will discuss insights into fluency growth gained from using these measures to analyze young readers' performance across successive encounters of words.
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Julie Mueller (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) Alexandra Gottardo, Esther Geva,. Pierre Cormier - Factor analysis of a pseudo-word elision task with ESL kindergarten students.
A battery of phonological awareness measures was conducted with 121 ESL (English as a Second Language) kindergarten students in 18 urban schools across Ontario. A factor analysis conducted on a 36-item pseudo-word elision measure produced a four-factor solution including syllable level, onset-rime level, phoneme level with no blend, and phoneme level with an initial blend. The four factors accounted for 50.3% of the variance in the items. The split of the 12 phoneme level items into two factors, blend and no-blend, suggests that this task may be able to identify more distinct developmental levels of phonological sensitivity.
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Adam J Naples (Yale U. ) Elena L. Grigorenko, Joseph Chang, Robert J. Sternberg - Familiality of phonological awareness and rapid naming: segregation and simulation analyses.
This study investigates the familiality and etiology of phonological awareness and rapid-naming through both family and simulation studies. We analyzed behavioral data on reading measures in a sample of 483 Russian families. Our results from the genetic analysis suggest a partially overlapping genetic etiology for rapid naming and phonological awareness. We then generated a simulated data set based on this overlapping genetic model to investigate the impact of sample size on detecting linkage to a gene. Our results suggested that despite sample sizes of up to 20,000 families, we were unable to locate reliably the localizations of the genes contributing to the manifestation of phonological awareness and rapid naming.
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Ana Luiza G. P. Navas (Unicamp, Brazil) - Effects of phonological similarity in a word reading task using a priming paradigm: the emergence of phonology in a transparent orthography.
There is still some debate on whether word recognition involves a necessarily a phonological stage in adult skilled readers. This study reports findings on the effects of phonological priming in different experimental tasks. In Experiment 1, adult Portuguese speakers participated in a naming task in which the degree of phonologically similarity between prime and target words was investigated. Experiment 2 explored the phonological similarity effect in a lexical decision task where no pronunciation was required. Results of both experiments showed that response times were faster for a phonologically similar prime-target pair as compared to a phonologically distant pair.
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Jessica Nelson (U. of Pittsburgh) Ying Liu, Julie Fiez, Charles Perfetti - Learning to read Chinese as a second language recruits Chinese-specific visual word form areas.
According to the System Accommodation Hypothesis (SAH), learning to read in a new writing system requires accommodation to the properties of the writing system. Consistent with the SAH, when learners (native English speakers learning Chinese) viewed characters, fusiform areas associated with word recognition showed more bilateral activation than when the learners read English. This same “visual word form” pattern is shown by native Chinese speakers. However, native Chinese speakers fluent in English, showed the “Chinese pattern” for both English and Chinese. Thus alphabetic learners quickly accommodate to the visual properties of Chinese, whereas a Chinese style of word reading characterizes Chinese native speakers in both Chinese and English.
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Tina M. Newman (Yale U. PACE Center and Child Study Center) Donna Macomber, Niamh Doyle, Elena L. Grigorenko - A family study of hyperlexia in autism.
This proposal describes our work aimed at improving the understanding of hyperlexia—the phenomenon of spontaneous and precocious mastery of single-word reading. Specifically, we investigated and compared performance on reading-related measures by children in three different groups: children with Autism Spectrum Disroders (ASD) and hyperlexia, children with ASD without hyperlexia, and typically developing children. The children were matched on their reading age and/or chronological age, and gender. In addition, we investigated the familiality of reading-related performance by assessing mothers on indicators of reading performance. Finally, we conducted structured interviews of the extended family history of schooling (i.e., school achievement-related information).
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Jane Oakhill (U. of Sussex) Barbara Nesi, Kate Cain - Understanding of idiomatic expressions in skilled and less-skilled comprehenders: A reading time study.
We explored the relation between idiom understanding and reading comprehension, and also whether children take longer to process idiomatic expressions than literal ones. The familiarity of the idioms was manipulated using English idioms and translations of Italian idioms, for which there was no English equivalent. Reading times for the expressions in an idiomatic context or a literal context, and reading accuracy and comprehension were measured. Children’s reading was slowed more by idiomatic expressions than by equivalent expressions that had a literal interpretation. There was a positive relation between reading comprehension and idiom understanding (which was not mediated by reading accuracy).
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Beth A. O’Brien (Tufts U. ) L. Miller, M. Wolf - Orthographic recognition speed and accuracy in developmental dyslexia.
The development of orthographic knowledge is important for automatic word identification and reading fluency. Since developmental dyslexia often involves slow word recognition and laborious reading, we sought to better understand the development of orthographic knowledge in children with dyslexia. We measured the accuracy and speed with which they visually searched for target letter pairs (varying in familiarity) within letter arrays (varying in visual confusability). First, second and third grade children were tested at the beginning and end of an intensive reading intervention program. Results showed both developmental effects and training effects on search speed, but not accuracy.
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Natalie G. Olinghouse (Vanderbilt U.) Donald L. Compton - Identifying achievement gaps: Effects of student- and class-level characteristics on the narrative writing ability of third-grade students.
This study examined child-level and classroom-level predictors of narrative writing fluency and quality in third-grade students. Demographic and achievement data were measured in 120 students in 14 classrooms. Teachers provided information regarding the amount of time spent teaching various writing skills. Students then participated in a narrative writing task. Results indicated that gender, handwriting fluency, and word reading fluency significantly predicted writing fluency. Gender, IQ, word reading ability, and understanding of correct grammar significantly predicted writing quality. Significant interactions were found between child-level and classroom-level variables in writing quality. These interactions indicated that increased minutes spent teaching planning and number of minutes spent writing resulted in decreased variability in narrative writing quality due to IQ and word reading ability.
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Richard K. Olson (U. of Colorado) Janice Keenan - A behavior-genetic analysis of reading comprehension’s relation to listening comprehension and word reading.
Data from identical and fraternal twins were used to explore genetic and environmental influences on reading comprehension through listening comprehension and word reading. Each had significant independent genetic influences on reading comprehension. Together they accounted for all of its significant genetic influence (h2 = .61). In contrast, the more modest but significant shared-environment influence on reading comprehension (c2 = .23) was accounted for by a single factor shared with both listening comprehension and word reading. Non-shared environmental influences were unique to each measure and likely due mostly to measurement error. Thus, the “Simple Model” for reading comprehension holds for genetic, but not environmental influences.
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Gene Ouellette (Carleton U. ) Monique Sénéchal - Pathways to literacy from Kindergarten to Grade 3.
Seventy-eight children were classified into four groups based on their early literacy at the beginning of kindergarten. The novice readers were children with good letter knowledge and decoding. The next three groups were nonreaders. The good and poor spellers were children whose invented spelling was above or below the median, respectively. Finally, poor letter-learners were children who knew 6 letter names or less. Longitudinal assessment revealed that the good spellers were stronger readers than the poor spellers at the beginning of grade 1, and that they maintained their advantage at the end of grades 1 and 3. The four groups were linearly different at all test points.
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Megan Overby (U. of Nebraska-Lincoln) Guy Trainin - The importance of early articulation competence to phonological decoding and encoding.
This study examined the relationship between early (pre kindergarten) articulation difficulties and third grade decoding and encoding achievement. 436 students participated in a longitudinal study studying the links between speech and literacy domains. Regression analyses revealed that articulation ability measured before entrance to kindergarten was a significant predictor of decoding, spelling, and reading outcomes. Even after controlling for age, cognitive ability, and language ability articulation remained a significant predictor of third grade achievement. The results indicate that articulation is an important factor and may be one of the important processes contributing to phonemic awareness and phonological decoding and encoding skills.
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William J. Owen (U. of Northern British Columbia) Maureen Hewlett, Ron Borowsky - Measuring skilled readers' reliance on lexical, sub-lexical, and semantic processing.
Researchers are continually developing diagnostics of sight vocabulary, phonetic decoding and semantic processing. The objective of our current research is to diagnose the degree to which readers rely on sight vocabulary and phonetic decoding processes. Using a modified process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991) we calculated skilled and less skilled reader's reliance upon sight vocabulary and phonetic decoding. This model captured the reading ability of the less skilled readers (readers with learning disabilities and ESL students); however, the model did not capture the reading ability of the skilled readers. Future models will require that a semantic component be incorporated.
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Rauno Parrila (U. of Alberta) George Georgiou - Persistent naming speed problems in high-functioning adult dyslexics: Wherein lays the problem?
Current study examined possible sources of serial naming speed differences in high-functioning dyslexics (U. students with a significant history of reading difficulties) and a matched (IQ, vocabulary, reading comprehension) group of nondyslexic readers. We examined speed of processing under high and low cognitive load, phonological processing, working memory, discrete naming speed for letters, words, and objects, delayed naming speed, speed of lexical access to semantic and phonological information, reactive inhibition, and articulation rate as possible sources of serial naming speed differences.
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Elisabeth S. Pasquini (Harvard Graduate School of Education) Kathleen H. Corriveau, Usha C. Goswami - Rhythmic auditory processing in college-aged dyslexics.
The underlying cause of the phonological deficits observed in dyslexia is unknown. Insensitivity to cues related to speech rhythm is a low-level auditory deficit thought to be responsible for dyslexics' impaired phonology. Such deficits have been well documented in dyslexic children. This study investigates whether these deficits persist into adulthood. Eighteen young adults with dyslexia and 18 chronological-age matched controls were tested on tasks measuring auditory processing, phonological awareness, and reading abilities. Specific relationships between auditory discrimination abilities and phonology and reading will be examined. The data will be examined in light of a proposed supra-segmental deficit account of dyslexia.
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Nicole Patton-Terry (Haskins Laboratories.) - Early linguistic awareness and spelling skills among African American English and Standard American English speakers.
This study explored the relationships between African American English (AAE) use, linguistic awareness, and spelling. Participants included typically-developing children in 1st-3rd grade who spoke AAE or Standard American English (SAE). After controlling for differences in overall literacy achievement, significant dialect group differences were found in morphosyntactic awareness and spelling of inflected grammatical morphemes. In regression analyses, AAE use was related to morphosyntactic awareness, which in turn contributed to spelling of inflections. The results suggest an indirect role for AAE in literacy achievement, mediated by dialect-related differences in linguistic awareness.
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Rufina Pearson (U. of British Columbia) Linda S. Siegel, Josefina Pearson, Ana Sanchez Negrete - Early identification and intervention of Spanish speaking children at-risk for reading failure.
This study examined: (1) the early identification of kindergarten children at-risk for reading failure and a follow-up the sample up to 2nd grade, to explore the development of reading and arithmetic skills under different teaching approaches, and socioeconomic status; (2) Effectiveness of a Phonological Awareness Intervention Program on kindergartens. Results show (1) an interaction between levels of PA, reading, writing and arithmetic skills and teaching approach. Furthermore, significant differences were detected between SES on letter knowledge, verbal memory, and reading comprehension on first and second grade. (2) Effective preventive action under direct instruction.
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Catherine G. Penney (Memorial U. of Newfoundland) - Onset awareness precedes reading, but phoneme awareness develops as a result of literacy.
A study was done to determine which aspects of phonological awareness precede literacy acquisition and which develop as a result of learning to read and spell using an alphabet. School-aged students, most of whom had reading difficulties, were tested on reading achievement and phonological awareness. Onset deletion was related to reading and spelling in a curvilinear fashion indicating that onset deletion preceded literacy. Deletion of a consonant from an initial onset cluster developed only after students could read a large number of words. Onset awareness, not phoneme awareness would appear to be a phonological prerequisite for literacy.
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Charles Perfetti (U. of Pittsburgh) Liu Ying, Julie Fiez, Jessica Nelson, Susan Dunlap - How the alphabetic brain learns to read Chinese: Implications of fMRI studies of adult learners for the functional neuroanatomy of learning to read.
Chinese has properties that allow a distinctive vantage point on the processes of learning to read. We present the results of two fMRI studies of English speaking adults learning to read Chinese, one with students in a college classroom and one in a controlled learning study. We identify both visual and frontal brain areas that are specifically important for learning Chinese, supporting the system accommodation hypothesis, and identify components of the brain’s reading network associated with learning connections from orthography to phonology and meaning.
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Stephen A. Petrill (Pennsylvania State U. ) Kirby Deater-Deckard - Environmental influences on early reading: A twin study.
We examined the relationship between measures of the literacy environment and reading outcomes in a sample of 240 twin pairs (100MZ) participating in the Western Reserve Reading Project. Children were tested in their homes prior to the end of first grade. Multilevel modeling results suggested that chaos in the home, maternal education, maternal educational attitudes, and home literacy environment mediated reading outcomes but did not moderate genetic influences upon reading outcomes. In contrast, child-level measures, such as number of books child reads showed significant genetic effects. Overall, results suggest family-level shared environmental mediation of literacy outcomes in emergent readers.
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Margaret E. Pierce (Harvard Graduate School of Education) Tami Katzir, Maryanne Wolf, Gil Noam - Examining word reading efficiency among struggling readers: does slow and steady win the race?
This study examined the relationship between word reading efficiency, controlling for accuracy, and performance on other literacy measures among struggling readers. Ninety-seven second and third grade children who were identified as at risk for reading failure were assessed on a number of literacy measures, including timed and untimed word-reading assessments. The results demonstrated that, controlling for accuracy, word reading rate was positively and significantly related to spelling and passage reading. The implications of these new findings on the importance of word reading rate will be discussed.
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Tatiana Cury Pollo (Washington U. ) Rebecca Treiman, Brett Kessler - Beginning spellers exploit inexact letter-name matches.
We studied how spelling is affected by letter-name knowledge when the match between a letter name and a phoneme sequence is imperfect. We examined 75 Portuguese-speaking preschoolers' use of H (which is named /a"ga/ but never represents those sounds) when spelling words beginning with /ga/ or variants of /ga/. Children used H for 15% of words beginning with /ga/ and 11% of those with /ka/, but rarely for words with syllables having other vowels, e.g. /ge/. Thus, when using letter names to spell consonants, children attended to adjacent vowels much more than to exact match of consonants.
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Kenneth R. Pugh (Haskins Laboratories) - Recent neuroimaging findings and an updated model of the neurobiology of skilled reading and reading disability.
Our research combines neuroimaging techniques (fMRI) with intensive behavioral testing to examine typically developing (TD) and reading disabled (RD) readers. After describing our working model of the neurobiology of reading, and early findings about how this differs in RD readers, we describe some recent studies that manipulated a range of task and stimulus dimensions including priming, frequency, spelling-sound consistency, imageability. Converging evidence from these studies have helped us to develop and refine our working model of the neurobiological bases of fluent reading and provide new insights into neurobiological differences between TD and RD readers. Results strongly suggest that the LH reading circuitry, while unstable, is potentially trainable in mature adolescent RD readers.
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Cynthia Puranik (U. of Florida) Linda Lombardino - Analyzing oral and written language samples using a text retell format.
Children and adults with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) and Language Impairment (LI) present with deficits in oral and written language. The debate over differences and similarities between these two groups is a long-standing one. Bishop & Snowling (in press) argue that these two clinical populations are categorically different with some overlapping phenotypic characteristics. Oral language and literacy skills can interact in different ways to produce different reading skill outcomes. Differences may lie in the non-phonological dimensions of language. The purpose of this study was to explore differences in the non-phonological dimensions of language by examining the oral and written samples of children and adults diagnosed with DD or LI.
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Jennifer Rabin (Dalhousie U. ) Helene Deacon - The relationship between morphological priming and reading.
This study will examine the relationship between the structure of children’s mental lexicons and reading. Eight-year-old children will complete a standardized reading test, and results will be related to the priming effects of morphologically-related words (e.g., Feldman et al., 2002). Inflected and derived priming words (e.g., rocks vs. rocky) will be compared to control conditions (identity, no prime, and orthographic words), and priming will be assessed using a fragment completion task. Data collected January through March (2005) will be discussed in the context of previous research, and related to theories of spelling and reading development.
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Gloria Ramírez (OISE/UT) Esther Geva - The use of reading comprehension tests in EL1 versus EL2 students.
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether reading comprehension tests have a different effect on the performance of English L1 (EL1) versus English L2 (EL2) speakers. This study also examines the validity and reliability of three reading comprehension tests (PIAT, Gates MacGinitie and a reading comprehension experimental test) administered to 290 grades 4 students. The sample includes 197 EL2 and 93 EL1. Results show dissimilar performance between the two language groups. Correlation analyses revealed differences among the three reading comprehension tests across language groups (EL1 vs. EL2). Implications for test implementation practices with EL2 learners are discussed.
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Pieter Reitsma (PI Research – VU Amsterdam) Mieke Bos, Eline Bouwman - Learning spelling by spelling.
The issue was how most effectively provide computer-based spelling exercises for children seriously delayed in spelling skills. In an experimental training study the word to be spelled was spoken and shown first. Then various conditions followed in which actual producing the spelling was contrasted with selecting the correct form among alternatives, while the target word was still in view or was disappeared at the time the response was required. Results show that, regardless whether the target was still available or not, actively producing spelling most facilitates the learning of word-specific orthographic knowledge.
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Jenny Roberts (Hofstra U. ) S. Lambrecht-Smith, K.Scott, P.Macaruso, J.Hodgson, J.Locke - Relationship of preliteracy skills to early spoken language measures in children with dyslexia.
This study examined the relationship between spoken language skills at 24 months of age and preliteracy skills at 60 months, in children at genetic risk for dyslexia and their age- and gender-matched controls. Subjects were followed prospectively until dyslexic status could be obtained. Spoken language profiles at 24 months revealed greater delays in children later identified as dyslexic than in children who did not become dyslexic. Strong relationships were seen between spoken language measures at 24 months, and 4 preliteracy measures at 60 months.
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Theresa A. Roberts (California State U. , Sacramento) - Mapping the territory-The interface between alphabetic learning and instruction in young English language learners.
Little is known about the progression in learning about the alphabet in young English Language Learners (ELLs). This presentation will describe this progression in three cohorts of preschool age and kindergarten age children from two different primary language groups who were learning English as a second language and learning to read in English. The influence of more explicit and more implicit methods of alphabet instruction on this progression was examined. The role of teacher expertise in more explicit programs as indexed by year of program implementation was also explored. Explicit instruction was beneficial for children as early as preschool and this benefit was apparent in the first year of program implementation. Learning letter names and letter sounds was more responsive to instruction than was phonological and phonemic awareness.
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Erin K. Robertson (U. of Western Ontario) Marc F. Joanisse, Amy S. Desroches, Stella Ng, & Alexandra Terry. - Similarities and differences between developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment.
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder that affects multiple language abilities. SLI is typically treated as a separate category from developmental dyslexia, which primarily affects reading. In a series of four experiments we have found important similarities and differences between the two groups. As a group, SLI children showed reading and phonological awareness deficits that are highly consistent with dyslexia. Moreover, children with dyslexia who did not meet the criteria for SLI nevertheless showed delayed development of morphology compared to normal controls. Finally, the SLI group had weaker speech perception and auditory sentence comprehension than the dyslexic group.
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Cristina Rodríguez (U. of La Laguna) Juan E. Jiménez - Validity of subtypes of reading disability in a transparent orthography analyzing word and pseudoword naming errors ..
The purpose of this research was to replicate the study conducted by Jiménez and Ramírez (2002) about subtypes of reading disability in a consistent orthography. Using regression-based procedures we try to identify phonological dyslexics (PH-dys) and surface dyslexics (S-dys) from a sample of 37 dyslexic by comparing them to chronological-age-matched controls on processing time and accuracy scores to high frequency word and pseudoword reading. Also we look at whether the Ph-dys and S-dys profiles are associated with other specific cognitive deficits. To determinate the validity of the subgroups that were identified we used the reading-level-matched group examining word and pseudowords naming errors.
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Heather Rogers Haverback (U. of Maryland) Susan J. Parault - A reading tutor service learning project and its influence on preservice teacher self-efficacy.
This study compared the efficacy beliefs of two groups of preservice reading teachers in a state required undergraduate course in Language Development and Reading Acquisition. Each group was exposed to course material through classroom discussions, interaction, and lecture. However, one class participated in a weekly service learning project, specifically the tutoring of reading at a local elementary school. Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy (2001) Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale was given to both groups. Results showed no significant changes in preservice teacher efficacy as a result of the service learning project. Continued efforts in this area are warranted as increasing teacher efficacy promotes academic achievement.
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Ivy E. Rollins (U. of Rhode Island) Susan Brady - Interference of first language on second language spelling abilities in Spanish-speaking children.
This study examines whether interference from orthographic knowledge of Spanish occurs when Spanish-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) are learning to read and write English. Thirty-two ELL second graders enrolled in a dual language (English/Spanish) program were given spelling assessments in both languages in order to investigate types of orthographic errors and whether these children experience interference from their knowledge of the Spanish writing system on their acquisition of the English orthography. Children displayed a greater number of orthographic errors for letter-sound patterns that differ across the writing systems (negative transfer) than for letter-sound correspondences that are the same (positive transfer).
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Julie Rosenthal (CUNY) - The mnemonic value of orthography for elementary students learning new vocabulary words.
The mnemonic value of spellings for securing vocabulary words and their meanings in memory was examined. Fifth graders were taught two sets of unfamiliar words and definitions as oral responses in a paired-association learning task. During study periods, students were shown spellings of one set of words, and they received extra practice reciting the other set of words but never saw their spellings. Learning of words and meanings favored the spelling condition. Results are interpreted as providing evidence for the mnemonic value of spellings in vocabulary learning because they provide readers with orthographic images useful for storing sounds in memory.
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Laura S. Roth (U. of Denver) Janice M. Keenan. - The role of comprehension monitoring in the comprehension skills of children with reading disability and children with ADHD.
Comprehension monitoring was assessed in children with reading disability (RD) and children with ADHD using an online garden-path sentence paradigm that contained ambiguous homographs. Monitoring was measured by pausing and correcting behaviors surrounding the homograph. Children with RD paused and corrected less than age-matched controls, while children with ADHD paused as much as age-matched controls but were less likely to correct. These results suggest that for children with RD, resources for monitoring may be limited by decoding efforts. Children with ADHD monitor, but their failures to correct may reflect lower standards of coherence or failures to adhere to task demands.
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Annie Roy-Charland (Université de Moncton) Jean Saint-Aubin, Mary Ann Evans - Children's eye-movements in shared book reading: It depends if they can read it.
Evans and Saint-Aubin (in press) monitored preschoolers' eye-movements in shared book reading activities and found that children spent little time examining the print regardless of the nature of the print and illustrations. The current study investigated attention to print across reading development by monitoring eye-movements in shared book reading for six children per grade from kindergarten to grade 4. Children were read text of varying difficulty levels. Results revealed that if children could read the text on their own, they looked at the print while being read to, otherwise they looked predominantely at the illustrations.
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Heather Ruetschlin (U. of Maryland) Maria Finger, Mariam Jean Dreher - Children’s reading comprehension in Grades 2-4 across genre and question type.
Standardized measures of reading comprehension typically yield reports of achievement that do not differentiate among the genres of materials that young children are asked to read. Yet fiction and nonfiction are considered to have differing demands. Further, nonfiction that is expository has different characteristics than the narrative-informational text that is often used in nonfiction for young children. This paper analyzes students’ performance on a standardized reading comprehension measure to determine whether differences are evident across genre (fiction, expository, and narrative-informational) and question-type (literal or inferential). Patterns across grade levels 2 through 4 are investigated.
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William H. Rupley (Texas A&M U.) Sandra L. Mergen, Victor L. Willson - Reliability and validity of elementary teacher’s self-reports of their use of reading instruction strategies.
This research reports the results of a study examining the reliability and validity of teachers’ self-reports of their use of selected reading instruction strategies over a one year period. Elementary teachers (N=42) reported their use of twenty reading strategies at the beginning of the school year based on last years’ experiences, in a two-week daily report kept during the spring semester, and in an end-of-school year retrospective account. Ten classroom observations of reading instruction were conducted by two observers during the spring semester. Observations were used to test the validity of the various forms of self-reports. Results indicated that teachers were reliable in reporting their use of reading instructional practices.
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John P. Sabatini (Educational Testing Service) Hollis S. Scarborough, Jane Shore - Low literate adult reading acquisition: Some simple model analyses.
The Relative Effectiveness of Adult Reading project is applying acquisition models, component measures, and adapted instructional interventions developed and investigated in the context of school-aged populations. Asample of over 300 adults in literacy programs, whose word recognition abilities are between the 2nd and 6th grade levels, has been given measures from the WRAT, WJIII, CTOPP, and TOWRE, as well as several experimental measures. We will present results of multiple regression analyses predicting reading comprehension scores from oral language, wordlevel, and phonemic level measures.
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Mark Sadoski (Texas A&M U. ) Victor L. Willson, Angelia Holcomb, Regina Boulware-Gooden - Verbal and nonverbal predictors of spelling performance: A national study and a follow-up.
Verbal orthographic predictors and nonverbal semantic predictors of spelling performance in grades 1-12 were investigated using the national norming data from a standardized spelling test. Verbal variables included number of letters, phonemes, syllables, digraphs, blends, silent markers, r-controlled vowels, and the proportion of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. The nonverbal variable was word concreteness. Word frequency was also included. Results showed that only three variables were consistently strong predictors of spelling performance: proportion of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, number of syllables, and word concreteness. Results are theoretically interpreted in terms of Dual Coding Theory and stages of spelling development.
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Elinor Saiegh-Haddad (Bar-Ilan U. ) - Linguistic constraints on the ability to isolate phonemes in Arabic.
Three linguistic factors were tested for their effect on Arab children's phoneme isolation (N=256). The first is the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme: Spoken Arabic Vernacular (SAV) vs. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Two groups of children were tested that differed in whether a particular set of phonemes were within their SAV or not. The study investigated whether the two groups would differ in their ability to isolate these phonemes. The effect of phoneme position (initial versus final) and linguistic context (singleton C versus clustered CC phoneme) on children’s phoneme isolation was also tested. ANOVA with repeated measures showed that the linguistic affiliation of the phoneme (MSA vs. SAV) had a main effect on phoneme isolation only in the group of children that did not have the target phonemes within their SAV. With regards to position and linguistic context, the results revealed a main effect of phoneme position, with initial phonemes easier to isolate than final phonemes. The interaction of phoneme position by linguistic context was also significant, with clustered phonemes significantly easier to isolate only when embedded the onset initial position, not in the final coda. Initial singleton phonemes turned out the most difficult of all other phonemes to isolate. These findings are discussed in terms of the natural and unique salience of the initial CV as an unmarked unit of speech perception.
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Javier S. Sainz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Ruben García-Zurdo, Carmen Villalba - Neural mechanisms of word parsing in reading.
Text segmentation – how to identify the units in a continuous text stream- is the main problem a reader faces in reading. Two ERP experiments aimed at studying the neural mechanisms involved in the detection of statistical regularities of letter-sequences were run. Lexical and non-lexical strings were presented while embedded in larger patterns for which transitional probability of letter sequences were controlled. Results show subjects’ sensitivity to pattern regularity and the operation in the proccess of three neural circuits, a temporo-occipital network activated in high-frequency words, a temporo-parietal network in low-frequency words and pseudowords, and an anterior frontal network involved in lexical conflict resolution.
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Stefan Samuelsson (Linköping U. ) Richard K Olson, Brian Byrne - Genetic and environmental influences on pre-reading skills at 5 years of age- A comparison between United States, Australia, and Scandinavia.
Parallel longitudinal studies of genetic and environmental etiologies of individual differences in pre-reading skills and early reading development have been initiated in the U.S. (Olson, PI), in Australia (Byrne, PI) and in Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden; Samuelsson, PI). Phenotypic comparisons of means across country have shown similarities for most measures of pre-reading skills, except for measures of print knowledge. Phenotypic correlations between measures of pre-reading skills have also shown to be similar within each twin sample. This talk will mainly foucus on preliminary findings comparing genetic influences on pre-reading skills across country.
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Rebecca Sandak (Haskins Laboratories) Stephen J. Frost, W. Einar Mencl, Jay Rueckl, Kenneth R. Pugh - Learning to read (alphabetic) words: controlled learning studies in English.
In series of behavioral and fMRI studies we have been investigating how different learning conditions influence how the brain reads recently-learned words. In an earlier study, we found that when participants acquired familiarity for novel words by attending to their phonological features, the subsequent (more efficient) naming of those items was associated with reduced activation in LH dorsal, anterior, and occipitotemporal regions; attention to semantic features during training increased activation in anterior ventral areas. We hypothesized that learning conditions requiring attention to both phonological and semantic attributes would optimize learning. A follow-up study confirmed this hypothesis behaviorally; fMRI data replicated our earlier findings and revealed the unique effects of the combined-training on ventral IFG and basal temporal regions. We also observed differential effects of in-magnet repetition depending on training condition. Implications for reading theory, instruction, and dyslexia are discussed.
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Stephan E. Sargent (Northeastern State U., Oklahoma) - The relationship of reading attitude and use of newspapers as a pedagogical tool in 3rd, 4th, and 5th Grade students.
Use of newspaper in education can impact students’ attitude toward reading. Approximately 150 students were selected from classrooms that regularly use the newspaper as part of the literacy curriculum (experimental group) and 150 students who do not (control group). The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (McKenna & Kear, 1990) was administered at the beginning of the school year to ensure the groups were comparable and given again at the end of the first semester. Results show a significant difference in reading attitude for students who regularly used the newspaper as a source of text. Findings are presented by grade level.
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Robert Savage (McGill U. ) Rebecca Blair - Epi- and meta- linguistic phonological skills in pre-reading children. ..
Three experiments in normal kindergarten children examined the hypothesis that rime phonological awareness is privileged. Phonological representations were explored in epi-linguistic (detection) and meta-linguistic (production) of rime (e.g. bone, phone,) head (e.g. kiss, king), onset (e.g. coat, cup) and coda (e.g. leaf, knife) stimuli matched for perceptual similarity. In study 1, pre-readers performed equally well on rime and head detection tasks, but less well on onset and coda detection tasks. By contrast in the meta-linguistic tasks, rime performance was at floor and greater but equivalent onset, head and coda performance observed. These patterns were replicated in two subsequent studies.
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Hollis S. Scarborough (Haskins Laboratories) Sarah McClure, Marjorie Gillis - Culture shock for Kindergartners: Complexity of classroom language.
Effective instruction requires good delivery as well as good content, but there has been little study of how teachers of beginning readers use language in instruction. We find that kindergarten teachers use language that is much more syntactically complex (proportion of sentences with more than one clause) and elaborated (number of noun phrases per sentence) than mothers' conversational language with children of the same age. Consequences for reading acquisition are examined.
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Gerheid Scheerer-Neumann (U. of Potsdam) Carola D. Hofmann - Do reading speed tests really measure reading?
Group reading speed tests always need to integrate other cognitive operations than merely reading (e.g. categorizing words) and it is an open question, how strongly results are confounded with the time it takes to perform these other operations. Three speed tests were applied to German primary school children from grade one to five (N=459): While first results seemed to suggest that reading speed tests measure some sort basic cognitive processing speed, selected correlations between the different tests and the data of poor readers indicate that the speed reading tests applied at least contain important components specific to reading.
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Rachel Schiff (Bar Ilan U. ) Dorit Ravid - Morphological inflections and verbal skills in novice Hebrew readers.
This is a longitudinal study which examines the relationships between first graders’ ability to inflect Hebrew nouns and their verbal (as measured by Wechsler vocabulary and similarities subtests) and non verbal abilities (as measured by the Raven test) at two time points in the context of learning to read and write. 110 first graders were tested twice – at the beginning and at the end of the school year – orally and individually on their knowledge of two types of Hebrew nominal inflection: (1) noun plurals – an obligatory inflection, and (2) noun genitives – an optional inflection which is typical of written Hebrew style. Both categories require knowledge of phonological stem changes and of regular and irregular suffixes, but none is taught explicitly in first grade. Results indicate that performance on both inflection types improves from the beginning to the end of first grade, especially in items with complex stem changes and irregular suffixes. Obligatory inflection was more successful than optional inflection. The more complex and irregular facets of inflection were found to be highly correlated with verbal measures (Wechsler) and with phonological awareness at both times, but not with non-verbal skills. The study highlights the relationship between oral morphological development and verbal abilities in novice readers.
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Sarah E. Scott (U. of Michigan) Joanne F. Carlisle. - A coach-based model of implementing change: What works well in the reading classroom? .
Despite the recent proliferation of literacy coaches throughout the United States, there is very little research on effective coaching. Descriptions of literacy coaching often draw from the work of Joyce and Showers (1996), but this model was designed prior to the proliferation of coaching as a tool for professional development in high-poverty schools in the United States. In this session we will report on an investigation of what coaches actually do in their day-to-day work and how teachers feel about the work of the coaches as agents of change in their schools. These data inform our understanding of what constitutes “effective coaching.” We also examine the extent to which coaches as instructional change agents in high-poverty schools appear to be influencing students’ gains in reading achievement.
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Mark S. Seidenberg (U. of Wisconsin-Madison) - Universal and language-specific aspects of reading.
One of the major recent advances in reading research has been the growth of research on languages other than English and writing systems other than alphabetic ones. Differences between writing systems and the languages they represent suggest that they could be read by very different mechanisms. At the same time, one would expect there to be commonalities because people share the same brains and thus the same perceptual, learning, and memory capacities. I will attempt to reconcile these two seemingly opposing considerations using our division of labor model (Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) of word reading as a tool, linking behavioral and neuroimaging evidence.
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Carrie Seward (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) Alexandra Gottardo - Influence of a short-term intervention program on Grade 1 phonological awareness.
A two-week summer training program was delivered by school and community partners to children identified as having low phonological awareness skills by their kindergarten teachers. A parent-training component provided workshops on shared reading and incorporating phonological awareness activities in daily routines. The intervention group was compared to a similarly selected control group. Post-test results indicated a significant effect of program on post-test phonological awareness after controlling for pre-test receptive vocabulary and phonological awareness. This finding has significant implications for educational planners suggesting that short-term interventions with community partners can be successfully provided for at-risk children prior to literacy instruction.
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Philip H.K. Seymour (U. of Dundee) Lynne G.Duncan, Mikko Aro, Sheila Baillie - Quantifying the effects of orthographic and phonological complexity on foundation literacy acquisition: the English-Finnish contrast.
There are differences between European languages in foundation literacy acquisition (Seymour et al, 2003) which reflect variations in orthographic depth and phonological complexity. Rates of acquisition of letter-sound knowledge, familiar word recognition, phonological awareness, and simple nonword decoding were traced in a longitudinal study of English, Finnish and other orthographies. Examination of individual growth profiles established that progress was in all cases contingent on letter knowledge but that there were contrasts in the effects of transparency of word spellings and syllabic complexity. Differences in strategy and individual variability are illustrated in the English-Finnish results.
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Jie Shen (U. of Waterloo) Alexandra Gottardo, G. Ernest MacKinnon - Language development: A comparison of children with specific language impairment and children with English as a second language.
This study investigated how children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and children with English as Second Language (ESL) differ in acquisition of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and story telling in English. Forty-seven preschool children participated: 15 with SLI, 15 with ESL and 17 Normally Developing peers (ND). The children with SLI exhibited receptive language skills within the average range but demonstrated weaknesses in expressive language skills. In contrast, ESL children showed weaknesses in both receptive and expressive skills relative to ND children. The implications of the results for current models of SLI language development are discussed.
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Linda S. Siegel (U. of British Columbia) Orly Lipka, Jill Etmanski - Early identification and intervention to prevent dyslexia: A 7-year longitudinal study of ESL and L1 English children.
This paper reports a 7 year longitudinal study in which children were identified at risk for reading difficulties in kindergarten and assessed every year until grade 6 on a variety of reading, spelling, memory, and phonological awareness tasks. The results indicated that 23.8% L1 and 37.2% ESL were at risk in kindergarten, at the end of grade 6, 3.6% L1 and 4.8% ESL were showing dyslexia. Phonological awareness, language awareness, and reading strategy programs were responsible for this significant improvement, indicating that dyslexia can be detected early and intervention programs can be used to prevent it in most children.
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Mindy B. Sittner (U. of Kansas) Hugh W. Catts - Late emerging poor readers.
In the last decade, there has been an emphasis on early identification and prevention of reading disabilities. However, these efforts might not identify children with reading problems that emerge in middle or later grades. We examined the prevalence and nature of late emerging reading problems in a large longitudinal sample of children (through 8th grade). Late emerging poor readers performed well in word recognition skills but worse than normal readers and early emerging poor readers in some aspects of language processing
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Lisa J. Slominski (U. of Michigan) Carol McDonald Connor, Frederick J. Morrison - Do schools or teachers tailor literacy instruction to the skill levels of at-risk preschool children?
Research has shown that children with weak literacy skills benefit most from explicit instruction in basic letter/word level skills. This study includes 157 children in 35 preschool classrooms. Results indicate that teachers at schools considered at-risk spent significantly more language arts time teaching basic skills than teachers at schools considered not at-risk. However, in this study, the majority of at-risk children were at non-at-risk schools. This indicates that, while school level policies seem to influence teachers’ instruction, a significant number of children may not be receiving the basic skills instruction they need to learn and grow optimally.
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Rihana S. Williams Smith (Florida Center for Reading Research) Joseph K. Torgesen - The influence of cognitive, linguistic, and cultural factors on reading achievement in Florida.
Language and cultural diversity are two important factors that have been demonstrated to influence vocabulary development and reading achievement. Relationships between vocabulary, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension were investigated within a diverse population of third grade children. The academic performance of White Non-Hispanic children was compared with the performance of children from 2 different ethnic minority groups: Black Non-Hispanic (involuntary) and Hispanic (voluntary). Academic performance was also examined as a function of proficiency with the English language. Interactions were observed between children's ethnic backgrounds and English language proficiency. Implications for the effects of the Reading First initiative for children from disadvantaged backgrounds will be discussed.
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Patrick Snellings (U. of Amsterdam) Aryan van der Leij, Peter F. de Jong, Henk Blok - Poor readers' integration of orthography and phonology: the role of synchrony and level of processing.
Accurate and redundant connections between orthographic and phonological representations are an essential component of fluent word recognition (e.g. Ehri, 1992, Perfetti, 1992). Poor readers may be less efficient in activating letter and phonemic information (Booth, Perfetti and MacWhinney, 1999). One specific hypothesis states that an asynchrony between visual-orthographic and auditory-phonological information disrupts the reading process (Breznitz, 2002). In the current study we examined the integration of orthographic and phonological information by systematically manipulating the time between visual and auditory information (synchronous, short ISI, long ISI) and the level of information that can be processed (C, CC, CCV letters and sounds).
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Margaret J. Snowling (U. of York) K. Goetz, C Hulme, S. Brigstocke, H. Nash - Individual differences in literacy attainments of children with Down Syndrome.
This study investigated variations in the reading skills of 49 children with Down syndrome (DS) (age 5:06 – 16:02) with reference to a group of typically developing children (age 4:09 – 9:06), matched for reading age. The children with DS showed a very wide range of reading ability (reading age equivalent scores ranging from <5:00 to 14:00). Path analyses indicated that once receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge was controlled, phonological skills were not a unique predictor of reading ability in the DS group. In contrast,for the typically developing group,phonological skills, but not vocabulary knowledge predicted variations in reading skills._x003c_br>Top
Emily Solari (U. of California, Santa Barbara) Michael Gerber, Lee Swanson - Spelling development of young English learners: the role of phonological awareness and working memory.
This study examines the relationship between measures of phonological awareness (PA), working memory (WM) and spelling in a sample of young Spanish-speaking English learners. Seventy-five (N =75) students were assessed in both English and Spanish in first and second grades on PA and WM and were given two spelling tests, one a visual recognition tasks, and the other a written spelling task. Results indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between the PA and WM tasks, as well as between the two spelling tasks and PA and WM. Regression analyses indicate that both PA and WM in Spanish and English play a significant role in the written spelling task. We interpret these results to suggest mechanisms of cross-linguistic transfer of processes underlying PA and WM task performance.
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Seung-Hee Son (U. of Michigan) Frederick J. Morrison, Beth Swearingen - Parents getting children ready for Kindergarten: Tailoring the home literacy environment at the time of school transition.
The research issue is whether the overall home learning environment and specific parenting practices during book reading change. Study 1 examines the extent of changes in the overall home learning environment using the NICHD ECCRN study (N=1364). 30.6% of parents of preschoolers in a nationally normative sample showed improvements in the home learning environment from 36 to 54 months of age of their children, while only 0.6% decreased. Based on study 1, study 2 performs in-depth analyses examining the changes in home book reading practices of parents of 50 preschoolers at the time of school transition. This study may provide a rationale for early home intervention for school readiness by examining the possibility of parenting change at the time of school transition.
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Louise Spear-Swerling (Southern Connecticut State U. ) Pamela Owen Brucker, Michael Alfano - Perceived and actual literacy-related knowledge of teachers with high vs. low background for teaching reading.
After rating their own literacy-related knowledge in three areas (general knowledge about reading development, phonemic awareness/phonics, and morpheme awareness/structural analysis), teachers completed five tasks intended to measure their actual knowledge base for teaching early literacy skills. Teachers with high prior background (i.e., course preparation and experience) significantly outperformed low-background participants on all tasks; however, even high-background teachers scored well below ceiling. Teachers’ self-ratings and performance varied depending on the area of knowledge, but teachers did have some accurate perceptions of their own knowledge. Results support the notion of a substantial gap between research on reading and teacher preparation in reading.
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K. Brooke Stafford (Teachers College Columbia U. ) Joanna P. Williams, Abigail Nubla-Kung, Simonne Pollini - Text structure instruction in social studies in the primary grades.
This study investigated the effect of an instructional program in compare/contrast text structure on second graders' comprehension of social studies text. Fourteen classrooms were randomly assigned to either a Text Structure program (n=5), Comparison program, utilizing the same materials, but without a focus on text structure, (n=5), or No Instruction (n=4). The Text Structure group outperformed the other groups on tasks assessing comprehension of compare/contrast text on several levels of transfer. The Text Structure and Comparison groups did equally well on content measures, suggesting that the text structure instruction can be successfully administered without a loss in content acquisition.
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Rhona Stainthorp (U. of London) Maria Constantinidou - Phonological awareness and reading speed deficits in dyslexic Cypriot children.
Evidence is presented from a study investigating the phonological awareness; word and pseudoword reading speed; listening and reading comprehension of 20 nine-year-old reading disabled Cypriot children relative to a reading age matched group and a chronological age matched group. The reading disabled children showed some competence in simple phonological awareness tasks, but weaknesses in more complex tasks requiring phoneme manipulation. Decoding was compromised by a phonological deficit leading to slow word identification. Slow and laboured decoding was a hindrance to reading comprehension for the reading disabled group whose listening comprehension was to that of the chronological age matched children.
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Dorothy J. Steffler (Concordia U. College of Alberta) Sarah Critten, Karen Pine - Understanding implicit and explicit spelling development in the context of Karmiloff-Smith’s representational redescription model.
Although it is understood that a great deal of knowledge used during spelling is implicit, few researchers have investigated the implicit nature of spelling and how implicit knowledge becomes explicit. Karlmiloff-Smith (1992) proposed a multilevel model of representational redescription (R-R) as a framework to study implicit and explicit knowledge. We were interested in investigating whether this model could be applied to spelling development. Children ages 5 to 7 were given both a recognition and recall spelling task using regular and irregular past tense verbs. We were able to classify all children according to levels derived from the R-R model.
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Karen A. Steinbach (The Hospital For Sick Children) Jan C. Frijters, Rose A. Sevcik, Marla Shapiro, Maryanne Wolf, Robin D. Morris & Maureen W. Lovett - Multiple component remediation of reading disabilities in children: Outcomes for children varying in IQ and socioeconomic status.
Young disabled readers were randomly assigned in groups of four to two multiple-component programs (PHAB/DI + RAVE-O; PHAB/DI + WIST—i.e., PHAST), an alternative treatment control (CSS+ Math), or a phonological control (PHAB/DI+CSS). A factorial design was used to evaluate intervention effects for 279 children varying in IQ (70-89; 90+), SES (average; low), and race (Afro-American; Caucasian). These demographic factors did not differentially predict outcomes at either immediate posttest or at one-year follow-up. Both PHAB/DI+RAVE-O and PHAST were confirmed to be effective vehicles of intervention for struggling readers from a range of backgrounds and with different levels of intellectual functioning.
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Kathy Stephenson (U. of Alberta) Rauno Parrila - Effects of cognitive and noncognitive factors on the acquisition of reading skills.
The present study examines how home literacy practices, parents' beliefs and expectations, children's achievement strategies, and pre-literacy skills assessed in kindergarten predict word reading and reading comprehension in grades 1, 2 and 3. Seventy children were followed from kindergarten to the beginning of grade 3. Children were administered measures of preliteracy skills (letter knowledge, phonological sensitivity, phonological memory, and naming speed) in kindergarten and grade 1. Parents' reported on home literacy practices and their beliefs and expectations, and teachers' reported on children's achievement strategies. Home literacy practices and children's achievement strategies correlated significantly with kindergarten preliteracy skills, but did not predict grade 1 reading after controlling for kindergarten pre-literacy skills. We are currently finishing the grade 3 data collection and the results are not yet available.
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Bianca M. Sumutka (Haskins Laboratories) Susan Brady, Hollis Scarborough - The role of vocabulary knowledge in decoding new words.
Whether words are in a child's vocabulary may contribute to the accuracy and speed of reading words encountered in print the first time. This topic was studied in two experiments with fourth-grade students. In Experiment 1, students read words unlikely to have been seen before in print (half orally familiar, half unfamiliar). In Experiment 2, students were orally taught two sets of words. Subsequently, students read four word sets (two sets orally introduced; two not). Word-reading accuracy and speed were assessed in both studies. Results indicate a positive effect of vocabulary knowledge on initial decoding of "new" words in print.
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M. Kendra Sun-Alperin (U. of Maryland) Min Wang - Sentence processing in Chinese-English bilingual children.
The effect of word order and animacy cues on sentence meaning choice in Chinese and English monolinguals, and Chinese-English bilinguals was examined in this study. Results were consistent with our hypotheses that there would be word order and animacy effects between the Chinese and English monolingual groups, and that bilingual children would employ backward transfer (from English L2 to Chinese L1) when processing sentences in their L1. English speakers relied more heavily on word order while Chinese speakers relied on animacy cues. Bilingual speakers tended to behave like English monolinguals when processing meaning of sentences in either language.
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Verena Thaler (U. of Salzburg) Karin Landerl - The influence of spelling pronunciations on the orthographic spelling competence.
This study examines the effect of hyper-correct pronunciations on the improvement of spelling performance. Earlier studies in our lab showed that spelling pronunciations are more effective for irregular than for inconsistent words. Spelling pronunciations of irregular words are more deviant from the standard pronunciations than those of inconsistent words. This could ease their storage. In a pre-post-test design poor and normal spellers were auditorilly presented with spelling pronunciations for both irregular and inconsistent words. After 15 presentations participants were asked to spell the training words. Differences between groups (poor and normal spellers) and conditions (irregular and inconsistent words) were examined.
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Jenny Thomson (U. of Cambridge) Usha Goswami - Rhythm timing and dyslexia: A causal connection?
In recent work (e.g. Goswami et al., 2002) we have found strong relationships between children's perception of auditory rhythm cues, specifically, amplitude envelope onsets, and phonological and literacy ability. This study examines a wider range of amplitude envelope and rhythm processing skills in dyslexic children aged 9 years, alongside chronological age and reading level control groups. We explore how amplitude envelope onset detection and literacy skills relate to the perception of additional rhythm cues such as duration, frequency and intensity. The relationship between speech rhythm processing and more general motor rhythm perception and production is also explored.
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Dianna Townsend (U. of California, Irvine) Penny Chiappe - Patterns of reading in English for Korean- and English-speaking children.
This study examined the reading strategies used by 18 English- and 19 Korean-speaking second graders in English. The purpose of the study was to determine if oral language and literacy skills show the same interrelations for native English speakers and English language learners. Children’s performance was examined on tasks assessing reading, vocabulary, orthographic processing, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and working memory. Korean children outperformed English-speaking children on measures of orthographic processing, word reading, reading comprehension and phonological processing despite their significantly smaller receptive vocabularies in English. Children from both language groups showed different error patterns in reading and spelling.
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Kuan-Chun Tsai (affiliation?) Terezinha Nunes, Peter Bryant - Learning to read and write new characters in Chinese.
Most Chinese characters contain a phonological component and a semantic radical. Children are usually not taught about either component, but recent research suggests that they are to some extent aware of the components’ functions. The most stringent test of this understanding is to see if children use the two components in learning new characters. In our study 6-, 7- and 8-year old learned unfamiliar pseudo-characters, and then in a following test had either to write or to read these new characters. Our results confirm that these children did use both components in learning about new characters.
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Vered Vaknin (U. of Haifa) Joseph Shimron - Is it more difficult to process irregular nouns? Evidence from Hebrew.
The default plural inflection in Hebrew is produced with the suffix im in masculine nouns, and the suffix ot in feminine nouns. Irregular masculine nouns are suffixed with the feminine ot, and irregular feminine nouns with the masculine im. Plural inflection is also occasionally involved with vowel alternation in the words base. There may be zero, one, or two vowel alternations. In a task of online plural inflection, incompatible suffixation was found to result in longer inflection. Vowel alternation was found to affect inflection of regular but not irregular nouns. The results are interpreted within an information processing model of plural inflection in Hebrew.
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Victor van Daal (U. of Stavanger ) Llinos Spencer - Developing reading fluency and spelling in a bilingual country: Results from year 6 children in North Wales.
The research focussed on Year 6 Welsh-English bilinguals with different levels of proficiency who acquired the two languages either in succession (Welsh or English first) or concurrently. Hypotheses concerning normal literacy attainment and reading difficulties in these two orthographies that vary in transparency were examined on measures of reading accuracy, fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension. Results indicated that learning to read (and spell) in the two languages at the same time is not harder; learning to read first in a transparent orthography is advantageous, and bilingual dyslexic do not have “double trouble”, but dyslexic children learning English first have more difficulty.
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Julie Van Dyke (Haskins Laboratories) Donald Shankweiler, Whitney Tabor - Individual differences in the time-course of sensitivity to syntactic and semantic interference during comprehension of complex sentences.
Recent work has suggested that, at least in skilled readers, difficulty in comprehending sentences with complex syntax may be due to interference effects associated with retrieving previously stored items from memory. Reader differences in memory retrieval and sensitivity to interference during sentence processing have so far not been investigated. We present data from a recently completed eye-tracking study designed to address these issues. In a group of 85 good and poor readers, we found that both were susceptible to syntactic and semantic interference to a similar degree, but that the two groups differed regarding the time course of these effects.
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Connie K. Varnhagen (U. of Alberta) L. Figeuredo, J. Daniels, B. Sadler Takach - Spelling and the Web.
The Web is an extensive source of information, entertainment, and communication. To effectively search for and access Web resources, users must type keywords into a search engine or directory. How does misspelling affect Web search? In this study, Grade 4 children and U. students searched for information on lemmings (easy to spell keyword) or ptarmigans (hard to spell keyword). Spelling ability and keyword misspelling affected participants' Web search strategies, search success, and time on task. This research emphasizes the importance of correct spelling for every day tasks and sheds light on how people accommodate when they encounter spelling difficulties.
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Sharon Vaughn (U. of Texas, Austin) Sylvia Linan-Thompson, David Francis - Experimental designs examining the effectiveness of Spanish and English interventions with bilingual First Grade students at-risk for reading problems.
Two clinical trial experimental design intervention studies, matched to core reading instruction of the student-one in English and one in Spanish- were conducted with 1st grade students who were English language learners (Spanish/English) at-risk for reading difficulties. For both interventions, students who did not pass a screening test were taught systematic and explicit instruction in oral language and reading by a research-trained teacher for 50 minutes per day in groups of 3-5 students for 7 months. English intervention students outperformed contrast students on multiple measures of English letter naming, phonological awareness and other language skills, and reading and academic achievement. In the Spanish intervention, there were significant posttest differences in favor of the treatment group for the following outcomes in Spanish: Letter Sound Identification, Phonological Awareness composite, Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised Oral Language composite, Word Attack, Passage Comprehension, and on two measures of reading fluency.
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Ludo Verhoeven (Radboud U. Nijmegen) Robert Schreuder - Prefix priming effects in reading Dutch bisyllabic words.
A masked priming experiment has been conducted in order to explore units of analysis in reading bisyllabic words in beginning and advanced readers of Dutch. 25 children in grade 3, 30 children in grade 5 and 24 adults were given a list of randomly ordered bisyllabic words with the first syllable being a prefix (1), a phonological prefix (2), a pseudoword with a phonological prefix (3), or a pseudoword with no prefix (4). The words were primed with corresponding vs non-corresponding prefixes. The results showed that prefix priming facilitated the identification of words. The effect was equally strong in words with a real prefix vs a phonological prefix. Moreover, we found the effect to be stronger in children than in adults. Apparently, adult readers have automatized the reading of bisyllabic words to such extent that the priming effect no longer prevails. The results will be discussed with reference to a parallel dual-route model of word decoding.
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Min Wang (U. of Maryland) - The relationship between general auditory processing, Chinese tone processing and English reading skill.
In the present study, we investigate the relationship between general auditory processing, Chinese tone processing and English reading skill in a group of Chinese-English bilingual children. Experiments included Tallal’s tone order judgment task, a FM (frequency modulated) sound judgment task, Chinese tone task, English phonological processing task and English nonword reading task. Two alternative hypotheses are tested: (1) Due to the possible shared underlying auditory processing skill, there may be a strong correlation between Chinese tone and auditory processing skill, and Chinese tone skill may contribute to English nonword reading over above English phonological skill; (2) Chinese tone processing may not be strongly correlated with general auditory processing because Chinese tone is not only an auditory process, but more importantly, it is a phonetic process. Chinese tone skill may still contribute to English reading via another shared underlying skill between Chinese and English.
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Adrianna R. Wechsler (McLean Hospital, Boston) Margaret E. Pierce, Tami Katzir, Maryanne Wolf, Gil Noam - Examining the co-morbidity of behavioral problems and reading difficulties among elementary school children.
This study examined the co-morbidity of behavior problems and reading difficulties among children. One hundred sixty-six second and third graders who met criterion for reading difficulties were evaluated on various literacy tasks and rated using the Conners’ Teacher Rating Scale – Revised (C TRS-S). The results demonstrated that struggling readers are more likely to display behaviors consistent with cognitive difficulties, anxiety, ADHD, and hyperactivity than behaviors consistent with oppositional or social difficulties. Also, poor readers exhibiting ADHD and anxiety related behaviors display a unique pattern of reading difficulties. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.
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Carolyn J. Wiens (Queen's U. ) John R. Kirby - The role of sound-symbol learning in letter knowledge, naming speed and reading skills.
The present study examined the role of sound-symbol learning in letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming and reading skills. Children were assessed in kindergarten and grade one on a variety of cognitive measures, sound-symbol learning, and reading skills. Results showed that the ability to learn sound-symbol associations is related to letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming, word identification and orthographic knowledge but not word attack. Results are interpreted in light of recent developments in memory theory and neuroimaging results that suggest there exists is a mechanism for integrating visual and verbal information that is separable from either visual or verbal memory alone.
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Gareth Williams (U. of Surrey) Yolanda Yuen - Comparisons in rhythm processing between alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts.
The aim of the study was to investigate the role of rhythm awareness in alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. Forty English children (aged seven years old and aged ten years old) and 54 Chinese ESL children (aged 7,8 years old and aged 9,7 years old) took part in the study. Reading related baseline measures and a measure to examine the children's ability to reproduce rhythm sequences were employed. The results are expected to suggest different patterns of rhythm reproduction be found across age and language.
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Heinz Wimmer (U. of Salzburg) Jürgen Bergmann, Martin Kronbichler - On brain dysfunction associated with dysfluent reading in regular orthographies: ERP and fMRI data.
Dyslexic and nonimpaired German boys performed a phonological lexical decision task (e.g. Taxi and Taksi vs.Taki). The dyslexics showed the wordform effect (Taxi vs. Taksi) although at massively prolonged response latencies. Dyslexics failed to exhibit the early N200 wordform effect which was exhibited by the controls at left posterior electrodes. The fMRI study showed that dyslexics exhibited underactivation of the left occipitotemporal region, but overactivation of the left temporoparietal and of right hemisphere regions. Findings will be discussed in relation to the functional neuroanatomical reading model of the Haskins group.
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Simpson Wai-Lap Wong (U. of Hong Kong) Connie Suk-Han Ho, Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow - The role of speed of processing and central executive functioning on RAN and reading fluency among Chinese adults.
This study investigated the relationship between general speed of processing (GSP), central executive functioning (CEF) and RAN, and their relative contribution to Chinese adults reading fluency. 40 undergraduates in Hong Kong were recruited and asked to complete several experimental tasks. Results from hierarchical regression suggested that GSP was more important than CEF in predicting RAN. Moreover, among GSP, CEF and RAN, only RAN remained to contribute significantly to reading fluency when other factors were controlled. A direct link between the speed of processing phonological and orthographic information of Chinese characters and reading fluency was found. A domain-specific speed of processing in predicting adult¡¦s reading fluency was proposed.
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Clare Wood (Open U. ) - Rhythmic sensitivity and early reading: A cross sectional study.
This paper will report the results of a cross sectional study of rhythmic sensitivity in approximately 200 children (50 Pre-school children, 50 5-year-old age children, 50 6-year-old children and 50 7-year-old children) to consider performance on this skill across the age groups and examine how it relates to the development of phonological awareness and word reading ability. Both lexical stress sensitivity and metrical stress sensitivity will be assessed and each skill considered separately for its ability to account for variance in reading and phonological awareness at each stage of development.
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Donna Wright (CUNY) Linnea Ehri - Do beginning readers’ remember orthography?
Beginning readers’ memory for spellings with initial and final doubled letters was investigated. Forty kindergarten and first graders were pretested on their phonological and orthographic ability and classified as partial and full alphabetic phase readers. Each phase group was randomly assigned to learn to read one of two equivalent word sets. Recall memory, recognition memory and transfer of orthographic patterns were assessed. Results indicated differences favoring full phase readers. However, both phase groups significantly recalled and three days later recognized orthographic features. Neither phase group generalized training. Retention of training words was dependent on whether words were legal English spellings.
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Zohreh Yaghoubzadeh (U. of Toronto) Fataneh Farnia , Esther Geva - A multi-componential approach to modeling reading development in second language learners.
Recent research on reading development in L2 has examined the contribution of basic cognitive processes and language proficiency to different reading components. However, to date no theoretical models have been tested that integrate cognitive, linguistic and reading components. Using longitudinal data of ESL children (grades 1 to 3) this presentation will offer an integrative model of reading development. The model illustrates the direct and indirect paths through which basic cognitive processes, oral language skills, and word identification in grade 1 contribute to the development of reading efficiency and reading comprehension in grade 3.
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Minwha Yang (U. of Virginia) - Difference in orthographic development between dyslexic and normal Korean children.
This study examines whether the orthographic development of Korean children follows the English developmental spelling theory, and whether the orthographic progression of Korean dyslexic and normal children are different. 120 Korean children in grades 1 to 6 participated in this study. An author-made feature spelling inventory was administered to the children and Guttman analysis was conducted to investigate children’s orthographic skill. A preliminary result revealed that Korean children learn alphabetic features first, and pattern features, and lexical meaning features the last. The analyses to compare normal and dyslexic children are in progress.
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Li Yin (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Richard Anderson - Phonological awareness and word reading: What can we learn from Chinese first graders learning English as a foreign language?
This study investigated the relationship between phonological awareness and word/character reading with 70 EFL first graders in Beijing, China. Four tasks assessing phonological awareness based on onset-sound type and twelve tasks assessing word/character reading ability based on word/character familiarity and regularity were administered in Chinese and English respectively. Confirmatory factor analysis selected a three-factor model: 1) cross-language ability to estimate pronunciations of NOVEL word/characters, 2) cross-language ability to read FAMILIAR words/characters, and 3) cross-language onset awareness. This result indicated a word/character learning strategy transfer in children from logographic language background learning an alphabetic language in the beginning level.
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Liu Ying (U. of Pittsburgh) Susan Dunlap. Julie Fiez, Charles Perfetti - Learning to read characters: An fMRI study of controlled learning of orthographic, phonological and semantic constituents.
Native English speakers learned 60 Chinese characters as either completely triangulated constituents (orthography, phonology, and meaning) or as incomplete associations of orthography-phonology or orthography-meaning. fMRI scans of learners showed greater activation (compared with English) in areas that supported the learning orthographic form (the fusiform region) and areas that support the learned phonological and semantic connections (e.g. mid-frontal regions). More generally, the evidence points to two generalizations. (1) Learning form and meaning is supported by distinct brain areas. (2) Some areas are general across writing systems, but others (e.g left middle frontal gyrus) are more specifically involved in learning Chinese, consistent with the SAH.
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Yolanda W.S. Yuen (Queen’s U.) Lesly Wade-Woolley - Phonological representation and English reading in Chinese ESL children.
The present study extends the results from Yuen and Wade-Woolley (2004) in investigating the role of phonological representation in ESL reading. Syllabic, but not phonemic, monitoring, was found to be significantly related to ESL reading. In the present study, a priming task is used to investigate if Chinese ESL children use syllabic or phonemic units in reading words. In addition, the performance of the priming and monitoring tasks are used to investigate if phonological representation uniquely contributes to ESL reading. The results of the present study will shed light on best instruction for ESL children.
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Jing Zhang (OISE) Janette Pelletier - Chinese children comparison between Chinese Montessori kindergarten and traditional Chinese kindergarten.
This study was conducted to discover whether different schooling (traditional Chinese schooling and Montessori schooling) in the same cultural context affect children 79 children of age four and age five respectively from one traditional school and one Montessori school were participated in the study. This study found that children from different schooling systems showed different developmental performance in both reading and writing tasks, which indicates that different schooling may have different impacts on children Chinese kindergarten performed better than those from Montessori school.
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Marcy Zipke (Graduate Center at CUNY) Linnea Ehri - The role of metalinguistic awareness in reading comprehension.
This study used structural riddles and ambiguous sentences to examine the importance of metalinguistic awareness in reading comprehension. 100 sixth- and seventh-graders were tested on 25 structural riddles and 40 ambiguous sentences. Performance was correlated with scores on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary subtests (MacGinitie & MacGinitie, 1989). Significant positive correlations were uncovered between vocabulary and riddle solving as well as ambiguous sentence recognition, and between reading comprehension and both riddle solving and ambiguous sentence recognition. A multiple hierarchical regression revealed that the ability to solve riddles accounted for unique variance in the reading comprehension scores, after vocabulary was statistically controlled. These results suggest that training in metalinguistic awareness may help to improve text comprehension--a significant departure from more traditional strategy-based methods of teaching reading comprehension.
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