Last revised June 20, 2002
Society for the Scientific Study of Reading
June 27 – June 30, 2002
The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago
Ordered by Principal Investigator’s Last Name
Nobuhiko Akamatsu (Doshisha University). Effects of word-recognition
training on automatization in English as a foreign language.
This study investigated the effects of word-recognition training on automatization
of word recognition in English as a foreign language (EFL). The second aspect
of the study concerned the effects of word consistency between spelling and
pronunciation on EFL word-recognition performance. Results showed that EFL learners
benefited from word-recognition training; they were able to recognize the target
words significantly more quickly and more accurately. Furthermore, correlational
analyses suggested that improvement in word-recognition speed with inconsistent
words was associated with automatization. Improvement in word-recognition speed
with consistent words, on the other hand, tended to be associated with simple
speed-up.
Stephanie Al Otaiba (Florida State University). "Non-responder":
A synonym for reading disabled? Can third grade reading disabilities be predicted
by responsiveness to early literacy treatment at kindergarten?
The purpose of the first study was to describe the characteristics of students
who did not respond to an effective early literacy intervention conducted across
kindergarten and first grade. A follow-up study was conducted to examine the
relationship between student responsiveness and third grade reading difficulties.
Study participants were 104 children, including 7 with IEPs, tested at kindergarten
and again at first grade. A combination of phonological retrieval, verbal ability,
attention and conduct, access to treatment, and phonological encoding with syntactic
awareness correctly predicted student responsiveness group membership for 85%
of the never responsive, 82% of the always responsive, but only 35% of the sometimes
responsive students. In turn, student responsiveness to kindergarten and first
grade treatment correctly predicted 92% of students with reading difficulties
at third grade. Implications for research and practice will be discussed.
Jason L. Anthony (University of Houston), and Christopher J. Lonigan. Word sensitivity,
syllable sensitivity, onset/rime sensitivity, phoneme sensitivity, analysis,
synthesis, and sound categorization are all phonological awareness!
Controversy exists concerning the nature of phonological sensitivity (PS), an
important causal variable in reading acquisition. One view holds different PS
skills reflect independent cognitive abilities; another suggests these skills
reflect a single ability. This study examined the overlap of 18 PS skills involving
four levels of linguistic complexity across four levels of task complexity in
947 2- to 5-year-old children from diverse backgrounds. Confirmatory factor
analyses demonstrated all PS skills indexed a single ability within each one-year
age group. Findings support a developmental conceptualization of preschoolers'
phonological sensitivity that progresses from word sensitivity to phoneme sensitivity
and from synthesis to analysis.
Amanda Appleton (Vanderbilt University), and Donald L. Compton. Exploring the relationship
between two text leveling systems and reading fluency in students experiencing
reading difficulties.
Given that most poor readers have significant difficulties decoding words,
it is unclear what criteria should be used to evaluate the accessibility of
text for these children. Both readability and decodability formulas have been
advocated as a means of selecting appropriate text for struggling readers. The
purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between two different leveling
systems, text decodability and text readability, and reading accuracy and fluency
in second grade children experiencing difficulties learning to read. To examine
these relationships, this study will use two different measures of readability
(Dale-Chall and Flesch-Kincaid) and two different measures of decodability (the
percentage of decodable words and the lesson at which the text becomes 85% decodable)
based on the Phonological and Strategy Training (PHAST) program (Lovett et a.,
2000). This study will extend current knowledge about the relative importance
of decodability and readability levels as predictors of accuracy and fluency
in text for students experiencing difficulties learning to read. Results are
intended to assist practitioners in selecting texts that are accessible for
children at their instructional level.
Egbert M. H. Assink (Utrecht University), Stans de Haas, Petra Rendering,
Sanne Rietberg, and Maaike de Vries. Development of orthographic processing
in elementary and secondary school age readers
Thirty-four normally reading eighth grade elementary school students and thirty-seven
fifth grade grammar school students participated in a computer controlled orthographic
processing task. Stimuli were letter sequences containing one open space, represented
by an underscore character, e.g. bli_k. Subjects had to decide if inserting
any letter would create a real word. The presented stimuli were factorially
manipulated on frequency, age of acquisition and within-word position of the
open space. Strong frequency and age of acquisition effects were found. Elementary
school students showed consistent position effects, indicating a incompleted
automatic access to orthographic representations in the mental lexicon.
Bettina Baker (University of Pennsylvania), and John F. Sabatini.
A comparison of a phonogically-based, linguistically informed individualized
reading program and a balanced literacy approach to teaching reading for struggling
minority readers.
This paper compares the Individualized Reading Program (IRP), a program
for minority, struggling readers to a balanced literacy program. The IRP combines
direct instruction in alphabetic principles with narratives that address the
emotional concerns and interests of inner city children. Fifty-eight 2nd to
4th grade African-American children who were 1-2 years behind in reading were
randomly assigned to one of the two treatment conditions. Results indicate
that both the IRP and balanced literacy groups showed significant gains on the
Word Attack, Word Identification and Passage Comprehension on the Woodcock Reading
Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R). However, the IRP intervention led to significantly
greater gains on Word Attack and Word Identification post-test scores.
Michal Balass (University of Pittsburgh), Lesley A. Hart, and Charles
A. Perfetti. Reading skill differences in semantic, phonological, and orthographic
processes: Behavioral and ERP evidence.
Research has shown that differences in comprehension skill are associated with
the effectiveness of basic word identification skill (Perfetti, 1985), which
in turn depends on lexical knowledge (Perfetti and Hart, 2000). Our study uses
behavioral and ERP measures to examine differences in lexical skill using meaning
and pronunciation decision tasks. We found skill-related differences in ERPs,
including potential shifts around 300 (P3) and 400 (N4) ms after the onset of
a word. The results are interpreted within the Lexical Quality Theory (Perfetti
& Hart, 2000), reflecting differences in readers' knowledge at the word
form (spelling and phonology) level that affect meaning retrieval.
Nanci Bell (Lindamood-Bell Learning Process). Concept imagery: A critical factor in
reading comprehension.
This presentation describes three sensory-cognitive functions critical to
language processing: concept imagery, phonemic awareness and symbol imagery.
Weakness in concept imagery causes inability to comprehend and retain “gestalts”
and to develop higher order thinking skills. Accurate decoding requires phonemic
awareness which is implicated as the most pervasive cause of decoding and spelling
problems, including those labeled “dyslexia.” Decoding and spelling fluency
requires symbol imagery for quick word recognition and accurate spelling. All
can be remediated.
Stuart E. Bernstein (Middle Tennessee State University), and Rebecca Treiman.
Do children use consonantal context when learning the pronunciation of vowel
graphemes?
A clue word task was used to explore how children in first through third grade
(N = 98) use context when learning to pronounce nonwords containing unfamiliar
vowels (e.g., zuop pronounced /zup/). Children used newly learned pronunciations
more often in items that shared two graphemes with a clue word (e.g., ruop and
zuot) than in items that shared only one (e.g., ruok). The new pronunciation
was no more frequent for targets sharing their vowel and final consonant (rime)
with the clue word than for targets sharing their initial consonant and vowel.
Implications for views of reading development are discussed.
Rebecca S. Betjemann (University of Denver), Janice M. Keenan, Jonathan
Potter, and Tedra A. Fazendeiro. Comprehending the GORT without reading it.
Poor decoding on the Grey Oral Reading Test (GORT-3) is often accompanied
by relatively high comprehension scores. Is this because poor decoders are good
comprehenders, or because some comprehension questions can be answered even
when the passage is poorly understood? To answer this question, we had 77 college
students answer the 4-alternative questions of the GORT without reading the
passages, and found that 57% of the questions were answered correctly, well
above chance. Non-readers' accuracy correlated significantly (r=.54) with young
readers' accuracy. Young readers' accuracy was predicted by passage-dependence
of the questions but not by decoding ability.
Freyja Birgisdottir (University of Oxford), and Peter Bryant. Pre-readers’
awareness of onset, rime and coda and its relationship to reading and spelling
development.
This study examined whether different forms of phonological awareness might
be linked in different ways to literacy. Pre-schoolers were followed up through
their first two years of schooling and given a range of phonological tasks that
required differing degrees of segmental ability. Results showed that in year
3, all the explicit measures were significant predictors of reading and spelling,
but the implicit measures were not. In year 2, only implicit and explicit measures
of onset were connected to literacy. These results highlight the significance
of the implicit/explicit distinction in comparing the predictive value of different
phonological units in reading achievement.
Richard Boada (University of Denver), and Bruce F. Pennington. Implicit
phonological representations in children with dyslexia.
The segmentation hypothesis in dyslexia states that deficits in phoneme
awareness are due to poorly segmented phonological representations. Three experimental
tasks were used to measure this construct: a lexical gating task, a priming
task, and a syllable similarity task. In all three tasks children with dyslexia
performed consistently worse than CA controls, and generally worse than RA controls,
when more segmental representations were required. Implicit phonological representations
were significantly correlated with measures of speech perception, phoneme awareness,
and phonological short-term memory, but not rapid automatized naming. These
results provide strong support for less mature implicit phonological representations
in dyslexic children.
Donald J. Bolger (University of Pittsburgh), Julie Van Dyke, Nicole
Landi, Charles A. Perfetti, and Barbara Foorman. What errors can tell us
about representation and process: Investigating a quantitative theory of reading
acquisition.
Current theories of reading acquisition define the development of reading skill
as the acquisition of quality orthographic word representations. Essential to
the acquisition process is the development of spelling-sound relationships reflected
in sublexical orthographic units (letters and letter-patterns). The Restricted-Interactive
Hypothesis (Perfetti, 1992) provides a framework to understand and predict reading
performance as a function of printed word learning at varying levels of skill.
A study was conducted on 144 first graders in the Houston Public Schools testing
the acquisition and transfer of structural orthographic knowledge. Participants
were administered 2 stories on Day 1 and isolated word lists on Day 2. Oral
reading performance was scored for accuracy and errors were both hand and tape-recorded.
Analyses are proposed to test the hypotheses of the RI model. Accuracy of story
and isolated word reading is expected to differ as a function of skill level.
More importantly, transfer of structural rime unit knowledge is expected to
increase according to skill level differentially compared to the transfer of
GPC knowledge. Error pattern analyses are expected to provide detailed evidence
of distinctions in spelling-sound knowledge as skill level increases. The results
of this study are expected to provide support to the RI model as well as suggest
what role orthographic rime units play in reading development.
James R. Booth (Northwestern University), Yasu Harasaki, and Douglas D. Burman. Development
of lexical and sentence level context effects for dominant and subordinate word
meanings of homonyms.
Nine, ten and twelve-year-old children read aloud dominant, subordinate
or ambiguous bias sentences that ended in a homonym. After the sentence, children
read aloud targets that were related to the dominant or subordinate meaning
of the homonym or control targets. There were three main developmental and reading
skill findings. First, 9-year-olds and low skill readers showed lexical level
facilitation in accuracy. Second, 9- and 10-year-olds or low and moderate skill
readers showed lexical level facilitation in reaction time. Third, 12-year-olds
or high skill readers showed sentence level facilitation in reaction time with
high skill readers additionally showing sentence level inhibition in reaction
time.
Mieke Bos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), and Pieter Reitsma. Effects of copying,
writing-from-memory and reading on poor spellers.
This study evaluates some computer-assisted exercises in spelling for children
with problems in learning to spell. It was hypothesized that repeated practice
in a carefully designed computer program could help poor spellers to improve
their spelling. Every child practiced 12 words in each of 3 conditions: a) copying-from-screen,
b) writing-from-memory and c) reading aloud from the screen. Both before and
after the training, the children completed a dictation and a reading test. An
immediate posttest in spelling showed that the children profited most from the
copy-from-screen condition. However, a month after training the words of the
write-from-memory condition were retained best. Reading had no significant impact
on spelling improvement. It is concluded that computer assisted exercises requiring
children to actually type the words have great potential to help children with
problems in spelling.
Patricia Bowers (University of Waterloo), and Karen Baker. Characteristic
errors of double deficit subtypes on the Quick Spell Test.
Do children with deficits in rapid naming tasks make particular types of
errors processing briefly-presented visual stimuli? The Quick Spell Test (QST)
presents differing types of four-letter strings to children for 250 ms. Previous
studies found that children with deficits in both phonemic awareness and rapid
naming make many errors reporting the letters in these strings, especially those
with little orthographic structure. QST errors of 80 Grade 2 children fitting
definitions for groups with single, double and no deficits were analyzed. Children
with rapid naming deficits had characteristic errors which will be discussed
in terms of broader visual processing constructs.
Margo Bowman (Wayne State University), and Rebecca Treiman. The
special status of word-initial letter names in connecting print and speech.
Research suggests that prereaders can use their knowledge of letter names to
connect printed and spoken words, especially when the letter names occur at
the beginnings of words. The present study went beyond previous studies by
comparing initial and final letter names in the same experiment. Prereaders
learned to pronounce four types of made-up words: name initial (RM -arm), name
final (FR-far), control initial (LD-arm), and control final (ML-far). Children
performed significantly better in the name-initial condition than the other
conditions. Young children's ability to use letter names to link print and speech
appears to be limited to word-initial cues.
Ana Carolina Perrusi Brandão (University of Sussex, Falmer), and Jane Oakhill. “How
do we know the answer?“ Children’s use of text data and general knowledge in
story comprehension.
This study investigates how young readers use information from the text
and/or their general knowledge when answering comprehension questions. After
each response, the children were asked how they found out the answers to the
questions. Their responses and justifications were analyzed qualitatively and
quantitatively. The text proved to be the main source of information for these
readers. The procedure of asking children to justify their answers was shown
to be a good way of identifying some of the problems they have with text comprehension
and it also encouraged them to look back to the text.
Kathleen J. Brown (University of Utah), Darrell Morris, Matthew Fields,
Stacey Lowe, Debbie Skidmore, Debbie Van Gorder, and Connie Weinstein. Who
can provide effective reading intervention after grade one? The role of teachers’
aides in serving maximum numbers of struggling readers.
Several empirical studies suggest that early reading intervention following
a model developed by Morris (1999) is more effective for at-risk first graders
than standard Title 1 intervention (see Brown et al., 2000; Morris et al., 2001;
Santa & Hoien, 1999). One study (Morris, Shaw, & Perney, 1990) suggests
that a similar model may be effective for second and third grade students when
delivered by closely supervised volunteers. However, the effectiveness of this
model, known as Next Steps, has not been evaluated for struggling readers above
grade one who receive the intervention from non-certified teacher aides. The
worth of such an investigation lies in the potential to inform the field regarding
the parameters of effective intervention delivery for maximum numbers of struggling
readers in high-impact schools.
Douglas D. Burman (Northwestern University), and James R. Booth. Learning to read unfamiliar
words improves word perception.
The effect of reading rehearsals on the ability to accurately perceive the
spelling of a word was examined. After rehearsing a list of pseudowords, adult
subjects indicated whether a briefly-presented sequence of letters in a perceptual
task accurately spelled the initial fragment of a rehearsed pseudoword. Due
largely to improved perception of letters at later positions, rehearsals improved
accuracy for longer letter sequences. Changes in perceptual processing with
rehearsal were further suggested by changes in the relationship of reaction
times for correct and variant sequences. Similar rehearsal effects were observed
for subjects learning to read an unfamiliar musical passage.
Kate Cain (University of Essex), Jane Oakhill, and Peter Bryant.
Individual differences in children’s comprehension skills: Concurrent prediction
by working memory and verbal ability.
We report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between
working memory capacity, reading comprehension ability, and component skills
of text comprehension. When children were aged 8, 9 and 11 years, performance
on working memory assessments and tasks that require the monitoring and integration
of information predicted unique variance in reading comprehension after word
reading, vocabulary and verbal ability controls. Further analyses revealed
that the relations between the comprehension processing skills (comprehension
monitoring and inference making) and reading comprehension were not wholly mediated
by working memory capacity. Thus, although working memory and comprehension
subskills share variance, they also explain unique variance in reading comprehension.
Marketa Caravolas (University of Liverpool), and Jan Volin. Predictors of reading and
spelling achievement in Czech and in English.
Predictors of reading and spelling achievement were compared in a group
of Czech (N = 80) and British-English (N = 60) primary school children in order
to examine whether the relative importance of phonological awareness, verbal
memory span, and processing speed varies as a function of orthographic depth.
Parallel forms of reading and spelling tests were designed in each language.
Also, matched tests of nonverbal IQ, WISC-III subtests: Vocabulary, Coding,
and Digit Span, as well as phonological awareness were administered. Regression
analyses indicated that when age, schooling and IQ were controlled, phonological
awareness accounted for unique variance in reading and spelling in both languages
as did verbal short term memory. Moreover, while graphomotor speed was a unique
predictor of spelling, it did not account for unique variance in reading in
either language.
Cláudia Cardoso-Martins (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais). The relative
contribution of sensitivity to rhyme and phoneme to beginning reading acquisition
in Brazilian Portuguese.
We describe the results of a longitudinal study investigating the contribution
of sensitivity to rhyme and phoneme to beginning literacy acquisition in Portuguese.
Sixty-six Brazilian children participated in the study. Children's sensitivity
to rhyme and phoneme at 5 years of age significantly predicted their progress
in learning to read and spell later on. However, the results also suggested
that the effect of sensitivity to rhyme on beginning literacy acquisition in
Portuguese is largely mediated by sensitivity to phoneme. Unlike previous research,
the same procedure was used to assess sensitivity to rhyme and phoneme. It is
thus unlikely that the present results can be explained away in terms of differences
in the cognitive demands of the rhyme and phoneme tasks.
Joanne F. Carlisle (University of Michigan), Nicole Patton, Kay Gugisberg, and Katherine
Strasser. Phonological sensitivity as a cornerstone of language learning
and literacy acquisition.
This study explores MacWhinney's view that phonological sensitivity plays
is the foundation for morphological learning. Specifically, the precision of
children's representations of the word phonology may impact their learning of
vocabulary and grammatical forms and their developing language comprehension
and expression. Kindergartners and first graders were given tests of (a) segmentation
of syllables in nonsense words and novel compounds, (b) nonword and "silly
sentence" repetition, and (c) formation of noun compounds. Along with developmental
changes in the relation of phonological measures to language and reading, the
results show that sensitivity to sounds in words contributes to students' grasp
of word formation principles, word meaning, and comprehension.
Julia Carroll (University of York), and Maggie Snowling. The speech
and language skills of children at risk of reading difficulties.
Studies have found that children with a family history of dyslexia often show
difficulties in speech and language tasks in the pre-school years. The present
study examines these deficits. Fifteen children with a family history of dyslexia
were compared to children with speech difficulties in the absence of family
risk and fifteen normally developing controls in a 'matched triplet' design.
The children were given language, speech, and phonological awareness tasks.
The children with a family history of dyslexia showed speech skills in between
those of the other two groups. However, their language and phonological awareness
was similar to that of the speech impaired children. These results are interpreted
using the phonological representations hypothesis.
Ronald P. Carver (University of Missouri-Kansas City). Investigating the root causes
of high and low reading achievement and the phonological deficit hypothesis.
A verbal aptitude test, called Verbal Level Aptitude Test (VLAT), and a
pronunciation aptitude test called Spelling Words Aptitude Test (SWAT) have
been developed to test components of a causal model of reading achievement.
These two tests, plus 8 other tests, were administered to 130 sixth and seventh
graders in an urban charter school. This data collection has just been completed.
These data will be analyzed prior to the annual meeting to see if there is correlational
evidence consistent with hypotheses regarding the theorized causal model, using
structural equation modeling.
Soracha Cashman (University of Wales), and Victor vonDaal. Effects of neighborhood
frequency and instructional method on novel word learning.
Effects of neighbourhood frequency in reading acquisition were examined by comparing
the acquisition of novel words of high and low neighbourhood frequency. Implicit
and explicit methods of reading acquisition were evaluated. Forty Year 2 monolingual
English speaking children were assessed for reading and spelling ability, and
were measured on acquisition of novel words of varying neighbourhood frequency
in two learning conditions; incidental and instructional. It was hypothesised
that the higher the frequency of the neighbourhood of the novel word, the better
it will be recalled, and that instructional methods of reading acquisition will
yield significantly higher levels of word recall than incidental methods. This
study will discuss the effects of neighbourhood frequency on reading acquisition,
evaluate neighbourhood frequency effects on orthographic code mapping, and consider
the merits of print exposure versus specific instruction on reading tasks.
Hugh W. Catts (University of Kansas), and Tiffany Hogan. The fourth grade slump: Later
emerging poor readers.
In learning to read, a “slump” is often reported around the 4th grade. At
this point, some children who have had few difficulties begin to experience
significant problems in reading. In this study, we identified a group of late
emerging poor readers (at 4th grade) and compared them to early emerging poor
readers (at 2nd grade) and consistent poor readers on measures of language comprehension
and word recognition speed and accuracy. Late emerging poor readers demonstrated
normal word recognition abilities, but showed deficits in language comprehension.
Early emerging poor readers showed deficits in word recognition speed and accuracy
and low-normal to normal abilities in language comprehension.
Carol Christensen (University of Queensland). The impact of collaborative
writing compared with whole-class direct instruction in remediating writing
disabilities.
This study examined the efficacy of two forms of pedagogy for children in Grade
4 experiencing difficulty in producing written text. Specifically, whole class
teacher-directed instruction was compared with collaborative writing. In addition
to children with writing disabilities there were two control groups; one age,
class and sex matched, and one achievement, school and sex matched (grade 2).
Over 700 children in 30 classes in seven schools were initially assessed. Within
schools participating classes were assigned to either whole-class direct teaching
or collaborative writing. The intervention program consisted of a sequence of
10 lessons in written language. Children were taught; that sentences begin with
capital letters and end with periods, to segment text into sentences, to sequence
ideas based on logical structure, to use cue questions (why, when what, where)
to extend their text on a particular topic, and to revise text at syntactic,
semantic and pragmatic levels. Final testing occurred at the conclusion of
the sequence of lessons and consisted of an individual and collaborative writing
sample. Analyses indicate that significant differences exist between normally
achieving students and students experiencing writing disabilities depending
on the type of instruction they receive. All students seemed to make remarkable
gains during the program. However, normally-achieving students seem to have
performed in the collaborative writing condition relative to children experiencing
writing disabilities. The paper will explore factors underlying performances
of different types of children under different instructional conditions.
Chris Coleman (University of Georgia), Noel Gregg, Robert Stennett, Cheri Hoy, J. Mark Davis,
Richard K. Olson, Sally J. Wadsworth, and John C. DeFries. The Colorado Perceptual
Speed Task as a measure of orthographic processing.
The presentation will feature research and normative data on the Colorado
Perceptual Speed Test (CPST; DeFries et al. 1981; Decker 1989), a 3-part, timed
task requiring the examinee to rapidly scan and circle groups of matching letter-number
clusters. The CPST correlates highly with other tests that address orthographic
awareness/skill (e.g., decoding and spelling achievement tasks), and yet is
not itself an achievement test. Therefore, it can serve as a valuable independent
measure of orthographic processing. Clinical use and performance patterns (among
students with and without disabilities) will be discussed.
Donald L. Compton (Vanderbilt University). Modeling the relationship between growth
in rapid naming speed and decoding skill in first-grade children.
This study used an extant longitudinal correlational data set (Compton, 2000)
to model the relationship between growth in decoding skill and rapid naming
speed in 1st grade children. Over an academic year, 75 1st grade children were
assessed 7 times (once per month) in word reading, nonword reading, rapid naming
of numbers, and rapid naming of colors. Phonemic awareness skill and letter
name knowledge were also measured during the initial assessment wave. Results
from three different sets of analyses are presented with each addressing a different
question regarding the relationship between rapid naming speed and early decoding
skill development. In the first set, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was
used to investigate the importance of phonemic awareness skill, letter knowledge,
rapid naming of numbers, and rapid naming of colors as predictors of individual
decoding skill growth parameters. In the second set, multivariate latent growth
curve analysis was used to examine the relationship between growth in decoding
skill and growth in rapid naming speed. In the final set, a 2-piece incremental
linear growth model was used to explore growth in rapid naming speed before
and after the initial onset of decoding skill acquisition. Results indicated
a unique relationship between rapid naming of numbers and early decoding skill.
A bidirectional relationship between decoding skill and rapid naming speed of
numbers was supported, with rapid naming speed prior to the acquisition of decoding
skill predictive of future decoding skill and with increased growth in rapid
naming speed facilitated by the acquisition of decoding skill.
Carol McDonald Connor (University of Michigan), and Holly K. Craig. Cultural-linguistically
diverse preschoolers’ responses to teachers’ requests and effects on early reading
skills.
This study explored how the cultural-linguistic status of at risk preschoolers'
language systems impacted classroom discourse surrounding teacher requests,
as a mediating effect on early literacy development. Preschoolers included children
who used African American English (AAE), children for whom English was a second
language (ESL), and children who used Standard American English (SAE). Children
in the SAE group attained significantly stronger early reading skills than did
children in the AAE and ESL groups. Classroom discourse mediated achievement
differences; SAE and AAE children benefited from highly interactive classroom
discourse whereas ESL children benefited from more structured and predictable
discourse.
Holly K. Craig (University of Michigan), Connie A. Thompson, Julie
A. Washington, and Stephanie L. Potter. Dialectal variations from print by
African American students.
This investigation examined African American English (AAE) production during
reading of the Gray Oral Reading Tests. Participants were 64 typically developing
African American male and female 2nd through 5th graders. Most students produced
dialect during oral reading and crediting the accuracy scores for AAE features
yielded statistically increased total reading scores. Opportunities for phonological
features of AAE were high and all but one phonological feature was produced
in this context. A phonological feature system for child AAE is presented.
Results are discussed in terms of the impact of dialect on the reading of typically
developing African American students.
Claudine Crane (University of York), and M. Snowling. On-line inference
during children’s reading of fairy tales: A developmental perspective.
This paper presents findings from a study investigating on-line inference
generation during children's reading of narratives based on real-world and fictitious
information. 45 children (aged 7, 8 and 9 years) read a series of passages
and completed a True/False sentence judgment task based on causal and elaborative
inferences embedded in the text. Results suggested that children from all three
age groups generated causal but not elaborative inferences on-line during reading.
This pattern of inference generation was the same in both real-world and fictitious
passages. Findings are interpreted with reference to the influence of belief
bias on inference generation.
Virginia Cronin (Mount St. Vincent University). Rhyming, rapid naming,
verbal fluency and reading acquisition.
Although many investigators find that early rhyme discrimination and rapid naming
tasks predict later reading acquisition in young children, theoretical understanding
remains elusive. This paper relates early language abilities that may reflect
automaticity to reading acquisition in a longitudinal study. The ratio of sight
word and nonsense word acquisition was related to preschool rhyme discrimination,
rapid naming, and verbal fluency. Children who needed many sight words before
reading three nonsense words were found have slower early automaticity scores
and to develop reading proficiency more slowly. These results were discussed
in term of the theory of word modules.
Rebecca J. Cross (University of Colorado), Chayna J. Davis, Sally J. Wadsworth, John
C. DeFries, and Richard K. Olson. Testing the evidence for a differential
genetic etiology of reading disability subtypes.
Previous studies have presented evidence for a significant differential
genetic influence on reading disability in relation to both IQ and processing-speed
subtypes: Genetic influence was relatively low for disabled readers who were
relatively low in IQ and processing speed. This difference in genetic influence
is confirmed in the present study. However, additional analyses show that much
of the difference in genetic influence on reading disability depends on the
IQ and speed correlations with the reading measure. When reading level was regressed
out of IQ and speed, their differential genetic influence on reading disability
was reduced and no longer statistically significant. A similar pattern of results
was found with several new subtype variables that are highly correlated with
reading, including phoneme awareness, phonological decoding, and orthographic
coding.
Anne E. Cunningham (University of California, Berkeley), Kathryn E. Perry,
Laura Rodriguez, Keith E. Stanovich, and Paula J. Stanovich. How teachers
spend their time teaching language arts: The mismatch between policy and practice.
Teacher education is becoming a central issue in policy discussions of children's
literacy. How teachers structure and allocate their instructional time for reading
education, in addition to their knowledge of reading development and processes
and pedagogy, is of increasing concern among researchers and policy makers.
In this study, we investigated reading-related subject matter knowledge, beliefs
and instructional practices in 150 first grade teachers. We examined the structure
of teacher's implicit beliefs about reading instruction, and the relations between
teacher's knowledge, beliefs, and practices via teacher reported rubrics delineating
the amount of instructional time they devoted to different reading-related activities.
Chayna J. Davis (University of Colorado), Javier Gayan, Valerie S.
Knopik, Shelley D. Smith, Lon R. Cardon, Bruce F. Pennington, Richard R. Olson,
and John C. DeFriesl. Genetic covariation between deficits in reading and
rapid automatized naming.
Children with reading deficits perform more slowly than normally-achieving
readers on speed of processing measures, such as rapid automatized naming (RAN).
While RAN is a well-established correlate of reading performance, and the heritable
nature of both reading difficulties and RAN have been supported by previous
research, few studies have attempted to assess the etiology of their covariation.
In the present study, bivariate DF models showed that deficits in these three
reading measures covary genetically with RAN. Univariate sib-pair linkage analyses
confirmed the presence of a QTL on chromosome 6p21.3 for phonological decoding,
orthographic choice, and reading deficits. Bivariate linkage analyses suggest
that a QTL for reading difficulties may be also a susceptibility locus for slower
performance on RAN tasks.
Peter F. de Jong (Universiteit van Amsterdam), and Aryan van der Leij. Developmental
changes in the manifestation of a phonological deficit in Dutch dyslexic children.
In a longitudinal study the development of phonological awareness and rapid
naming was studied in 19 dyslexic and 19 normal readers learning to read in
Dutch. Dyslexic children showed impairments in rapid naming from kindergarten
through sixth grade. Impairments in phonological awareness at the level of phonemes
became manifest in first grade and tended to disappear at the end of primary
school. However, a second cross-sectional study revealed that fourth grade dyslexic
children's phoneme awareness was hampered when task demands increased. Results
of both studies suggest that dyslexic children's deficits in phonological awareness
and rapid naming follow distinct developmental pathways.
S. Hélène Deacon (University of Oxford), and Peter Bryant. Young
children’s use of base morphemes to spell derived words.
This study examined 7-, 8- and 9-year-old children's use of roots in spelling
two types of derived words: those with phonological changes between base to
derived form (e.g. obsess to obsession) and those with no change (e.g., magic
to magical). Children were shown a clue and asked to spell two-morpheme words
(e.g., shown magic and asked to spell magical) and one-morpheme words (e.g.,
shown met and asked to spell metal). For both types of derivations children
used the clues only in spelling the two-morpheme words. Results will be discussed
in the context of previous research and theories of spelling development.
Carolyn A. Denton (University of Texas, Houston), and Patricia G. Mathes.
Word identification strategies in two early reading intervention models.
As part of a study of early reading intervention, we implemented two small-group
interventions, a direct instruction model and a guided reading model with added
emphasis on word work. This session reports the results of a study in which
we observed and coded the decoding strategies and linguistic units children
were taught to use in the two approaches, and their relationships to reading
outcomes.
Aram Dorit (Tel Aviv University), and Iris Levin. The role of maternal writing mediation
in the child’s literacy achievements in school: A longitudinal perspective from
kindergarten to second grade.
Eva-Maria Ebner (University of Salzburg), Verena Thaler, and Heinz Wimmer. Enhance
reading fluency in German speaking dyslexics.
This study evaluates the effects of a computer-based reading program to enhance
reading speed. Twenty poor readers were trained individually with two different
treatments for five weeks. Both treatments aimed at the implementation of multiple
sublexical associations, concerning onset-clusters and their segments. Words
were presented with either visually and auditorily highlighting the onset-cluster
and its segments or just visually highlighting the relevant parts. The results
indicated substantial gains in reading time. Effects concerning retention one
and four weeks after training as well as generalization on transfer and control
words showed to be significant.
Carsten Elbro (University of Copenhagen), and Dorthe Klint Petersen.
Pre-school prediction of good and poor reading comprehension in grade 7.
Pre-school language measures predict initial reading development fairly
well. But some students may experience late developing problems - perhaps particularly
in the area of reading comprehension. The questions to be addressed are whether
such specific comprehension problems can be found and, if so, how well they
can be predicted from language and other cognitive measures taken in pre-school.
The presentation will report from a follow-up on the Copenhagen longitudinal
study of approx 160 children of dyslexic and non-dyslexic parents. Results from
pre-school to grade 3 were reported previously to the SSSR community.
Mary Ann Evans (University of Guelph), Deborah Shaw, Michelle Bell,
Shelley Moretti, and Maureen Fox. Shared book reading: A "yes"
for vocabulary and phonological awareness; a "maybe" for beginning
reading.
The assumption that reading to your child will foster reading and vocabulary
acquisition was stringently tested by first controlling for child age and sex,
then parental education, and then child cognitive ability before evaluating
the contribution of shared reading in a sample of 120 children. Whether shared
reading fosters phonological awareness was also examined. As the last step in
linear regressions, shared reading predicted no additional variance in kindergarten
emergent literacy, but did predict vocabulary and phonological awareness. In
grades one and two, neither shared reading nor vocabulary predicted reading.
However kindergarten phonological awareness, entered after all other predictors
including vocabulary, predicted both reading, and spelling.
Michaela Evans (University of Waterloo), and Richard Steffy. Predicting
performance in reading achievement: The unique contributions of orthographic/processing
speed and phonological/working memory.
In Grade Four Children (n=100) a Structural Equation Model (SEM) reveals
two separate but positively correlated factors: 1) processing speed and orthographic
measures, and 2) working memory and phonological measures. This SEM was used
to predict shared and unique variance of reading achievement scores, namely
Letter Word Identification (LWID) and Word Attack (WA), from the Woodcock-Johnson-Revised.
Results show that these two factors account for 43% of the variance in LWID
and 80% of the variance in WA. The orthographic/processing speed factor contributes
significantly more unique variance to LWID than the phonological/working memory
factor, while the opposite is true for the WA task.
Tedra A. Fazendeiro (University of Denver), Janice M. Keenan, and Rebecca
S. Betjemann. Latent semantic analysis versus idea checklists: Methods for
assessing passage recall and comprehension.
Children with reading disability and controls both read and listened to passages
from the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI). They gave retellings following
each passage and answered both implicit and explicit comprehension questions.
Retellings were scored using both the QRI idea checklists and Latent Semantic
Analysis (LSA). Results show high correlations between scores from the checklists
and those from LSA for both reading and listening passages. Both measures adequately
predicted performance on explicit comprehension questions, but neither measure
sufficiently predicted scores on implicit questions. Both measures showed that
controls produced better retellings than dyslexics for reading but not listening
passages.
Lauren Figueredo (University of Alberta), and Connie Varnhagen. Detecting a problem
is half the battle: The relation between error type and spelling performance.
We examined differences in spelling error detection and correction in adults
as a function of error type. The error types were phonological (e.g., incredibul),
orthographic (e.g., decisian), and morphological (e.g., extention) errors. Participants
detected and then corrected spelling errors in a one-page essay that contained
18 misspellings. Participants detected significantly more phonological errors
than orthographic and morphological errors and detected morphological errors
the least. Knowledge of how to correct an error may be sufficient for detection
of phonological errors, but is not always sufficient for detection of orthographic
and morphological errors.
Michael M. Gerber (University of California, Santa Barbara), Judy English, and Jill Leafstedt.
Cross language relationships of phonological processing abilities in young,
emerging bilingual students.
Little is known about cross-language transfer of phonological skills in support
of second language reading acquisition by young children. We present results
from the first two years of a longitudinal study of relationships among English
and Spanish measures of phonological processing by 376 Spanish-speaking kindergarten
and first grade students. Analyses are interpreted to suggest that development
of phonological abilities is independent of the characteristics of students'
first (L1) or second (L2) language. Performance on Spanish phonological tasks
is predictive of ability to perform similarly on parallel English tasks despite
lack of proficiency in spoken English.
Vincent Goetry (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and Philippe Mousty. Do bilingual
children activate the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of their two languages
when reading in one?
The present study examined whether French-Dutch and Dutch-French bilingual
children activate the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of their non-dominant
reading language when required to name words in their dominant reading language.
These children were compared respectively to Dutch and French monolinguals in
a reading task including words with cross-linguistic inconsistent grapheme-phoneme
correspondences. The results show that the bilinguals are able to inhibit their
knowledge of the non-dominant language only when none of the stimuli contain
graphemes typical to that language. It is suggested that orthographic typicality
may play an important role in preventing cross-linguistic interference during
reading in bilingual children.
Noël Gregg (University of Georgia), Deborah Knight, Chris Coleman, Robert B. Stennett,
Cheri Hoy, and Mark Davis. Reading comprehension: The influence of task demands.
This study investigated the contribution of specific cognitive and linguistic
processes on three different reading comprehension tasks (multiple choice; cloze;
free recall) in samples of college students with (n=93) and without dyslexia
(100). A series of regressions were conducted to investigate the contribution
of phonology, orthography, fluency, working memory, executive functioning and
oral language to different reading comprehension task demands.
Jennifer Griffin (University of Texas, Houston), Jason L. Anthony, Barbara R. Foorman,
Christopher Schatschneider, and David Francis. Word decodability as a function
of context and repetition.
Identifying determinants of word decodability is important for classroom
instruction, curriculum development, and policy making. This study examined
the effects of context and repetition on word decodability. Ninety at-risk first
graders read words in no context, low context, and high context conditions.
Half of the words in each condition were repeated once. Separate ANOVAs for
each list found significant main effects of context and repetition and a significant
context by repetition interaction, such that context effects were overshadowed
by repetition effects if words were encountered twice. Results indicate that
decoding skills of at-risk beginning readers benefit from increased contextual
cues and repeated exposure to challenging words.
Yvonne Griffiths (University of Essex), Peter Bailey, Nicholas Hill, and Margaret Snowling.
An examination of the evidence for basic auditory processing deficits in
dyslexia: Frequency discrimination.
Pure tone frequency difference limens were measured in a group of 12 dyslexic
and normal reading adults. The following variables were examined: paradigm (2I2AFC
v 4I2AFC), standard frequency (fixed v roved), stimulus duration (400 ms v 20
ms), interstimulus interval (400 ms v 2800 ms), interpolated interferers (present
v absent). Group thresholds did not differ significantly when the 4I2AFC procedure
was used, but differ in all conditions using a 2I2AFC procedure. There were
no significant interactions between group and the remaining variables tested
suggesting that dyslexics' difficulty with frequency discrimination is not attributable
to poorer auditory memory or impaired phase locking.
Bente E. Hagtvet (University of Oslo), Erna Horn, and Sol A. H. Lyster. Oral language
precursors of reading difficulties: A longitudinal study of children of dyslexic
parents.
The present study focuses on the relation between phonological, syntactical
and semantic variables as measured at ages three through six, and different
aspects of reading, at ages seven, eight and nine. Seventy children of dyslexic
parents were followed longitudinally during the age period from three through
nine, and oral and written language skills were assessed yearly. The results
suggest that later reading skills are determined by a broad specter of oral
language variables. A rather strong relationship is, for example, found between
comprehension of complex syntax at age three and reading comprehension at age
nine. The results are discussed with reference to Norwegian orthography, which
is rather transparent, and also with reference to developmental theory.
Kendra M. Hall (Teachers College, Columbia University), Joanna P.
Williams, Kristen D. Lauer, K. Brooke Stafford, Laura A. DeSisto, and John S.
deCani. A study of the effect of text structure and content on at-risk second
graders’ comprehension of compare/contrast informational text.
This study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional program designed
to teach the comprehension of compare/contrast informational text, a program
that emphasized text structure while also introducing new content. Compared
to more traditional instruction that emphasized only content and to no instruction,
the program improved students' ability to comprehend compare/contrast informational
text. Students were able to demonstrate some transfer of this knowledge to
uninstructed compare/contrast texts, although they were not able to transfer
this knowledge to text structures other than compare/contrast. Findings indicate
that text structure instruction can improve 2nd grade students' comprehension
of compare/contrast informational text and such instruction does not detract
from their ability to learn new content.
Lesley Hart (University of Pittsburgh), Edward Wlotko, and Charles
Perfetti. Event related potential study of individual differences in learning.
An Event Related Potential (ERP) experiment compared word processing and
learning in skilled and less-skilled reading comprehenders. Subjects took a
vocabulary test and were given 45 minutes to study 60 of the words they did
not know. They then participated in an ERP task in which they made semantic
judgments about previously known words, newly learned words, and unknown words.
ERP recordings were made during the presentation of the word. The ERP signatures
to the word types and comprehension were different, indicating that ERPs can
be used to study individual differences and learning.
Laura Boynton Hauerwas (Providence College), and Joanne Walker. Spelling
of inflectional morphemes: A study of phonological, morphological and orthographic
influences on children’s spelling.
Evidence suggests that, as spelling develops, children are influenced by their
phonological, morphological, and orthographic abilities. Little is known about
the relationship of these factors in impaired spellers. To address this, our
study focused on the relationship between children’s spelling of inflected verbs
and performance on phonological, morphological, and orthographic tasks in both
impaired and age-matched and spelling-matched peers. Children were given a
series of spelling and metalinguistic awareness tasks. Results indicated that
age-matched and spelling-matched subjects did better on inflectional morpheme
spelling tasks than the children with deficits in spelling. Variation in phonological
and orthographic awareness accounted for differences.
Kristina Herden (University of York), and Margaret J. Snowling. The role of paired-associate
learning in the development of reading skills.
The acquisitions of letter-sound rules and of sight words are both forms
of visual-verbal paired-associate learning. Thus, most research in relation
to reading development has focused on visual-verbal paired-associate learning.
This paper explores how performance on both inter- and intra-modal paired-associate
learning tasks relates to reading skills as well as to phonological and rapid
naming skills. A group of 49 children (5-11 years) were administered tests of
word and nonword reading, phoneme deletion and rapid naming, as well as visual-visual,
verbal-verbal and visual-verbal paired associate learning tasks. It was established,
which of the measures could account for unique variance in concurrent reading
skill. Results are discussed within a developmental model of the acquisition
of reading skills.
Benjamin Heuston (Waterford Institute), and Mark St. Andre. A three-year
study of the effectiveness of the Waterford Early Reading Program Level 1 in
eight Idaho school districts.
In 1998, the Waterford Early Reading Program - Level 1 was implemented in virtually
every Kindergarten classroom in the state of Idaho. Eight districts were selected
as a representative sample and agreed to be part of a three-year study. Each
year the performance of Kindergarten students were tracked relative to an historical
control group. The results were measured using a Kindergarten Inventory that
had been created by Marilyn Adams and Phil Gough. Overall, students performed
markedly better than the control group, with average effect sizes measuring
between 0.21 and 1.09 for various groupings of students.
Tiffany Hogan (University of Kansas), and Rochelle Harris. Phonological
awareness training in first graders and the later effects on word reading in
their native and second language.
This study investigated the effects of a short, intensive English phonological
awareness intervention on the native and second language reading skills of 64
first grade children in a French immersion program. Results indicated that the
phonological awareness treatment yielded statistically significant increases
in phonological awareness skills immediately following the treatment although
these effects did not differentiate native or second language reading skills
over time. Furthermore, findings showed that risk grouping based on initial
phonological awareness scores differentiated native and second language reading
skills at pre-, post-, and follow-up testing. Implications for phonological
awareness training in an immersion setting are discussed as well as the at-risk
determination for native and second language reading skills.
Lorenc Hoxhallari (University of Wales), and Victor vonDaal. Learning to read in Albanian:
A skill easily acquired.
Effects of orthographic transparency were examined by comparing children learning
to read in Albanian, Welsh and English. Twenty Year 1 Albanian children were
given a reading test consisting of a 100 word stratified sample of decreasing
written frequency. They were able to read accurately 80% of the words and knew
the meaning of 77%. Reading latency was a direct effect of word-length (R2=.88).
Errors tended to be mispronunciations rather than real word replacements, and
there were hardly any null-responses. These results were compared with Ellis
and Hooper (2001), in which an identical design was used with English and Welsh
children of the same age, but with one more year of formal reading instruction.
The Albanian children read more words than the English and Welsh children, knew
more word meanings, but had longer reading latencies. Like the Welsh children,
but unlike the English children, the Albanian children made more nonword errors.
These results suggest that children acquire reading faster the more transparent
the orthography, and that shallow orthography promotes an initial relianceon
a phonological ecoding strategy.
Jacqueline Hulslander (University of Colorado, Boulder), Erik Willcutt, Joel
Talcott, Caroline Witton, Bruce Pennington, and Richard Olson. Reading ability,
ADHD, and performance on visual and auditory psychophysical tasks.
Two auditory psychophysical tasks, 2Hz auditory modulation detection and
2Hz frequency detection, and one visual psychophysical task, coherent motion
detection, were significantly correlated (.3-.4) to individual differences in
word reading. A visual form detection task was not (although this task had poor
reliability). However, ADHD is related to both word reading and auditory thresholds,
thus possibly contributing to their correlation. When controlling for ADHD,
the auditory-word reading correlations become non-significant. The relationship
between motion detection and word reading appears independent of this potential
confound. Relationships between psychophysical thresholds, ADHD, and the component
skills of reading are also discussed.
Florian Hutzler (University of Salzburg). Different reading strategies in orthographies
of different consistency: Evidence from an eye movement study.
Our hypothesis was that readers may adapt to the inconsistencies of English
by relying on larger letter clusters or whole word patterns, while less pressure
towards large grain-sizes may operate in more regular orthographies. We tested
this hypothesis by collecting naming latencies and eye-movement data of German
and English readers. Expectations were that English readers may exhibit shorter
naming latencies and fewer fixations per word, in particular for high frequency
items. English readers indeed exhibited shorter latencies and a smaller number
of fixations for high, but not for low frequency words. There was no orthography
difference for fixation time.
Galit Ishaik (University of Waterloo), Patricia G. Bowers, and Richard A. Steffy. On
the road to understanding good and poor reader accuracy differences for different
word types.
The literature addresses the importance of a variety of skills for reading
achievement. The current study investigates the contribution of phonological
awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), orthographic awareness (OA),
and rapid perception (auditory and visual) to regular, exception, and pseudoword
reading in good and poor reader groups. Exploratory factor analyses with the
5independent variables yielded slightly different factor structures in grade
4 good and poor reader groups. Furthermore, variance in reading regular, exception
and pseudowords was explained by different factors in the good and poor reader
groups.
Joseph R. Jenkins (University of Washington), Julia A. Peyton, Patricia F. Vadasy, and
Liz Sanders. Effects of more and less decodable text on reading development
of at-risk first grade students.
Two groups of at-risk first graders received reading tutoring using the same
phonics program. Students in the More Decodable group also read storybooks that
were consistent with the phonics program. Students in the Less Decodable group
read stories composed of high frequency words. During the first 30 lessons,
the more decodable storybooks were 85% decodable vs. 14% decodable for the less
decodable storybooks. A control group did not receive tutoring. Both tutored
groups significantly surpassed the control on an array of decoding, word reading,
passage reading, and comprehension measures. However, the more and less decodable
groups did not differ significantly on any measure.
Annette R. Jenner (College of the Holy Cross), Katherine M. Quinn, Erin
J. Sorey-Gregory, and Leonard Katz. Make familiar words unfamiliar: A study
of mixed-cAsE.
Recent neurobiological model of reading proposes that unfamiliar words are
processed in a left dorsal circuit but familiar words are processed in a left
ventral circuit. This model has stimulated interest in the mechanism by which
unfamiliar words become familiar over time through repetition. Two experiments
were run in which some words were made initially unfamiliar by mIxEd-cAsE presentation.
Subjects performed a lexical decision on both lowercase and mixed-case stimuli;
mixed-cases were slower. For the final repetition, mixed-cases stimuli were
reversed (e.g., bEaCh - BeAcH). Reaction time did not change. This suggests
that participants are not using whole word orthographic patterns to recognize
words.
Rhona S. Johnston (University of Hull), Alan McNeil, and Hazel Scott. Poor readers
are impaired in using phonological coding in pictorial memory tasks.
Poor readers aged 12 did not show word length effects with pictorial presentation,
and had smaller phonological similarity effects than reading age controls. However,
the poor readers showed a normal pattern of performance with auditory and printed
word presentation. Attempts to induce 10 year old poor readers to show word
length effects via teaching them either covert or overt rehearsal were unsuccessful.
A longitudinal study of poor readers showed that by the age of 15 poor readers
were still not showing clear cut word length effects. The relevance of these
findings for difficulties in learning to recognize words will be discussed.
Lauren A. Katz (University of Michigan), and Joanne F. Carlisle. The making of close
readers: Using word-analysis strategies to improve comprehension.
This paper presents an investigation of an instructional program designed
to address the needs of students with reading and language-learning difficulties
who have difficulty becoming independent readers in the late and middle school
elementary years. The program consists of training in word analysis strategies
(for higher-level decoding and for inferring meanings of unfamiliar words in
texts) and guided practice using these analytic skills during reading. Case
studies (single-subject design) of students between 4th and 7th grade show that
the instructional program results in noticeable growth on treatment and transfer
measures of reading morphologically complex words and inferring meanings of
words from context. In addition, students tended to make significant progress
on standardized measures of word reading and comprehension.
Janice M. Keenan (University of Denver), Rebecca Betjemann, and Tedra
Fazendeiro. Reading disability and inference deficits in listening comprehension.
This study presents preliminary results from the listening comprehension component
of an ongoing behavioral genetics study of comprehension skills in reading disability
(RD). Using Barnes, et al.'s (1996) task, we assessed inferencing when knowledge
differences between RD and non-RD children were equated. Twins ages 8 - 16
learned a knowledge base, then listened to passages referring to it, and then
answered literal, coherence inference, and elaborative inference questions.
Younger children with RD, but not older children, show deficits in inferencing
even when they are just listening and even when they have the knowledge needed
to make an inference; these comprehension skills are heritable.
Nenagh Kemp (University of Manchester). Adults’ spelling of
pseudoword plurals: Not as good as you’d think.
This study examined whether adults spelled the final /s/ or /z/ of ostensibly
plural, non-plural, and neutral pseudowords via the morphology-based plural
rule (regular English plurals are always spelled with "s"), or simply
via knowledge of the frequency with which certain letters co-occur. Sixty adults
wrote 48 pseudowords whose appropriate final spelling could be determined by
a) the plural rule only (e.g., "prees"/"preeze") or b) the
plural rule or their final sound combination (e.g., "pleens"). Participants
used the plural rule, but only to a limited extent. They instead relied heavily
on orthographic frequency patterns to complete both plural and non-plural pseudowords.
Brett Kessler (Wayne State University), Rebecca Treiman, and Suzanne
Bick. Use by skilled spellers of context-sensitive patterns: Onsets and codas
constrain the spelling of English vowels.
The English monosyllables familiar to adults were analyzed to find the situations
in which the spelling of a vowel becomes significantly more determinable when
the identity of an adjacent consonant is taken into account. We ran experiments
to test whether adults are sensitive to these patterns when spelling nonwords
and when making errors in spelling real words. The results with single-syllable
stimuli show that spellers are indeed sensitive to influences of both preceding
consonants (syllable onset) and following consonants (syllable coda) when spelling
vowels, belying theories that context is unimportant or only influential within
the rime.
John R. Kirby (Queen’s University), and S. Hélène Deacon. Comparing
the roles of morphological and phonological awareness in children’s reading.
It has been suggested that phonological awareness plays an important role
in predicting early reading achievement, while morphological awareness is important
in determining later reading development (e.g., Singson, Mahony & Mann,
2000). The present research examines this question in a longitudinal study with
101 children (beginning in grade 2). Over the course of four years, measures
of phonological and morphological awareness accounted for similar amounts of
the variance in children’s progress in reading comprehension, phonological decoding
and word identification, after controlling for IQ. The implications of these
results will be discussed in the context of previous research on the role of
linguistic skills in reading development.
Line Knudsen (University of Copenhagen), and Carsten Elbro. The X-test: Knowledge of
text genre may influence reading comprehension.
The poster presents a test of knowledge of genre and structural text features.
Measures of readers’ use of higher order text structures are usually confounded
with lower order abilities, notably decoding. This confound is avoided in the
X-test by replacing all letters with Xs. The reader is then asked to use his
or her knowledge of how information is conventionally organized in each of the
X-texts presented. A study indicated that knowledge of genres and structural
features explained a significant amount of variance in reading comprehension
after controlling for decoding.
Karin Landerl (University of Salzburg). Arithmetic skills in children with dyslexia.
Everyday experience with dyslexic children suggests that a substantial number
of them have problems with arithmetic, as well as with reading and spelling.
Difficulties with certain arithmetic skills could well be a consequence of the
specific cognitive deficits underlying the children's literacy difficulties.
On the other hand, there may exist a considerable amount of comorbidity of dyslexia
and dyscalculia. The paper is going to report first findings from a comprehensive
assessment of arithmetic skills in 8- to 9-year old poor readers. The tasks
were designed to tap different basic components of arithmetic ability, e.g.
number reading and writing, mental calculations, counting speed, automatic number
processing, understanding of mathematical concepts and estimation.
Nicole Landi (University of Pittsburgh), Julie Van Dyke, Charles A. Perfetti, and Barbara
Foorman. Causes and consequences of predictability.
A predictable sentence context has been shown to facilitate word identification,
an effect that is greater for less skilled readers than for skilled readers.
In addition, words that are more difficult to identify in isolation receive
a greater benefit from a predictable context than words that are easy to identify
in isolation (Stanovich & West, 1982). These effects suggest that readers
can use context to aid word identification. This work combines empirical evidence
(from first grade readers) examining the effect of learning words in a predictable
context on later word identification and from computational models that outline
factors important to word predictability.
Kristen D. Lauer (Teachers College, Columbia University), Joanna P.
Williams, Kendra M. Hall, K. Brooke Stafford, and Laura A. DeSisto. Are second
grade students sensitive to informational texts: The relationship among structure,
content, and ability.
This study examined whether second grade students were able to read and
understand unfamiliar, historical content texts written in either a typical
informational textbook structure or a narrative structure. Comprehension of
these texts was compared with comprehension of familiar texts in which the events
paralleled those in the unfamiliar texts and were events that could possibly
occur in the students' everyday lives. Finally, the study investigated the effect
of low and high reading ability. The study found that ability, structure, and
content familiarity influenced performance for questions related to the content
and structure of the text; ability and structure influenced summarization performance;
and only ability influenced performance on detail questions.
T. V. Joe Layng (Headsprout, Inc.), Janet S. Twyman, and Kent R. Johnson. Contingency
adduction in a beginning reading program.
A process of contingency adduction is defined when behaviors learned under one
set of circumstances may, either combined with other behaviors or alone, be
recruited to serve a new function by a different set of circumstances. The research
reported here investigated the application of contingency adduction to establishing
sound-to-letter correspondence, and vocalized sound blending in the context
of an Internet deployed reading/decoding program for non-readers. Children age
4 to 6 were taught to discriminate letter/sound correspondence with minimal
presentations; often, only one stimulus presentation was required. With little
instruction, children also reliably blended sounds to say words.
Annukka Lehtonen (University of Oxford), and Peter Bryant. Awareness of phoneme duration
preducts literacy skills.
Traditionally, phoneme awareness tasks have tested children's ability to
manipulate or differentiate between different phonemes. However, other aspects
of sound can differentiate between meanings in different orthographies, e.g.
tones in Chinese and duration in Finnish. We used Oddity Task (Bryant &
Bradley, 1978) with two conditions to test children's phoneme awareness. The
items differed either in terms of phoneme identity or duration. Children also
did a pseudo-word spelling task and a reading test. We found that the Duration
condition emerged as a strong and significant predictor of both spelling and
reading, while Identity condition predicted neither.
Valerie Marciarille LeVasseur (University of Connecticut), Paul Macaruso, Laura Conway
Palumbo, and Donald Shankweiler. Formatting text faciliates fluency in developing
readers.
Is reading facilitated by marking major syntactic boundaries in text? Second
graders read aloud passages appropriate for their grade level under two text
format conditions: In one condition the end of every line coincided with the
end of a phrase; in the other, line breaks always interrupted a major phrasal
constituent. The results show that text formats preserving phrasal units facilitate
reading response time and result in fewer false starts and stumbles at the beginning
of lines following return sweep. The findings indicate a potential benefit
of text manipulation in promoting fluency in young readers.
Deborah Litt (University of Maryland, College Park). An exploration
of the double deficit hypothesis in the reading recovery population.
Sixty children selected for Reading Recovery were tested on rapid object
naming, elision, and blending before instruction in Reading Recovery began.
Subjects were then classified along the dimensions proposed by the double deficit
hypothesis. At the end of their Reading Recovery instruction, the data will
be analyzed to determine whether deficit status is related to reading outcomes
as measured by: (1) successful completion of Reading Recovery, (2) difficulty
of text read at 90% accuracy, (3) reading rate, (4) length of time needed to
complete the program, and (5) TOWRE Sight Word Efficiency. Analysis of post-treatment
scores on the classification measures may provide an indication of whether instruction
in Reading Recovery brings about change in the core processes.
Ying Liu (University of Pittsburgh), Charles Perfetti, and Min
Wang. Learning to read in a new writing system: ERP evidence.
Can ERP data indicate learning in a new writing system? American colleges students
enrolled in a Chinese language course participated in a year long learning study.
In one of many tasks to assess their learning, students named both Chinese characters
and English words while ERP recordings were made from surface electrodes. Results
showed an early indicator of language difference between English and Chinese
at 120ms. Curriculum-defined character frequency effects, taken to be the indicator
of learning, were observed at 450ms, later than frequency effects observed in
the reader's native language. These results show that a reader's exposure to
learned words is detectable in ERP recordings.
Denis Lobo (Reading Upgrade LLC). Scientific reading instruction
meets MTV: Results from first year studies on Reading Upgrade.
Results from completed studies at four sites have shown that the Reading
Upgrade intervention program delivers dramatic gains of one to three grade levels
in reading over four to ten weeks, versus one grade per year with alternative
methods. The program uses pop and hip-hop teaching songs, interactive auditory
processing games, and MTV-style visuals. The processing centers for music (rhythm,
pitch, lyrics) overlap with centers for reading. After a lifetime of exposure
to environmental music and television U.S. students develop advanced neural
pathways for audiovisual input. Thus we hypothesize that the rapid gains achieved
result from exploiting these pathways.
Linda J. Lombardino (University of Florida), Wayne M. King, Sarah T. Ahmed,
and Simone Campbell. Computerized program for evaluating accuracy and speed
for nonword decoding, word recognition and spelling recognition tasks.
A computerized program (The Phonological and Orthographic Screening Tool for
Dyslexia, POST-D) was developed to assess accuracy and rate in nonword decoding,
word reading, and spelling recognition. The program was administered to 21
participants who were diagnosed with dyslexia and 17 who had normal reading
and spelling abilities. Participants were given the computerized test in addition
to a battery of standardized reading/spelling tests. The two groups differed
significantly on all of the computerized test measures. Further, the POST-D
reading and spelling scores were highly correlated with the standardized spelling
and reading measures. The computerized test proved to an efficient and valid
method for measuring decoding, word reading, and spelling recognition.
Sharon MacCoubrey (Queen’s University), Lesly Wade-Woolley, and Don A. Klinger. Early
identification of grade one French immersion students at-risk for future reading
difficulties.
The present study examined which measures best identify English-speaking
French Immersion students at-risk of future reading difficulties in French and
English. Using reading scores taken in both languages at the end of Grade 1
and beginning of Grade 2, good and poor reading groups were defined. Measures
taken at the beginning of Grade 1 were used to determine group membership. Discriminant
analysis showed phoneme blending and sound isolation identified group membership
in English and phoneme blending and rapid naming identified poor and good readers
in French. These results can be used to identify new cases for early intervention.
Frank Manis (University of Southern California), Kim Lindsey, and Caroline Bailey. Early
prediction of reading disabilities in Spanish-speaking children.
We explored cross-linguistic transfer of phonological and other reading-related
skills between Spanish and English. We administered a kindergarten battery of
Spanish language tests to 330 children in a Texas border town. Follow up measures
of reading in Spanish and English were obtained at the end of first and second
grade. Analyses revealed some evidence for cross-linguistic transfer, but also
some evidence for language specificity. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness
and print awareness showed evidence of transfer, whereas Spanish vocabulary
was uniquely predictive of Spanish reading skill. Approximately 65% of the children
could be classified correctly as good or poor readers in English at the end
of second grade based on kindergarten Spanish measures.
James R. McBride (Renaissance Learning, Inc.), and Steven P. Tardrew.
Mapping the development of pre-reading skills with STAR early literacy.
Research for an innovative assessment system has provided a map of the development
of pre-literacy skills. STAR Early Literacy is a computer-administered, adaptive
assessment of component skills of reading. It administers test items, tailored
to ability level, from seven literacy domains: General Readiness, Graphophonemic
Knowledge, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Comprehension, and Structural
Analysis. This paper will describe STAR Early Literacy, and emphasize the methodology
employed in calibration of its item bank, and in mapping the development of
proficiency in the seven literacy domains it comprises. Finally, it will display
results of the mapping by age cohort, grade, and scale score.
Catherine McBride-Chang (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Chun Pong Wat, and
Yiping Zhong. The role of morphological awareness in predicting Chinese character
recognition in beginning readers.
We examined concurrent and longitudinal (across 9 months) predictors of Chinese
character recognition in 192 Hong Kong and 89 Xian Tan Chinese kindergartners
(mean age=4.9 years). Because Chinese characters contain relatively rich visual
information (Chen, 1996), we tested the extent to which various visual skills
would predict early character acquisition. Children's syllable deletion skill
was a strong predictor of early reading. Various visual skills were also associated
with early character recognition, though their patterns of association were
less consistent across cultures. Future research should focus on isolating
which visual skills are most strongly predictive of early Chinese character
acquisition.
George W. McConkie (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Shun-nan Yang. How
cognition affects eye movements in reading: An interaction/competition explanation.
Cognitive processes related to reading have been observed to affect eye
movement patterns in several ways. Detailed explanations about the underlying
mechanisms of eliciting such effects often assume direct cognitive control.
Here we reported a newly developed theory of eye movement control in reading,
emphasizing on the neurophysiological underpinning about how and what certain
oculomotor events occur when readers encounters reading difficulty, by means
of neural inhibition. Two studies are reported, revealing the effects of reading
difficulty on saccade programming, in terms of its effects on saccade latency
and saccade length in a time-linked manner. Emphases will be on the effects
of detecting or previewing an obvious reading problem on the dynamic process
of saccade programming, and on how the elicited effects can be observed across
several fixations, depending on the nature of the difficulty.
Souhila Messaoud-Galusi (LEAPLE and ILPGA), René Carré, Liliane Sprenger-Charolles,
Agnes Kipffer-Piquard, and Will Serniclaes. Perceptual segregation of speech
sounds by dyslexic children.
Speech stimuli can be perceived as a sequence of phonemes despite the absence
of a segmental marker. Formant transitions between two vocalic endpoints (/a/
and /i/) are perceived as a sequence of three vowels (/aEi/) when their duration
exceeds some threshold. The present study shows that segregation of a continuous
transition into small-size linguistic units depends both on reading delay and
age. This seems to indicate that acquisition of small-size units in speech perception,
although not necessary for oral communication, are required for establishing
the correspondence with graphemes during reading development.
Vera C. S. Messbauer (University of Amsterdam), and Peter F. de Jong. The
influence of visual and phonological distinctiveness on visual-verbal paired
associate learning in Dutch dyslexic and normal readers.
The effect of visual and phonological distinctiveness on visual-verbal paired
associate learning was studied in two experiments. In the first experiment,
the influence of visual similarity on word learning was examined in 46 dyslexics
and 46 chronological-age controls. Results showed that dyslexic children performed
worse than controls on word learning, but were not hampered to a greater extent
than the controls by visual indistinctiveness. In the second experiment (dyslexics,
n=43; chronological-age controls, n=43) phonological similarity of the words
was manipulated. Results replicated the findings of experiment 1. Additionally,
it was found that only normal readers associated phonologically distinct words
with indistinct visual stimuli more easily than indistinct words.
Carlin J. Miller (University of Georgia), George W. Hynd, and Scott R. Miller. Using
parental phonological processing and rapid naming ability to predict child decoding
ability.
The double-deficit hypothesis suggests that phonological processing and rapid
naming may be the core deficit areas in dyslexia. Dyslexia is also known to
have genetic etiological factors, but an intergenerational model of the double-deficit
hypothesis has not been tested. Eighteen parents who reported childhood reading
problems and 23 of their children who also demonstrated poor reading achievement
were identified. Hierarchical linear regression was used to test the predictive
effects of parental phonological processing and rapid naming on child decoding
skills. Results from this study suggest that parental phonological processing,
but not rapid naming is predictive of child reading performance.
Paul Morgan (Peabody College, Vanderbilt University), Caresa Young,
and Doug Fuchs. Effects of tutoring on the reading performance of treatment
resistant children.
This study evaluated the effects of providing treatment resistant children
exhibiting chronically low sight word and non-word performance with short-term
but intensive one-to-one tutoring. Participants were four 1st-grade children
failing to make adequate progress after receiving increasingly individualized
reading interventions. Each child received one hour of one-on-one tutoring daily
for 10 consecutive school days. Instruction included phonemic awareness training,
letter-sound recognition, and decoding through reciprocal teaching. Visual analysis
indicated that all participants made strong gains in non-word reading, but weak
gains in sight word reading. Results are discussed in terms of the resource
needs and characteristics of treatment resisters.
Frederick J. Morrison (University of Michigan), Carol McDonald Connor, and
Leslie Katch. Specificity in classroom instruction effects on first graders’
reading outcomes.
Research provides information about the skills children need to master to become
good readers; however we understand less about the methods and styles of teaching
that best meet the individual needs of first-grade children. In this study we
explore the contrasting effects of teacher-directed-explicit-word-level instruction
and child-directed-higher-order instruction on end-of-the-year outcomes for
children with differing cognitive abilities and beginning of first-grade reading
skills. HLM results suggest significant interactions between children's cognitive
and beginning-of-the-year reading skills and the amount of and change in time
spent over the school year on specific types of instruction. Research and instructional
implications are discussed.
Louise Morrison (York University), and Esther Geva. Comprehension
monitoring in first and second language reading.
In this paper, I report the results of a cross-lingual study on the role
of comprehension monitoring and underlying linguistics/cognitive processes on
first and second language reading proficiency (English and French, respectively).
Results show that successful monitoring, as measured by error detection performance
at the discourse level, does transfer across languages, and that monitoring
performance is highly correlated with reading proficiency in both languages.
While monitoring performance in English was the most important predictor of
reading proficiency in both languages, lower level processes such as word recognition
and working memory played an important role in predicting reading proficiency
in both languages.
Jack Mostow (Carnegie Mellon University), Greg Aist, Juliet Bey,
Paul Burkhead, Andrew Cuneo, Brian Junker, Susan Rossbach, Brian Tobin, Joe
Valeri, and Sara Wilson. Independent practice versus computer-guided oral
reading: Equal-time comparison of sustained silent reading to an automated reading
tutor that listens.
A 7-month study of 178 students in grades 1-4 at two schools compared two daily
20-minute treatments. 88 students did Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) in their
classrooms. 90 students in 10-computer labs used the 2000-2001 version of Project
LISTENs Reading Tutor (RT), which uses speech recognition to listen to a child
read aloud, and responds with spoken and graphical assistance (www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen).
The RT group significantly outgained their statistically matched SSR classmates
in phonemic awareness, rapid letter naming, word identification, word comprehension,
passage comprehension, fluency, and spelling -- especially in grade 1, where
effect sizes for these skills ranged from .20 to .72.
Valerie Muter (University of York), Charles Hulme, Margaret Snowling,
and Jim Stevenson. Phonology, grammar and reading: Extending the phonology-reading
model.
We present the results of a two-year longitudinal study of 90 children beginning
at school entry. We investigate the relationships between early phonological
skills, letter knowledge and grammatical awareness as predictors of the development
of reading ability (word recognition and reading comprehension). Word recognition
skills are consistently predicted by earlier measures of letter knowledge and
phoneme deletion ability (but not by vocabulary knowledge, rhyme skills or grammatical
awareness). In contrast, reading comprehension is predicted by grammatical
awareness but not by earlier phoneme deletion ability. The results are related
to current theories about the role of phonological and language skills in the
development of reading ability.
Alyssa Goldberg O’Rourke (Tufts University), Beth O’Brien, Robin Morris, Maureen
Lovett, and Maryanne Wolf. Rethinking the role of intelligence measures in
reading disability research and practice: Cognitive profiles of the double-deficit
subtypes.
Within the reading disability field, intelligence tests are often administered
to document a discrepancy between ability and achievement or to aid in the development
of subtyping classification schemes. Profile analysis techniques represent an
alternative to more traditional methods of analyzing performance on intelligence
tests. In the present study, 235 children with severe reading disabilities
in Grades 2 and 3 were classified into three subtypes according to the framework
of the Double-Deficit Hypothesis (DDH) (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). Profile analysis
demonstrated subtype differences in the patterns of cognitive strength and weakness
based on 10 subtests from the WISC-3. Implications of these findings for research
and practice are discussed.
Richard K. Olson (University of Colorado), Brian Byrne, and Stefan Samuelsson. Preliminary
results from an international longitudinal twin study of genetic and environmental
influences on early reading development.
Parallel longitudinal studies of early reading development in identical
(MZ) and fraternal (DZ) twins have been initiated in Australia (Byrne, PI),
the U.S. (Olson, PI), and Norway (Samuelsson, PI). The twins are being tested
in preschool with static and dynamic assessments of pre-reading skills, and
in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade for their development of early
reading, spelling, and related cognitive skills. Comparisons of the similarities
of MZ and DZ twins are revealing the relative importance of genetic, shared
family environment, and non-shared environment influences on individual differences.
Most of the data collected so far has been from preschool twins, so the talk
will focus on results from the first wave of testing/training.
Rauno Parrila (University of Alberta), Mari Lokholm, and Hanne Nergård. Phonological processing
of high-performing adult dyslexics.
Word reading and phonological processing of self-described Norwegian adult dyslexics
was compared to those of matched controls. Words varying in length, frequency,
and complexity were presented for 500msec and 200msec. Under the long presentation
time, both groups were highly accurate but the control group was significantly
faster. The differences in response speed were largest for short and simple
words. When words were presented for 200msec, there was a significant difference
in both accuracy and response speed. Similar differences were found in nonword
decoding, pseudohomophone choice, and rapid automatized naming tasks, whereas
homophone choice, phonological memory, and choice reaction time tasks indicated
smaller differences. Results are discussed in terms of different models of reading
development.
Dolores Perin (Teachers College, Columbia University). Effects
of language proficiency and text characteristics on the written summarization
of urban adult remedial students.
Urban postsecondary remedial reading students who were native (N=37) or
non-native (N=48) English speakers were compared on their inclusion of important
ideas in an expository composing-from-sources task. Four source texts in two
knowledge domains were used. Native vs. non-native differences were found for
only one of the sources (native<non-native). Similarities between the
two groups on specific ideas selected for inclusion ranged from 14% to 100%,
depending on the source text. Both language proficiency and source text affected
the frequency of copying vs. paraphrasing ideas in producing the written summaries.
Readability and organization of ideas in the source texts are compared.
Linda M. Phillips (University of Alberta), and Stephen P. Norris. University
students’ interpretations of media reports of science and their self-assessments
of those interpretations.
Three hundred and eight first and second year university students were asked
to read five media reports of science describing recent scientific research
and findings. The tasks asked students to interpret and make judgements about
the certainty, status, and role of statements identified in the reports; to
indicate how much knowledge they had about the general topic of the report,
their interest in the general topic, and to self-assess their difficulty reading
each report. Students' self-assessments of their knowledge, interests, and reading
difficulty were rarely significantly correlated with performance on their respective
sections of the interpretative test. However, knowledge, interests, and reading
difficulty within each section tended to be correlated and frequently were correlated
across sections. Students seemed to have an inflated view of their own ability
to read and to understand the five media reports of science. Yet, their interpretative
performance was low. Implications for the development of scientific literacy
will be discussed.
Paige C. Pullen (University of Virginia), Holly B. Lane, and John Wills Lloyd.. Early
literacy intervention: Identifying effective intervention components.
Individual tutoring was provided to 86 struggling beginning readers to identify
effective components of reading intervention. We compared the effects of four
conditions-children formed words by (a) manipulating magnetic letters, (b) writing
letters in Elkonin boxes, (c) manipulating magnetic letters and using Elkonin
boxes, and (d) control-in promoting an understanding of the alphabetic principle.
Results of the study will be discussed.
Pieter Reitsma (VU Amsterdam). Preparing the neighbourhood: Transfer of specific
PA training on reading.
In two training studies the hypothesis was tested that improving phonological
representations of specific words would have beneficial effects on learning
to read similar words (neighbors). In each study severely reading disabled Dutch
children participated and received various kinds of practice in order to attain
more distinct phonological information on these items. In a pretest and posttest
similar words and controls were read. Results of both studies show that training
in phonemic awareness seem to have 'localized' transfer effects.
Jeremiah Ring (Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children), and Jeffrey
L. Black. Correlates of treatment response in an alphabetic phonics dyslexia
curriculum.
Reading intervention research shows there is variability in children's response
to treatment, and that some variance can be attributed to individual differences
at the beginning of treatment. The purpose of this study is to add to that body
of evidence by examining reading growth in an Orton-Gillingham derived treatment
program. The curriculum emphasizes systematic instruction in the structure
of written language to teach reading skills. The data presented in this paper
represent interim results after one year of that intervention. The analyses
focus on student cognitive profiles at pretest with the goal of identifying
student characteristics that can reliably account for observed variability in
treatment response.
João Rosa (Oxford Brookes University), and Terezinha Nunes. Morphological priming
effects in children’s spelling.
Our aim was to analyze the effectiveness of priming in improving children's
spelling of schwa vowels in Portuguese. Primes (presented orally or in writing)
contained well articulated, stressed vowels whereas the targets contained non-stressed
vowels. A non-primed condition served as baseline. If primes prove effective
in improving the schwa vowel spelling, this would demonstrate children's implicit
use of morphological information. No priming effects were detected in 6 and
7-year-old children; 8- and 9-year- olds' spelling improved significantly with
priming. Thus there was no evidence of use of morphological information in younger
children's spelling; implicit use of morphology was demonstrated in older children's
spelling.
Emily Russell (University of Rhode Island), and Susan Brady. An
examination of the nature of reading fluency.
This study investigated the nature of reading fluency by measuring: 1) skills
thought to comprise fluency (rate, accuracy, phrasing ability, expression);
2) other reading abilities (word recognition speed, decoding speed, comprehension);
and 3) potentially related cognitive and linguistic abilities (oromotor speed/
accuracy, syntactic awareness, listening comprehension, working memory, rapid
serial naming). Participants were 83 third- and fourth-grade children whose
fluency was studied at their independent reading levels. Analyses are underway
to determine which cognitive and reading skills best predict each component
of fluent oral reading and to examine the pattern of associations between components
of fluency and other reading abilities.
Mark Sadoski (Texas A&M University), Ernest T. Goetz, Andrew
G. Stricker, and Thomas K. Burdenski, Jr.. New findings for concreteness
and imagery effects in the composition of written definitions
Ninety-two undergraduates wrote definitions of a set of concrete terms and a
set of abstract terms with assignment to use either an imagery strategy, a verbal
strategy, or no strategy (control). Results replicate previous findings of
a significant effect of concreteness and no effect of strategy assignment, but
findings differed in the direction of some concreteness effects. Definitions
of concrete terms tended to be higher in quality. Definitions of abstract terms
were longer and used longer words. Regardless of strategy assignment, participants
reported using an imagery strategy with concrete words and a verbal strategy
with abstract words.
Elinor Saiegh-Haddad (University of Toronto). Linguistic distance and
initial reading acquisition in Arabic diglossic context.
The study examined phonological sensitivity and pseudo word decoding ability
in kindergarten and first-grade Arabic native children. Because native speakers
of Arabic first learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)- a language structurally
distinct from the language they grow up speaking- it was hypothesized that linguistic
differences between the two varieties of Arabic would interfere with the acquisition
of basic reading processes in MSA. Two linguistic contrasts were examined: sound
and syllabic structure. The results showed a clear, but different pattern of
interference of the two contrastive structures addressed on performance. The
results are discussed in terms of the role of linguistic distance in the acquisition
of basic reading processes in a bidialectal/ bilingual situation.
Javier S. Sainz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Carmen Villalba, and Betty Moussikou.
Illusory word- and illusory object-conjunctions: Are the same brain mechanisms
in use?
A migration error can be described as an interaction among items in a multi-word
or multi-object display. For example, given the tachitoscopic display SAND LANE,
subjects cued to report the item on the left often report LAND or SANE instead
of SAND, there being a similar tendency to make migration errors when the item
on the right is cued as well, a result which is known as the surround-similarity
effect. In the first experiment, migration errors were investigated by manipulating
the way a target word is recognized in the context of close similar word-like
distractors. In the second experiment, pictures of artificial objects were constructed
to parallel the experimental conditions of the first one. The same normal adult
readers were run in both experiments, while event-related potentials measures
as well as the usual behavioral responses were taken. Preliminary results show
that both kinds of migration errors partially share common brain mechanisms.
Rebecca L. Sandak (Haskins Laboratories), W. Einar Mencl, Stephen J.
Frost, Justin Bates, Annette Jenner, Stephanie A. Mason, Jay G. Rueckl, Kenneth
R. Pugh, and Leonard Katz. The neurobiology of adaptive learning in reading:
The effects of repetition and differential encoding of word stimuli.
Neuroimaging studies have revealed a set of LH areas critical for word identification,
with ventral (occipitotemporal), dorsal (temporoparietal), and anterior (IFG)
components. Some findings suggest that dorsal and anterior components recognize
printed words by means of slow, attentional processing whereas ventral regions
constitute a fast word-form system. Using fMRI, Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis
by examining cortical activation during a semantic categorization task to novel
vs. repeated items. Areas showing repetition-correlated decreases and increases
in activation were isolated. Experiment 2 investigated how practice with unfamiliar
words resulted in these shifts, more precisely characterizing the cortical changes
associated with adaptive learning.
Dominiek Sandra (University of Antwerp), James Booth, Heike Martensen, Astrid Geudens,
and Charles A. Perfetti. Which factors cause the emergence of onset-rime
effects in word reading? The role of grapheme-phoneme consistency, orthographic
pattern frequency, and experimental task.
This is a follow-up to our SSSR.2001 talk. In a cross-linguistic study we investigated
three factors which possibly underlie rime effects in reading. (i) Rime effects
might reflect that the vowel’s pronunciation depends on the coda. Such dependency
occurs in English (can/car), not in Dutch. (ii) Rime effects might (partly)
be effects of orthographic pattern frequency. (iii) They might also be task-dependent.
Using masked priming in brief identification (BI) and naming we found no language
effect, only a task effect: language-independent effects in BI, none in naming.
To relate these findings to our research question we ran experiments in which
(i) the English vowel pronunciation depended more heavily on the coda and (ii)
non-rimes were primed.
Kathryn Saunders (University of Kansas), and Anthony DeFulio. Relationships among
word attack and phonological-processing skills in individuals with mild mental
retardation.
We explored relationships among word attack and phonological-processing
skills in 30 adults with mild mental retardation. The mean Woodcock Word ID
age equivalent (AE) was 7.8, while mean Word Attack AE was 6.6. There were four
tests of phonological awareness (for rime, and first, middle, and end sound),
two rapid-naming tests (pictures and letters), and a test of speech perception,
which involved repeating nonsense words. All of the phonological awareness measures
and both rapid-naming measures were also significantly correlated with Word
Attack skills. The speech perception task measure was not significantly correlated
with Word Attack skills.
Hollis S. Scarborough (City University of New York, Brooklyn), Anne Charity,
and Darion Griffin. Is unfamiliarity with "school English" related
to reading acquisition by African-American students?
Urban African-American students in kindergarten through second grade were asked
to imitate the sentences in a story book that was read aloud to them in "school
English" (SE). Responses were scored as verbatim correct, as differences
in dialect (phonological or morphosyntactic), or as recall errors that were
unrelated to dialect. Also, comprehension of SE instructional terms was assessed
using a receptive vocabulary measure. Scores on these tests of the children's
familiarity with SE were examined in relation to grade level, reading achievement,
and other language skills.
Barbara T. Schmidt (Graduate School and University Center, City University
of New York), Loraine K. Obler, Linnea Ehri, and Martin Chodorow. Evidence
of dissociation between phonological processes and lexical processes.
This study examines the extent to which oral reading and silent reading
comprehension are dissociable in skilled readers. The twelve undergraduate participants
in this study had good reading comprehension and performed similarly on a silent
single-word reading task. However, there was no significant correlation between
oral reading rate and silent reading comprehension. The results suggest that
oral reading of text and single-word reading aloud are linked to each other,
but not to reading comprehension, providing evidence of a dissociation between
the phonological and lexical processing of words with utilization of two distinct
reading routes, one for decoding and one for meaning.
Latrice M. Seals (University of Texas), Barbara R. Foorman, and Jason L. Anthony. Evaluation
of a vocabulary enrichment program for at-risk third graders.
The present study investigated the effects of a classroom-based Vocabulary Enrichment
Program (VEP) on language and literacy outcomes of schoolchildren. The twenty-week
vocabulary curriculum was designed for speakers of African American Vernacular
English with limited vocabulary. Participants were 231 third grade students
from urban Title 1 schools. The sample was 97% African-American, 3% Hispanic,
and 51% female. After matching on school demographics, schools and sometimes
classrooms within schools were randomly assigned to an intervention or comparison
group. Results indicated that VEP participants experienced greater vocabulary
growth than nonparticipants, F=35.7, p<.001; however, gains did not generalize
to verbal reasoning, reading comprehension, or decoding.
Willy Serniclaes (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Liliane Sprenger-Charolles, Caroline
Bogliotti, Souhila Messaoud-Galusi, Sandra Vanheghe, Philippe Mousty, and René
Carré. Categorial perception deficit in dyslexia: Reliability and implications.
Different studies show that dyslexic children suffer from a categorical
deficit in speech perception. We present a review of the available evidence
for the “Categorical Perception” (CP) deficit and stress its implications for
reading development. We conclude that: (1) the CP deficit is reliable across
studies taking account of methodological differences; (2) dyslexics are less
sensitive to differences between phonemes and more sensitive to acoustic variants
of the same phoneme; (3) this arises from a higher sensitivity to allophonic
differences in speech; (4) this in turn has obvious implications for reading
development and might be a major determinant of dyslexia.
Micahl Shany (Haifa University), and Ilana Ben-Dror. Surface
and phonological reading—Evidence from Hebrew orthography.
The present study investigated the manifestation of sub-types of reading disabilities
in Hebrew orthography. Thirty-seven reading disabled sixth graders participated
in the study. Eighteen subjects presented slow-accurate reading pattern when
reading fully vowelized text (SA) and 19 presented slow-inaccurate reading pattern
(SIA). These two reading disabled groups further presented other distinct reading
patterns: they presented different use of context for word recognition, in addition
omission of vowel marks affected differently their reading patterns. These results
support the patterns of sub-types observed in English orthography but provides
different symptoms that are associated with each reading disabled group. Results
were interpreted as reflecting efficiency of phonological processing as the
most influential cognitive mechanism that underlies the different reading patterns.
In addition it was suggested that other language specific processing such as
naming speed and morphological processing might play an important role in the
development of word recognition efficacy in the case of SA disabled readers
and should be further investigated.
Joseph Shimron (University of Haifa), and Vered Vaknin. Access units in a Semitic
language.
Recent studies in word morphology in Hebrew are reported in an attempt to
examine the construct of "Access units" in Semitic languages. "Access
units" are defined as units that mediate between input stimulus and lexical
representations. Often they give access to grammatical information--forms that
indicate syntactic and semantic notions, but they may also be units that are
simply sensitive to superficial aspects of word structure, appearing as clusters
of graphemes or phonemes. The majority of studies on access units were conducted
on European languages, in which the word's stem as a whole is considered as
one access unit. In Semitic languages, the word's stem is traditionally seen
as a merger of two morphemes, the root and the template. In addition, affixes
are used for inflections and derivations. The studies reported evidence from
Hebrew that necessitates some modification of the access unit definition.
Robindra Sidhu (Queen’s University), and Lesly Wade-Woolley. The
role of language-specific orthographic awareness, phonological awareness, and
rapid automatized naming (RAN) in the word recognition of second grade French
immersion students.
This investigation examined the relation between naming speed and language-specific
orthographic awareness in English and French word recognition. RAN-numbers predicted
unique variance in English word recognition. This variance was related to English
orthographic awareness and not phonological awareness. RAN-letters also predicted
unique variance in English word recognition, however subsequent analyses showed
that RAN-letters considerable overlapping variance with phonological awareness.
In predicting French word recognition, only RAN-letters explained significant
unique variance. RAN-numbers did not predict any unique variance. This difference
may be attributed to lower French orthographic awareness compared to English
orthographic awareness.
Margaret J. Snowling (University of York), Alison Gallagher, and Uta Frith.
Individual differences in the precursors of orthographic skill: Evidence
from children at genetic risk of dyslexia.
This paper reports a longitudinal study of 56 children at genetic risk of
dyslexia, assessed at the ages of 3;09, 6 and 8 years. Sixty six percent of
the high-risk group had reading disabilities at age 8 years. The data suggest
that the risk of dyslexia is continuous: at-risk children who did not fulfill
criteria for reading impairment were slow to learn letters and, at age 6 years
of age, they performed as poorly as at-risk reading impaired children on tests
of grapheme-phoneme knowledge. The findings are discussed within an interactive
model of reading development.
Louise Spear-Swerling (Southern Connecticut State University). Comparing
third graders’ reading comprehension with their fluency in easy text.
This study explored the contributions of word identification accuracy, naming
speed, and oral language comprehension to third graders' reading comprehension
and oral reading fluency (ORF) in easy text. Children's ORF and reading comprehension
correlated substantially with each other (r = .63, p = .000), and with all three
predictors. However, language comprehension accounted for more variance in
reading comprehension than in ORF; conversely, naming speed accounted for more
variance in ORF than in reading comprehension. Children with weak ORF were
not always weak comprehenders in reading (and vice versa). The results suggest
text difficulty may be important to consider in evaluating fluency.
Rhona Stainthorp (London University Institute of Education), and Diana
Hughes. “Matthew effects” in writing: Evidence from precocious readers.
"Matthew effects" in reading predict positive effects from reading
across the curriculum. This paper presents some evidence from a longitudinal
study of precocious readers. The data relate to standardized measures of reading,
writing, and language obtained from fourteen 11 year-olds who had been identified
as being precocious readers before they had started school. Their performance
is contrasted with that of an able group who had not been precocious readers.
The data suggest that there are positive effects on vocabulary and written expression.
However, experimental tasks of narrative writing indicate that it is difficult
to quantify differences in writing performance.
Ronald Stringer (McGill University), Lisa French, Melanie Gotlieb, Mariam Haider, Shahrzad
Irannejad, and Gail McCoubrey. Analyzing the RAN with eye fixation duration
and total task time.
Eye movement characteristics of good and poor readers were observed during RAN
performance. Two groups of twenty participants, categorized as good or poor
readers based on their Wide Range Achieveme