Aaron. - . Alarie. - . Alves. - . Anderson. - . Angell. - . Anthony. - . Aram. - . Arrow. - . Arteagoitia. - . Ayala. - . Babur. - . Baker. - . Balass. - . Barth. - . Bates. - . Beck. - . Bellitti. - . Berends. - . Bernstein. - . Betjemann. - . Biemiller. - . Bignell. - . Bishop. - . Blaiklock. - . Blanchard. - . Blomert. - . Bodé. - . Bogliotti. - . Bonnotte. - . Bosman. - . Both_de_Vries. - . Boulware-Gooden. - . Brenders. - . Breznitz. - . Bryant. - . Bucko. - . Burnham. - . Bus. - . Byrne. - . Cain. - . Cameron. - . Caravolas. - . Cardoso-Martins. - . Carlisle. - . Carroll. - . Carver. - . Casalis. - . Castles. - . Catts. - . Chase. - . Chen. - . Chow B. - . Chow E. - . Christensen. - . Christodoulou. - . Colé. - . Coleman. - . Colin. - . Collins. - . Compton. - . Connelly. - . Connor. - . Corbett. - . Core. - . Cormier. - . Cornelissen. - . Corriveau. - . Cromley. - . Cronin. - . Cruz. - . Cunningham. - . Curry. - . de_Jong. - . de_Luca. - . Deacon. - . deBree. - . Dirks. - . Dole. - . Ducharme. - . Duncan. - . Durand. - . Elbeheri. - . Elbro. - . Evans. - . Farrington-Flint. - . Figueredo. - . Filipppini. - . Foorman. - . Frost. - . Funnell. - . Garcia_Gomez. - . Genard. - . Georgiou. - . Gerber. - . Geudens. - . Giess. - . Gijsel. - . Godfrey. - . Godoy. - . Goetry. - . Goetz. - . Goldberg. - . González-Trujillo. - . Gottardo. - . Goulandris. - . Gregg. - . Griffin. - . Grigorenko. - . Gygax. - . Hagtvet. - . Hamilton. - . Hasselman. - . Hindman. - . Ho. - . Horner. - . Hosp. - . Hughes. - . Hulslander. - . Hutzler. - . Iyengar. - . Jacobs. - . Jared. - . Jenner. - . Jimenez. - . Jiménez. - . Johnson. - . Johnston. - . Joshi. - . Juhasz. - . Karni. - . Kemp. - . Kessler. - . King. - . Kirby. - . Klicpera. - . Kliegl. - . Klint_Petersen. - . Korat. - . Kuhn. - . Kwan. - . Kyle. - . Lafrance. - . Lambrecht_Smith. - . Lamm. - . Landerl. - . Lane. - . Largy. - . Larkin. - . League. - . Lecocq. - . Lee. - . Lehtonen. - . Leikin. - . Leong. - . Leppänen. - . Levin. - . Levorato. - . Levy. - . Leybaert. - . Lipka. - . Luan_Hui. - . Lyster. - . Lyytinen. - . Macaruso. - . Manis. - . Manolitsis. - . Mariol. - . Martens. - . Martin. - . Martin-Chang. - . Mason. - . Masterson. - . McBride-Chang. - . McCoubrey. - . McKenna. - . Messaoud-Galusi. - . Miller. - . Miller_Guron. - . Morgan. - . Morrison. - . Mostow. - . Muter. - . Nation. - . Nelson. - . Nicholson. - . Noble. - . Notenboom. - . Nunes. - . Nunes. - . O’Carroll. - . Oakhill. - . Olinghouse. - . Olson. - . Pacton. - . Palma. - . Perfetti. - . Petrella. - . Peyrard-Janvid. - . Pollo. - . Post. - . Puranik. - . Räsänen. - . Ravid. - . Reichle. - . Richards. - . Richardson. - . Roberts. - . Roberts. - . Rosa. - . Roth. - . Rudra. - . Saiegh-Haddad. - . Saint-Aubin. - . Sainz. - . Samuelsson. - . Sandak. - . Schabmann. - . Scheerer-Neumann. - . Schelstraete. - . Schmidt. - . Segers. - . Serniclaes. - . Serres. - . Shany. - . Share. - . Shaul. - . Sheehy. - . Siegel. - . Simpson. - . Smith. - . Snellings. - . Snowling. - . Sprenger-Charolles. - . Stainthorp. - . Steffler. - . Stein. - . Stringer. - . Stuart. - . Stuart. - . Sucena. - . Suchey. - . Szczerbinski. - . Talcott. - . Thaler. - . Thomson. - . Topping. - . Torppa. - . Trainin. - . Transler. - . Treiman. - . Uhry. - . van_Beijsterveldt. - . van_den_Bos. - . van_den_Broeck. - . van_den_Broek. - . van_der_Schoot. - . van_Gelderen. - . van_Heghe. - . van_Hell. - . van_Otterloo. - . Varnhagen. - . Vasbinder. - . Verhoeven. - . Wade-Woolley. - . Wang. - . Wauters. - . Weekes. - . Williams. - . Wise. - . Wolters. - . Wood. - . Worthington. - . Wu. - . Yuen. - . Yuill
P.G. Aaron (Indiana State University). - A metric to assess sight-word reading skill.
Two strategies are used for pronouncing written words, decoding and sight word reading. In contrast to decoding, sight word reading is quick and automatic. Since sight word reading is an indication of skilled reading, an index of sight word reading would serve as a useful tool. Speed of processing as an index of sight word reading can be problematic because an individual may be a good sight word reader, but slow. Having a common denominator of processing speed can avoid this confound. It was hypothesized that an individual may be considered to be a sight word reader if he can name a list of words as quickly as he can name the letters of the alphabet. When this criterion was applied to 167 elementary children and 75 college students, it was found that sight word reading skill emerges at about third grade. Children with reading disability are slow in developing sight word reading skill.
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Sara E. Alarie (Queen’s University), Marina Davydovskaia, Tanya Martin, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Is there a bilingual advantage for early French immersion students in reading and spelling English?
The present short-term longitudinal study compared French immersion children and English monolingual children. Students were tested in October of Grade 1 and matched on reading level in English with the monolingual English group. Age, cognitive ability and receptive vocabulary in English were controlled. In May of the same school year, tests of phonological awareness, nonword decoding, and spelling were administered. This design was aimed at investigating (1) the possible advantages of bilingualism on these linguistic measures and (2) the relative development of reading related skills and abilities in these groups over the first year of formal instruction.
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Rui Alexandre Alves (Universidade do Porto), Cecilia Aguiar, Sao Luis Castro, Joaquim Bairrio - Assessment of concepts about print using an ecologically valid task with Portuguese children.
Knowledge about writing conventions helps the beginning reader to progress through the printed text. The Concepts About Print task developed by Marie Clay allows to measure that knowledge in the context of a specially prepared picture/text story book, and thus is more ecologically valid than traditional itemized tests that have also been proposed for the same purpose. We prepared a Portuguese version of the task (Conceitos Sobre a Escrita, CSE), and presented it to 41 children aged 5 to 8 years. We found that CSE is reliable and sensitive to grade-related increases in literacy.
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Richard C. Anderson (University of Illinois). - Morphological instruction accelerates Chinese children’s literacy development.
A total of 146 Chinese children participated in a two-year study of morphological instruction. Every reading lesson in the first and second grade was augmented to better explain the structure of new characters and words. After controlling for IQ and performance on a battery of reading readiness tests administered early in the first grade, children who received morphological instruction performed substantially better than control children on reading and writing tests administered early in the third grade. The results suggest a causal connection between insight into character and word structure and growth in literacy.
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Philip Angell (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), Uta Frith - How to become an early reader.
Early reading acquisition was studied in two sisters who started to read very young: At 46 months, Beatrice showed orthographic reading and alphabetic spelling. She also gave more irregular pronunciations to irregular non-words than adults, suggesting the default mechanism was not based on GPC's. In contrast, at 37 months Jemima's reading style was purely logographic. By 43 months, her reading style was still logographic, but her repertoire and accuracy had increased, and this was joined by a nascent alphabetic spelling style. These two cases are used to illuminate reading acquisition in the context of self-initiated learning.
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Jason Anthony (University of Houston) Coleen Carlson - Phonological precision, awareness, memory, and access: The structure and roles of preschool phonological processing abilities in early literacy.
A fourth phonological processing ability (PPA) was recently introduced and asserted to play an important role in literacy acquisition. We examined phonological precision in relation to established PPA and emergent literacy skills. 232 3- to 5-year-old children completed measures of phonological awareness, RAN, phonological memory, phonological precision, letters names, letters sounds, and print discrimination. Confirmatory factor analysis evidenced distinguishability of Phonological Awareness and Phonological Access; however, Phonological Precision and Phonological Memory were correlated at .95. Structural equation modeling found Phonological Precision and Phonological Memory had equivalent correlations with other PPA and literacy skills. Results question the new construct and its roles in development of phonological awareness and word reading.
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Dorit Aram (Tel Aviv University), Sigalit Aviram - Parents’ choosing and reading books to their young children: How does it effect children's literacy and socio-emotional development?
A large though inconclusive body of research connects storybook reading to different aspects of early literacy. Yet little is known as to the relation between storybook reading and children's early socio-emotional development. Moreover, studies have focused on the quantity and quality of reading encounters, but not on how parents select books for their children. The present study investigates the relations between aspects of storybook reading (maternal book selection preferences, frequency of storybook reading, the nature of the reading interactions, and the literacy environment) and the kindergartners' early literacy as well as social emotional development. Forty middle-class mothers and their kindergartners participated in the study. We interviewed the mothers in their homes regarding the following issues: criteria used while selecting books for their children, quantity of storybook reading and other literacy activities, nature of storybook reading, and familiarity with children's literature. We tested children on early literacy measures (letter knowledge, phonological socio-emotional measures (empathy, coherence, and social cognition). Kindergarten teachers also provided information regarding the children's socio- emotional development. Findings will be discussed within the framework of shared reading as a vehicle for literacy and socio-emotional development.
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Alison Arrow (University of Auckland), Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn, Tom Nicholson - Instructional effects on the reading, spelling, and phonological awareness of beginning readers.
Methods of reading and spelling instruction were examined as to their effects on phonological awareness (PA), and on the transfer of skill between early reading and spelling. Sixty-two preschool children attending NZ kindergartens were taught to either read or spell 8 CVC regular words, in conjunction with either word-analysis or meaningful instruction, or they received math instruction. Word-analysis instruction showed the greatest advantage in learning the target words, and allowed early transfer of skill between both reading and spelling. Word-analysis reading instruction also had a task dependent effect on phoneme blending. Implications for models of reading and spelling are discussed.
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Igone Arteagoitia (Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington), Liz Howard - Investigating spelling/reading relationships in Spanish/English bilingual students.
The issue of spelling/reading relationships is a complex one, particularly for bilingual students who acquire knowledge about two different orthographies. In this study, English and Spanish reading, spelling, and oral proficiency data were collected from 171 native-Spanish-speaking and native-English-speaking third-graders in two-way immersion programs. Multiple regression was used to investigate the relationship between English reading and spelling ability for these bilingual students. In the final model, which accounted for 84% of the variance in English reading ability, two distinct English spelling measures were significantly and positively associated with English reading ability, controlling for oral English proficiency and Spanish reading ability.
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Mercedes Muñetón Ayala (Universidad de La Laguna). - Effects of computer assisted instruction on spelling errors.
Using a drills and practice computer program with corrective feedback Muñetón (2000) designed a study to determine which of the processes (i.e. memory, copy or reading) improve the spelling skills in children with learning disabilities in a consistent orthography. Results showed us that copy condition improved the spelling skill more than the other conditions. In the study 43 subjects participated aged between 8 and 10 years within the range of the third and four grade levels of primary education. Students’ spelling was two years below the expected level for their age. Students were randomized for each group. One training group wrote the word from memory and the other copied the word from the computer screen. Stimuli were selected using three psycholinguistic parameters: length (bisyllables and trisyllables), orthography consistency (consistent and non-consistent) and syllabic structure ( cv and ccv). In the present study we try to analyse the different types of errors (substitutions, omissions and spellings) across treatment sessions as a function of differences in copy and memory conditions.
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Nalan Babur (Bogazici University, Istanbul). - Relationships among RAN, linguistic, and cognitive abilities in early readers.
The relationships among Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), phonological awareness (PA), short-term memory (STM), processing speed (PS), letter knowledge (LK), and early reading skills (READ) were examined in a sample of first and second graders who have a variety of reading skills. Causal models of Reading were developed for each grade level and appropriateness of the path models was tested through path analyses. RAN digits/letters (RAN-DL), PA, and LK were independent predictors of READ at each grade level. RAN-DL had an increasingly predictive role in READ, whereas the importance of PA relatively diminished in the second grade. PS and STM had changing roles at each grade level.
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Scott K. Baker (University of Oregon), David Chard, Lana Edwards - Teaching First Grade students to listen attentively to narrative and expository text: Results of an experimental study.
Results of a study to test the efficacy of a first-grade intervention to improve listening comprehension among students at risk of reading difficulty will be presented. Twenty schools, (42 participating first grade teachers), were randomly assigned to an Innovative Story Read Aloud condition or a Standard Story Read Aloud condition. Five students in each classroom are being assessed to determine outcomes. Extensive teacher modeling and questioning, rich discussions, intentional redundancy, and frequent opportunities for student-to-student interactions are key components of the innovation. Treatment fidelity is being measured and instructional data gathered to explain variability in student learning. Data will be analyzed using ANOVA and structural modeling.
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Michal Balass (University of Pittsburgh), Jessica Nelson, Charles A. Perfetti - The effects of word knowledge on new word learning in adults: An ERP study.
How does specific word knowledge affect new word learning? Our goal wasto use ERP's to compare word processing and learning in different word training environments (orthographic, phonological, semantic). Native English speakers of high and low reading skill learned rare English words in one of three conditions: Orthography-Meaning; Orthography-Phonology; Phonology- Meaning. Following training, they made meaning judgments about the words while ERP's were recorded. ERP signals segmented after presentation of second word distinguished between meaning retrieval for unknown rare words and trained words at 400ms. Differences among early and late ERP components were observed as a function of orthographic, phonological, and semantic information that was provided during learning.The latency and amplitude of these components differed with comprehension skill.
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Amy E. Barth (University of Kansas), Daryl F. Mellard, Hugh W. Catts - Improving literacy instruction for adults.
The purpose of this study was to determine the literacy requirements of commonly used adult literacy outcome measures. Specifically, how is performance on recognized components of reading (e.g. word decoding or fluency) related to adult literacy outcome measures?
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Timothy Bates (Macquarie University, Sydney), Anne Castles, Max Coltheart, Nathan Gillespie, Margie Wright, Nick Martin - Molecular genetic analyses of reading & spelling: A component processes approach.
Genetic linkage analysis of reading and spelling traits are reported for the nonword and irregular word phenotypes of the Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading. Four reading and spelling phenotypes were assessed and a genome wide scan for linkage was conducted in a large adolescent DZ sib sample using the Merlin program for univariate analyses of the linkage data. Amongst other findings, support for the likelihood of genes for DRC components on chromosome 6 is presented, as well as a novel genetic linkage on chromosome 8. Implications of these data for theory and future research on reading are discussed.
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Joseph E. Beck (Carnegie Mellon University), June Sison, Jack Mostow - Using automated speech recognition to measuring scaffolding and learning effects of word identification interventions in a computer tutor that listens.
Does it help to provide brief word identification assistance to students? On words they encounter soon afterwards? Does brief assistance lead to long-term learning gains? Which types of assistance are best? We have explored these questions using automated experiments in a computer tutor for reading that listens. We examine data from 300 students, mostly in grades 1 through 3. The major results were a definite scaffolding effect in student performance on the same day as they were given assistance. However, although there was a slight improvement in longer-term performance, the difference was not statistically significant.
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Stephanie Bellitti (City University of New York), GenineMarie Coccoli, Mark Lauterbach - The role of spelling explorations on the spelling acquisition of special education and typically developing 2nd grade students.
This study investigates the effect that teaching spelling pattern strategies, in the context of word explorations, has on the spelling abilities of second grade general and special education students. In a quasi-experiment two groups (one special education and one typically developing) received the spelling patterns strategy treatment and one group (typically developing) received the mandated instruction for the school district. Preliminary results indicate that the greatest gains, as measured by a developmental spelling inventory, were made by the typically developing group who received the treatment, followed by the group of special education students.
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Inez Berends (PI Research - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Pieter Reitsma - The effects of orthographically and semantically oriented flashcard training.
The present experiment examined the effectiveness of repeated reading, either with or without limited exposure duration. Further, the influence of focussing either on the orthography or semantics of the presented word while training was also studied. A group of 148 reading delayed children participated in this experiment (94 Grade 1 students, 54 Grade 2 subjects). Ten experimental words were repeated 32 times either with or without LED. The subjects had to answer orthographic or semantic questions about the presented word. Grade 1 subjects improved more when receiving orthographic training, while grade 2 subjects showed a bigger improvement after semantic training.
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Jared Bernstein (Stanford University), Jared Bernstein, Sheida White, Brent Townshend, Isabella Barbier - Automatic analysis of oral reading fluency.
Some standard instruments report oral reading fluency in words-read-correctly in a fixed time window using human accuracy judgments. An alternative approach, implemented in the Fluency Addition to NAAL (National Assessment of Adult Literacy), uses special-purpose speech recognition technology to perform automatic analyses of oral renditions of word lists and text passages from 20,600 adult readers. The automatic methods applied in NAAL produce an estimate of words read correctly per time, along with ancillary metrics such as average number of words between pauses and articulation rate. The analysis methods are explained with examples, comparing the new metrics with traditional measures.
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Rebecca S. Betjemann (University of Denver), Janice M. Keenan - Priming in children with reading disabilities.
Priming is an important component of reading that can affect a child's ease of decoding and comprehension. We examined semantic, phonological/graphemic, and combinatorial priming (primes with both semantic and phonological/graphemic relation to the target, e.g., BOAT - FLOAT) in children with reading disabilities (RD). Both visual and auditory lexical decision tasks were used to assess priming. Surprisingly, results indicate that children with RD have similar patterns of phonological/graphemic and semantic priming compared to chronological-age controls. The main difference was in combinatorial priming, where there was a trend for more priming from combinatorial than single-dimension primes in controls than in RD children.
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Andrew Biemiller (University of Toronto), Catherine Boote - Identifying particularly useful word meanings for children ages four to eight.
Average children know about 6000 root word meanings by the end of grade two. Children in the lowest vocabulary quartile average about 4000 word meanings. If we knew which words were likely to be known by average children the end of grade two, and could further identify words likely to be known even by children with relatively small vocabularies, we could identify the 2000-3000 words most likely to be helpful for low vocabulary children. It would probably be possible to teach 1200 of these words successfully over a three-year period. Current research to identify these words is now underway, and we anticipate reporting on a thousand or so target words as well as words likely to be known by most children.
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Simon Bignell (University of Essex), Kate Cain - Inferencing skills in children with high levels of inattention and hyperactivity.
Word reading and story comprehension skills were assessed in 7-10 year olds with high hyperactivity and/or inattentiveness. Children with high hyperactivity or inattention had poor word reading skills relative to same-age controls. Inferential skills were assessed in three story presentation conditions: child reads aloud, reads silently, and listens. Children with high hyperactivity were impaired in all conditions, but those with high inattention were only impaired when reading silently. These data suggest that reading comprehension deficits in children with ADHD symptoms do not simply arise because of poor attention and/or poor word reading. The implications of these findings will be discussed.
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Anne Bishop (University of Florida), Mary T. Brownell - An examination of beginning teacher instruction in special education: Instructional reading practices that result in student engagement.
The instructional reading practices of beginning special education teachers were examined to determine what novice teachers do to promote student engagement in reading. Twenty reading lessons of eight teachers were analyzed to determine the conditions, interactions, and consequences that resulted in student engagement or non-engagement. Teacher behaviors linked to high student engagement reflect findings from the process-product and motivation and engagement literature in reading
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Ken Blaiklock (Institute of Technology, Auckland). - The importance of letter knowledge in the relationship between phonological awareness and reading.
Many studies of phonological awareness and reading have not controlled for extraneous variables such as ability, phonological memory, preexisting reading skills, and letter knowledge. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study that took account of these variables for a group of children during their first two years at school. Concurrent and predictive correlations between rhyme awareness and reading, and between phoneme awareness and reading, were often significant and remained so after adjusting for verbal ability or phonological memory. Controlling for letter knowledge, however, reduced most correlations to nonsignificant levels.
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Jay Blanchard (Arizona State University), James Christie, Karen Burstein., Kim Atwill, Terry Moore - The effect of illustrations on assessment of phonemic awareness in young children: A preliminary study.
The present research examined the effect of illustrations on assessment of phonemic awareness using a norm-referenced standardized test (SESAT-1). The results indicate that assessment protocols using illustrations enhance performance as opposed to protocols that did not. The results suggested that assessment protocols using illustrations measure more than phonemic awareness
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Leo Blomert (Universiteit Maastricht), Nienke van Atteveldt, Elia Formisano, Rainer Goebel - A functional neuro-anatomical model for the integration of letters and speech sounds in the human brain.
Most people are surprisingly well capable of using literacy skills even though the human brain is not evolutionary adapted to this relatively new cultural phenomenon. Associations between letters and speech sounds form the basis of reading in alphabetic scripts. We investigated the functional neuroanatomy of associations between letters and speech sounds using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The most interesting finding is a modulation of the response to speech sounds in early auditory cortex by visual letters. Based on the analyses of single-subject data and group data aligned on the basis of individual cortical anatomy, we will present a model for the integration of graphemes and phonemes. Our data indicate that the efficient processing of culturally defined associations between letters and speech sounds may be based on a naturally evolved neural mechanism for integrating audiovisual speech.
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Sylvie Bodé (University of Luxemburg), Alain Conten - Phonological awareness training: A field study in a transparent orthographic system.
The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of phonological awareness activities when luxemburgish kindergarten teachers trained their own class with minimal external supervision. Twenty kindergarten classes (150 children) constituted the training group and 21 classes (157 children) formed the control group. At the end of kindergarten, clear training effects were observed for all the phonological awareness tasks, except the most difficult, phoneme omission. After six month of reading and writing instruction in German, only children with low levels of phonological awareness showed significant training effects in applying the alphabetic principle, as assessed by a pseudoword spelling test
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Caroline Bogliotti (Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII), Souhila Messaoud-Galusi, Willy Serniclaes - Relation between categorical perception of speech and reading acquisition.
Data before and after reading acquisition were collected in order to study the influence of linguistic experience and literacy on the emergence and consistency of categorical perception (CP). Children from a longitudinal study (6 to 8 y.o) identified and discriminated [do] and [to] syllables from a VOT continuum. The same paradigm was proposed to 10 y.o children. As subjects differed both in age and reading experience, these data bring out the question of the relation between linguistic maturation and literacy.
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Isabelle Bonnotte (Université Charles de Gaulle - Lille 3). - The role of semantic features in French adults' processing of verb meaning in semantic decision-priming tasks with short and long SOAs.
The purpose of the research was to examine the role of featural representations in the processing of verb meaning. An empirical study with French adults aimed at determining how people understand verbs and whether verb meaning is computed in the same way as noun meaning. Processing on two superordinate verb categories (the durative, non-resultative category, and the non-durative, resultative category) was analyzed with semantic decision-priming tasks using a 250-ms and 500-ms SOA. Different priming effects on durativity and resultativity were shown. Overall, the findings supported the idea that semantic featural representations play a central role in the dynamics of computing verb meaning.
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Anna M. T. Bosman (University of Nijmegen), Raquel Paffen - Developing a spelling consciousness .
In a recent study with students from Grade 3, we employed an experimental training to enhance students' spelling consciousness. Students with a spelling consciousness pay attention to their feelings about the rightness or wrongness of a just-written spelling, which enables them to regulate their own learning process. Students were taught to become aware of the knowledge they had and of the knowledge they did not have regarding the spelling of words presented to them. Compared to a control group, only five training sessions were sufficient to significantly increase students' spelling awareness.
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Anna C. Both de Vries (Leiden University), Adriana G. Bus - Development of writing before formal instruction.
Children (N=96) wrote and drew two sets of 8 words, one set with a particular purpose (making labels) and the other without (dictation). There were three age groups: 3½-4, 4-4½, 4½-5. The findings show that children as young as 4 years are able to produce graphic forms that include characteristics of writing. However children only understood written signs to be symbols from the age of 4½. From that age they used letters instead of drawing to denote a particular meaning. Using letters often coincided with a basic understanding of the alphabetic-phonetic principle but children’s knowledge of letter-sound rules rarely passed some incidental knowledge
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Regina Boulware-Gooden (Neuhaus Education Center) R. M. Joshi - Spelling: are linguistic processes the same across different orthographies?
The proposed presentation examines the role of phonology, orthography, and morphology and in English and Russian words in grades 4, 6, and 8. This study investigates (1) how the linguistic process may vary in their relationship to spelling as a result of the differences in orthographies and (2) how knowledge in phonology, orthography, and morphology develop as children are exposed to further educational instruction. A Commonality Regression Analysis for each grade and each country was conducted to see how each linguistic process uniquely and collectively predicts spelling. Further analysis was conducted to see whether there was a statistically significant change between countries and over time.
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Pascal E. A. Brenders (University of Nijmegen), T. Dijkstra, J. G. van Hell - Does sentence constraint influence visual word recognition in bilinguals? Evidence from event-related potentials and response times.
To examine the influence of sentence context constraint on visual word recognition by bilinguals, we performed an event-related potential (ERP) study and a reaction time study (lexical decision task). Proficient Dutch-English bilinguals (with Dutch as first language, L1, and English as second language, L2) read high and low constraint sentences, in Dutch (L1) or in English (L2), followed by English target words. Target words were orthogonally varied on cognate status and concreteness. The reaction times analysis and preliminary results of the ERP analyses show effects of context constraint, cognate status and concreteness in visual word recognition by bilinguals.
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Zvia Breznitz (University of Haifa). - 100 millisecond threshold: Overcoming the asynchrony between processing systems in the dyslexic brain.
An Asynchrony processing time gap between systems activated during reading was found to be an underlying factor in dyslexia (Breznitz et al., 2001; 2003). The present study investigated the possibility of overcoming this time gap among dyslexics by manipulating the presentation time of visual-orthographic and phonological stimuli. Results indicated that when the phonological stimulus follows the orthographic by an interval ranging between 100-120 ms, dyslexic subjects improve their performance accuracy. Below and above this range, performance accuracy decreases. In contrast, accuracy for regular readers begins between 60-80 ms and remains stable from this point onwards. Theoretical explanations will be discussed.
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Peter Bryant (University of Oxford), Terezinha Nunes, Ursula Pretzlik - Does it help to be explicit about morphology?
In many languages the spellings of particular sounds depend on the morphemes that these sounds represent. Yet children are given little instruction about these morphological spelling rules. For example, they are not taught that the endings of nouns like 'magician' and 'education' are spelled as 'ian' if the noun is a person and 'ion' in an abstract noun. Children probably eventually spell such difficult words either by rote learning, or by implicit learning of the rule. We asked whether explicit instruction is more effective. We compared the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on learning the ion/ian rule. Explicit instruction produced the greatest gains. Instruction effects lasted over a 2-month period during which the children were not taught about this spelling rule.
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Ashley Bucko (University of Michigan) Frederick Morrison, Carol Connor - Teaching preschoolers how to read: Maternal characteristics that increase the likelihood of direct literacy instruction in the home.
This study examines the relation between mothers' characteristics, how frequently they teach their preschoolers (n = 123) reading skills and how this affects children's language and reading. Direct Instruction (DI) of reading skills included encouraging their child to write, teaching their child the names and sounds of letters, and teaching their child how to read words. SEM revealed that DI positively and significantly predicted alphabet and letter-word recognition but not vocabulary. Mothers who worked and had fewer children tended to provide DI more frequently than did stay-at-home moms or mothers who had more children. Mothers' education and age did not predict DI. Implications will be discussed.
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Denis Burnham (University of Western Sydney), - Language specific speech perception, mode of speech processing, and the onset of reading.
Following initial language-general speech perception abilities, infants’ responses to non-native (NN) speech contrasts compared with native (N) speech contrasts are attenuated around 6 months due to ambient phonology input. Similar (N-NN) attenuation also occurs once reading instruction begins. This language specific speech perception is significantly related to reading ability, suggesting that phoneme to grapheme mapping in reading acquisition is facilitated by suppressing irrelevant phonetic variation. Thus successful reading acquisition is better served by language-specific (phonemic) than language-general (phonetic) speech processing. Phonologically-based models of reading and reading disability should include not just speech perception, but language specific speech perception.
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Adriana G. Bus (Leiden University), Maria T. de Jong, Marian Verhallen - Do stories on DVD or CD-rom support young children’s literacy?
From listening to stories children expand their comprehension of plot sequence, facts and details, and story language. These outcomes strongly recommend read alouds as components of literacy programs and support trends resulting in more teachers and parents reading aloud every day. Empirical evidence indicates, however, that the effectiveness of read alouds depends on children’s language development. Even the simplest picture- storybooks may include so many unknown words and sentence structures that children fail to understand text even after several readings. A prime aim of our studies is to test whether children with a language delay learn as much from picture-storybooks as children without language delay. Computers introduce new formats of picture-storybooks thus expanding the number of sources to support story and language understanding: different from the traditional format books on the computer include oral text, animated pictures, and sound effects. Our second aim is to test whether encounters with stories including filmic pictures and sound effects, provide unique opportunities to stimulate story and language comprehension. Subjects were 3- and 5-year-old children with and without a language delay from lower-class families. We will present outcomes of two randomized experiments.
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Brian Byrne (University of New England), Barbara Hindson, Ruth Fielding Barnsley, Donald Shankweiler, Cara DeLaland, Carol Mackay - Early intervention with preschool children bearing family risk for dyslexia.
Preschool children selected from families in which one or both parents had significant reading difficulties were assessed on a variety of cognitive and linguistic characteristics and given individual instruction in phonemic awareness and print conventions. After three years, at-risk children reached grade-appropriate levels on word reading and comprehension. The most salient predictor of reading growth was the number of instructional sessions required, not the final preschool outcome level attained. This aspect of the data suggests that some kind of learning rate parameter influences acquisition of foundation skills for reading and continues to exert an influence throughout subsequent reading development.
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Kate Cain (University of Essex), Jane Oakhill, Kate Lemmon - Vocabulary knowledge and inference from context.
Reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are highly correlated. We report research that investigates the proposal that the ability to infer from context mediates this relation and plays an important role in vocabulary acquisition. Cross-sectional work revealed that 9-10 year-olds with weak comprehension skills were specifically impaired when required to infer the meanings of novel words from context: their performance on a direct instruction task was good. Children with weak vocabulary skills were poor on both measures. Longitudinal data supported the role of inference: early reading experience and initial inferential skills explained growth in vocabulary between 7 and 14 years.
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Claire Cameron (University of Michigan), Frederick J. Morrison - A structural equation model of self-regulation and early literacy development in preschool children.
Research has demonstrated that some kindergarteners may be at risk for developing poor self-regulation (McClelland, Morrison & Holmes, 2000). This study sought to examine the interplay of self-regulation and early literacy in preschool children. Participants were 189 preschoolers (mean age=3 years, 11 months). Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the reciprocal predictability of self-regulation and early literacy over two time intervals during the preschool period. The model provided a good fit to the data, and explained 97% and 74% of the variance in spring early literacy and self-regulation, respectively. There was also a positive correlation between the errors of fall self-regulation and pre-literacy (r=.48). Although related, the development of self-regulation in the preschool children in this study appears to be driven by early literacy skills, while the reverse is not true
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Marketa Caravolas (University of Liverpool), Maggie Snowling, Charles Hulme, Brett Kessler - How orthographic consistency affects the development of spelling skills in English: Implications for theories of orthographic learning.
The effects of vowel grapheme consistency on the development of spelling skills in a cohort of 150 British children were examined. Children's spelling of 100 monosyllabic words was monitored at three time points over the first two years of schooling. All vowel spellings were scored for conventional accuracy. The unconditional and conditional consistencies (i.e. consistencies weighted by the adjacent graphemes) of all graphemes in the word set were computed. Within-subjects regression analyses showed that word frequency and unconditional grapheme consistency had a significant additive effect on vowel spelling by the end of the first year of schooling. The variance accounted for by these two variables increased in the second year of schooling. In addition, by the conditional consistency (i.e. the consistency of the vowel given the ensuing coda grapheme) accounted for unique variance in in vowel spelling by the middle of year 2. These findings suggest that children's orthographic representations are influenced from very early on by the statistical properties of the English orthography.
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Cláudia Cardoso-Martins (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Ricardo Fernandes Napoleão de Souza, Letícia Siqueira Lemos, Marcela Fulanete’Corrêa - What is the nature of young children´s syllabic spellings?
The study investigates the correlates of preschool children’s “syllabic” spellings, that is, spellings in which the number of letters corresponds to the number of syllables in the pronunciation of words. Participants were 227 Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children ranging in age from 4 to 6 years. Results question E. Ferreiro’s hypothesis that the syllabic spellings result from children’s search for a general criterion that enables them to regulate variations in the number of letters necessary to write different words Instead, our results suggest that the syllabic construction is an incidental result of young children’s tendency to write the letters whose names they can detect in the pronunciation of the words.
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Joanne F. Carlisle (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Lauren Katz - Ready access to morphemes as a factor in reading English words.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether ease of lexical access of morphologically complex words (as estimated by speed of naming) contributed to word reading and comprehension for 4th and 6th grade students in the US. Students were given sets of words that were morphologically simple and complex to read aloud. Among the morphologically complex words were some with low frequency surface forms but high frequency base words—words that were unlikely to be recognized without morphological decomposition. Results of regression analyses indicated that, when the effects of naming two-syllable morphologically simple words were controlled, both accuracy and speed of naming morphologically complex words contributed additionally to performance on a standardized word-reading test. Additionally, speed and accuracy of naming morphologically complex words contributed significantly to performance on a measure of reading comprehension. Results suggest support for models of morphologically processing that posit activation of words, morphemes within words, and sub-morphemic elements. They also suggest that facility in reading complex words is an educationally relevant skill for students in the upper elementary grades.
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Julia M. Carroll (University of Warwick), Margaret J. Snowling, Valerie Muter, Uta Frith - Language development in children at genetic risk of dyslexia: a follow-up at age 13.
A group of children with a family history of dyslexia were selected at 3 ½ years of age and tested at three further points in time: at the ages of 6, 8 and 13. Data is presented concerning the language development of these children. In the group as a whole, 11.8% children met criteria for SLI in the high-risk group, while only 4.8% of the controls did, suggesting shared genetic risk factors between language and literacy difficulties. The high risk children as a group showed similar verbal ability levels to controls at age 6, though they scored less well on nonword repetition and recalling sentences. By age 13, the high-risk group showed weaker performance on both of these tests and on vocabulary. A bi-directional relationship between language and literacy is proposed.
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M. Heather Carver (University of Missouri Columbia), Ronald P. Carver - Effect of computerized tutoring in spelling, vocabulary, and rate upon the reading achievement of poor readers: A treatment study, Testing a causal model.
It has been hypothesized that an instructional treatment which focuses upon increasing the number of basic words that students can read results in higher reading achievement, according to a causal model stimulated by rauding theory. 54 sixth graders in an urban school were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The mean gain for the experimental group was 1.7 GE units during the school year on a composite reading achievement measure, and this was 0.7 GE units more than the control group gained. The few students who worked on the computer tutor for 100 hours or more gained 2.1 GE units on the average.
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Séverine Casalis (Université Charles de Gaulle - Lille 3), Isabelle Bonnotte - Phonological and semantic processing in French children's word naming: Evidence from normal readers and poor comprehenders.
Phonological and semantic priming were assessed in two groups of French children: good and poor comprehenders matched on decoding skills. All children performed two word naming tasks using a long SOA (750 ms). In the phonological priming task, related primes and targets were homophones. In the semantic priming task, as in Nation and Snowling's study (1999), two relations between related primes and targets were examined: first, categorical versus functional relation, and second, high versus low association in context. Both groups of children showed priming effects in the two tasks. These priming effects were modulated by groups and priming conditions.
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Anne Castles (University of Melbourne), Timothy Bates, Max Coltheart, Nathan Gillespie, Margie Wright, Nick Martin - Behavior genetic analyses of reading & spelling: A component processes approach.
The behavior genetic bases of the Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading were examined in a large unselected adolescent twin sample. Data were in accord with the view that reading is a quantitative normal trait, with no categorical genetic or environmental events grading some readers as dyslexic. 70% of reading variance was found to be genetic, with little evidence for shared environmental effects. DRC predicts that there should be no genetic or environmental effects for regular word reading, over and above those of irregular and nonword performance. This prediction was tested using multivariate behavior genetic analyses. Possible evidence for sex-linkage is also discussed.
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Hugh W. Catts (University of Kansas), Suzanne M. Adlof - Language processing in children with specific comprehension deficits.
This study investigated the language and cognitive processing abilities of 8th grade children with specific comprehension deficits (n=57) and compared their performances to children with specific decoding deficits (N=27) and normal readers (n=98). Children with specific comprehension deficits performed significantly less well than the comparison groups on a range of language tests, but showed normal performance on measures of phonological processing. These differences were apparent in 8th grade as well as in earlier grades when comparable assessments were administered. Results are discussed in terms of the developmental relationship between language and reading disabilities.
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Chris C. Chase (Claremont McKenna College), Robert F. Dougherty, Nicola Ray, Susan Fowler & John Stein - Magnocellular cone signal strength in dyslexia.
One defining feature of the M pathway is a bias for M- and L-cone input and weak S-cone input relative to other pathways. We measured the relative strengths of the L-, M- and S-cone inputs to the M pathway in good and poor readers. Results suggest that dyslexic L/M and L/S signal strength ratios were much higher than controls. Dyslexic relative M-cone sensitivity was highly correlated with reading skills. We conclude that poor dyslexic magnocellular functioning is reflected by a higher than average L/M ratio due either to a stronger than normal L-cone signal or a relatively weak M-cone signal.
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Shih-wei Chen (University of Maryland), Min Wang - Pinyin or Zhu-yin-fu-hao: which better predicts phonological awareness at onset-rhyme and phonemic levels?
Phonological awareness developed in learning to read Chinese appears to be contingent upon the availability of phonetic script instructions. The two phonetic scripts presently taught in Taiwan and mainland China (respectively, Zhu-yin-fu-hao and Pinyin), however, differ greatly in how they represent speech sounds. As an attempt to evaluate the impact of such representational differences on Chinese-speaking students’ development of phonological awareness, the proposed study examines the performance in tasks tapping different levels of phonological awareness of students from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong for the ways each of the two phonetic scripts contributes to the building of phonological awareness.
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Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Catherine McBride-Chang, Pan-Chung Fung - The impact of dialogical reading on typically developing and hearing impaired Hong Kong young children.
Two studies investigated the effects of an interactive parent-child reading technique, dialogic reading, on 86 typically developing kindergarteners and 28 hearing-impaired kindergarten and early primary children in Hong Kong. Children in the two groups were pretested on Chinese literacy and language tasks, and assigned randomly to one of three conditions: dialogic reading, typical reading, and control. After an 8-week intervention, the children were posttested. Results indicated both typically developing and hearing-impaired children in the dialogic reading group benefited significantly from the intervention, in literacy and language skills.
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Eva Man Ching Chow (University of Hong Kong, Connie Suk-Han Ho - Motion perception in Chinese dyslexic children.
Given the substantial differences between the visual characteristics of written Chinese and alphabetic scripts, this study aimed at examining the magnocellular deficit hypothesis in Chinese dyslexic children. 23 Hong Kong Chinese dyslexic children and 23 chronological-age controls were tested on a global motion coherence task. The Chinese dyslexic children were found to perform significantly worse than the controls in this task, which supported the magnocellular pathway deficit hypothesis. In addition, the dyslexic group detected the stimuli in blue colour significantly better than in white. Educational implication of this finding will be discussed.
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Carol A. Christensen (University of Queensland). - Making a difference: Secondary school reform in literacy.
This paper compares two secondary schools (Grades 8-12) that implemented reform of literacy. Both schools were located in low socio-economic areas outside a major city in Queensland, Australia. Both had historically experienced many of the problems associated with areas with high levels of social and economic stress. Widespread low levels of literacy impacted across the curriculum. The paper will discuss factors that accounted for the outcomes of the programs including curriculum and teaching strategies, program organization, structure and management, school leadership and organization, social relationships developed by teachers and students in the school and the peer group culture in the schools.
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Joanna Christodoulou (Fulbright Fellow, Greece), Maya Alivisatos - The naming speed deficit: An analysis of Greek students.
The purpose of this study is to explore the prevalence and distribution of the naming speed deficit amongst reading-impaired students in Greece. Participants were over 200 students in primary and secondary schools in Greece, from both public and private institutions, and who were identified as having dyslexia. Students were identified as reading disabled by official assessments administered by school or government-affiliated organizations, and teacher feedback when appropriate. Translated versions of the Rapid Automatized Naming Tasks were administered to assess naming speed performance. Implications for assessment and diagnosis are discussed.
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Pascale Colé (Université de Savoie et C.N.R.S.), Liliane Sprenger-Charolles, Linda S. Siegel, Juan E. Jiménez González - Syllables in learning to read in English, French and Spanish.
Phonological mediation is traditionally thought to involve the phonological codes of words already established through contact with spoken language. However, there is still much debate on the precise nature of such codes in reading acquisition. In the present experiments, we examine the possible role of syllabic units in a silent reading task involving bisyllabic words, by comparing the performances of English, French and Spanish first graders. The results suggest that the use of syllabic units depends on the phonological structure of the language, and on the consistency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondance as well as on the reading level of the participants.
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Chris Coleman (Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders, Athens), Noel Gregg, J. Mark Davis - How effective are dyslexia and ADHD screeners in identifying college students with and without RD and ADHD?
The study will examine the effectiveness of two established self-report instruments, one a screener for RD (i.e., dyslexia) and the other a screener for ADHD, in four adult samples. University students with specific disabilities (RD = 75, ADHD = 50, RD1 = 50, No Diagnosis = 50) were administered (1) the Adult Reading History Questionnaire (LeFly and Pennington 2000) and (2) the Brown ADD Scales (Brown 1996). Analyses will be performed in order to determine the specificity and sensitivity of each instrument in identifying its target population.
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Stéphanie Colin (Université Lyon2) Annie Magnan, Jean Ecalle, Jacqueline Leybaert - Relation between early phonological skills and later reading performances in deaf children: effect of early exposure to Cued Speech.
Our study aimed to investigate whether early phonological skills predict later reading performances in deaf children exposed (early versus late) or not exposed to Cued Speech (“CS”, a manual system delivering phonetically augmented speechreading through visual modality). Different epi- and meta-phonological and written words recognition tasks were gradually administered from Kindergarten to first grade. Results showed that the early phonological skills at kindergarten predicts word recognition at first grade in the deaf as well as in the hearing groups. In addition, the performances of early Cued Speech users did not differ from those of hearing children and were higher than those of the others deaf children, especially in the first grade. Early exposure to Cued Speech may allow the development of accurate phonological representations and consequently, the use of accurate phonological decoding to recognise written words.
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W. Matthew Collins ( McMaster University), Martin Chodorow - The effects of priming on error detection in proofreading.
The present study was designed to examine the effects of priming on the speed and accuracy of error detection in text and to compare two theories of reading which make different hypotheses about proofreading performance on familiar text. Participants were presented with target sentences some of which were preceded by a prime sentence that had either the same syntactic structure or the same verb, or the same structure and verb as the target sentence. Detection of errors was more accurate in structurally primed target sentences, but there was no significant difference in response time as a function of structural priming.
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Donald L. Compton (Vanderbilt University), Amy Elleman, Natalie Olinghouse, Jan Vining - An evaluation of the effects of decoding, comprehension, and metacognitive instruction on reading comprehension gains in children who are poor readers.
The purpose of this study was to determine the value of decoding, comprehension, and metacognitive instruction on the reading comprehension growth of children grades 3 - 5 who are poor readers. Groups of teacher identified poor readers were randomly assigned to decoding instruction; decoding and reading comprehension instruction; and decoding, reading comprehension, and metacognitive instruction. The decoding group received 25 lessons of word identification strategy training (Lovett et al., 2000) and quick reads for fluency (Hiebert) with each lesson lasting 30 minutes. The two reading comprehension groups received 25 lessons lasting one-hour each with 30 minutes of word identification strategy training (Lovett et al., 2000) and quick reads for fluency (Hiebert) and 30 minutes of comprehension instruction comprised of expository text reading with summarizing, predicting, questioning, and clarifying instruction. The only difference between the two comprehension groups is that the metacognitive group was taught the reciprocal teaching dialog in addition to reading expository text reading with summarizing, predicting, questioning, and clarifying instruction. Group differences on reading comprehension growth were evaluated using a two-level growth model (HLM).
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Vincent Connelly (Oxford Brookes University), Morag Maclean, Sonya Campbell - The writing skills of university dyslexics compared to age and spelling age matched controls.
There has been little research on the writing skills of dyslexic students. One of the few studies on dyslexic writing (Sterling et al, 1997) claimed that dyslexic students writing difficulties were solely down to their low spelling age, compared to age controls. In this study we matched 24 dyslexic students with both chronological age and spelling age match groups. We also gave the students a more realistic academic essay task. Differences relating to essay structure and organisation, spelling errors and handwriting speed are discussed in relation to a developmental model of reading and writing. Reasons for the more complex differences found, as compared to Sterling et al (1997), are proposed.
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Carol McDonald Connor (University of Michigan), Frederick J. Morrison, Jocelyn N. Petrella - Effective reading comprehension instruction: Examining child by instruction interactions.
This study examined the effect of third-grade language arts instruction on growth in children’s reading comprehension skills, including child-instruction interactions. Classrooms were observed in the fall, winter, and spring. Dimensions of instruction were used to describe language arts activities – explicit versus implicit, teacher- versus child-managed, and word-level versus higher-order. The effect of instruction depended on students’ fall reading comprehension. Students with average to low fall scores achieved greater growth with more time in teacher-managed-explicit-higher-order instruction (teacher-led predicting, questioning). Children with higher fall scores demonstrated stronger growth with more child-managed-explicit-higher-order instruction (cooperative writing opportunities). Children with lower fall scores demonstrated less growth in these classrooms. Research and classroom instruction implications are discussed.
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Nancy L. Corbett (University of Florida). - A componential study of a summer reading comprehension program for middle school students.
Researcher conducted a 3-year directed research comprehension studyto determine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of variations of a summer intervention program for middle school students. Variations of the program including tutors/no tutors and length of daily program were examined.Changes in reading comprehension were measured with group and individual pre-, post- and 10, 20 week maintenance tests. Analyses were conducted to examine the effects of instructional conditions on dependent variables(i.e., comprehension, word identification, fluency, and academic self-efficacy). Results suggest the effectiveness of programmatic summer interventions for middle school students experiencing difficulty in reading comprehension.
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Cynthia Core (Florida Atlantic University), Alice T. Dyson, Linda J. Lombardino - Phonological awareness skills in kindergarten children with and without phonological impairment.
This study investigated the phonological awareness skills of 10 kindergarten children with expressive phonological impairment. Children had normal nonverbal ability, expressive and receptive language skills. They were matched by classroom teacher with 10 normally developing children with normal phonology, language and nonverbal ability. Children completed a battery of 10 phonological awareness tests that targeted syllable, onset-rhyme and phoneme level skills. Results from a paired samples t-test showed that children with phonological impairment had lower phonological awareness scores than their classroom-matched peers. Performance varied significantly by classroom for children in both groups.
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Pierre Cormier (Université de Moncton), Natalie Michaud, Gilles Raîche - The roles of syllabic and phonemic awareness in the growth of decoding in French-speaking grade-one children.
The role of syllabic and phonemic awareness in predicting growth in decoding in French was investigated with a two-level hierarchical model of decoding skills in 100 grade-one children. Two parameters, intercept and slope, characterized growth in decoding, estimated separately for words and pseudo-words. Other predictors of growth included measures of oral language (receptive vocabulary), letter knowledge (letter names and sounds) and phonological skills (verbal working memory and rapid lexical access). Phonemic elision was related to the intercept of growth in decoding. Syllabic elision was not related to any parameters of growth. These findings encourage further HLM studies of reading.
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Piers Cornelissen (Newcastle University), Kristen Pammer, Ruth Lavis, Peter Hansen - Dynamic visual processes in normal reading: Implications for developmental dyslexia?
Data from two studies relating visual task performance to contextual reading are presented. The first study investigated the relationship between contextual reading and relative spatial encoding for symbol arrays as well as sensitivity to the frequency doubling illusion, an index of retinal M-y ganglion cell function. The data suggest that successful reading requires not only information about letter identity, but also information related to spatial processing of words. Consistent with this speculation, a second study found that reading accuracy for dyslexic readers was most impaired when contextual material was presented in whole paragraphs, rather than line-at-a-time or word-at-a-time reading conditions.
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Kathleen H. Corriveau (University of Cambridge), Usha C. Goswami - Specific language impairment and P-centre processing: A causal connection?
Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) often show co-morbid problems in motor skills and in reading development. The underlying cause of this co-occurrence will be examined, with reference to an insensitivity in suprasegmental auditory processes, or P-centres. Thirty children with SLI, and 30 chronologically age and language-matched controls were tested on a variety of auditory and motor tasks, as well as phonological awareness tasks. Specific relationships between difficulties in phonological tasks and auditory and motor tasks will be presented. The data will be examined in light of the P-centre hypothesis, and proposals made for key future research questions.
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Jennifer G. Cromley (University of Maryland College Park), R. Azevedo, D. Moos, F. Fried - Developmental patterns in searching for information in hypermedia.
We developed a causal model of searching for information in text, and tested the fit of that model with data from 17 middle-school, 17 high-school, and 17 undergraduate students using an open-ended hypermedia environment. Students gave verbal answers to 10 researcher-developed questions of varying difficulty about the circulatory system, which they found by searching the environment. The model explained 64% of the variance in quality of students' answers, with prior knowledge, search time, and finding the relevant page making the biggest total contribution. Older students found significantly more relevant pages and gave significantly higher quality answers. More effective searchers were faster and used fewer search moves. Effective searches were not, however, associated with any particular search move, except for less use of searching for entire phrases in the encyclopedia.
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Virginia Cronin (George Washington University). - Early automatization in double deficit groups.
In a longitudinal study deficit groups were formed by preschool and kindergarten phonological awareness and RAN picture naming. There were 62 children in the no-deficit group, 20 in the single-deficit low phonology group, 20 in the single-deficit low rapid naming group, and 18 in the double-deficit group. They were given letter and number naming tasks in the spring of kindergarten, and the fall and spring of Grade 1. The single deficit low phonology group performed like the no deficit group and the single deficit low rapid naming group performed like the double-deficit group, supporting the two core deficit theory.
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Alicia Cruz (Universidad de Jaén), Sylvia Defior, Elvira Mendoza - Rhyme in Spanish deaf children.
The aim of this study was to explore whether deaf children have access to the rhyme level of phonological representation. Two groups of prelingually deaf children and two hearing control groups matched for general reading level participated. We used a judgement rhyming task. Different distracters (phonologic and ortographic distracters) were used in order to explore the strategies used by the deaf children. In general, the performance of both deaf groups was poorer than that of younger reading-matched hearing controls. For hearing readers, the data suggest an effect of phonological similarity. The deaf scores reflect the influence of orthographic knowledge.
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Anne E. Cunningham (University of California, Berkeley), Jennae Bulat, Colleen Ryan, Devon McCreachon, David Futterman, Keith E. Stanovich - Orthographic learning while reading: An examination of first grade readers.
The aim of this study was to provide a direct test of the self-teaching hypothesis (Jorm & Share, 1983; Share, 1995) by extending earlier research (Cunningham et al, 2002; Reitsma, 1989; Share, 1998). We examined younger children reading real words in the naturalistic context of connected text and independent reading. Additionally, we examined possible sources of variance in student's orthographic learning by including tasks that tapped general cognitive ability, RAN, and orthographic discrimination ability. Convergent with earlier studies, we observed robust orthographic learning in young children while reading. Further data patterns will be discussed.
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Jennifer Curry (University of Alberta), Rauno Parrila,& Kathy Stephenson, John R. Kirby, Joanna Catterson - The reliability and validity of self-reported home literacy activities and print exposure measures.
We examined the reliability and validity of a home literacy questionnaire and print exposure measures. Author Recognition Test (ART) and Children’s Books Title Recognition Test (CBTRT) were administered to parents and Book Exposure Recall Task (BERT) to grade 1 children. Preliteracy and reading measures were used as a criterion. Parent-child reading activity part of the questionnaire had a Cronbach alpha of .77, whereas the reliability of the print exposure measures varied from .91 (ART) to .66 (BERT). Parent-child reading activity and BERT correlated significantly with the criterion tasks, ART and CBTRT did not
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Peter F. de Jong (University of Amsterdam), Vera C. S. Messbauer - Exploring the consequences of impoverished phonological representations: The role of learning context.
We hypothesized that dyslexic children's presumed low quality phonological representations especially pose problems when learning to read words in a context of phonologically and orthographically similar words (for example KLAP, KRAP and KLAS). To test this 'distinctness' hypothesis, dyslexic children and groups of reading and age-matched normal readers repeatedly read series of target nonwords, presented in a distinct and an indistinct context. At posttest, one day and one week later, target nonwords and new nonwords meant to study transfer, were given. The results for reading speed at posttest, but not for accuracy, lend some support for the 'distinctness' hypothesis.
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Maria de Luca (IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia), Pierluigi Zoccolotti - Eye movements and developmental dyslexia in Italian readers.
Developmental dyslexia in a language with transparent orthography (Italian) was studied by means of eye movement recordings. Dyslexics read texts with a large number of small saccades indicating a fragmented word analysis; no deficit in oculo-motor functioning was detected. The high number of fixations depended on word length not word frequency. Examining this word-length effect in reading words and pseudo-words, fixations increased in dyslexics as a function of item length for both kinds of stimuli; in normal readers, this occurred only with pseudo-words. Evidence indicates that Italian dyslexics read by predominantly relying on a sub-lexical procedure.
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S. Hélène Deacon (Dalhousie University), Lesly Wade-Woolley, John Kirby - Yesterday: Morphological awareness and spelling of the past tense morpheme in French and English.
This presentation will report on a longitudinal study of spelling development of English-speaking children in French immersion. We examined morphological awareness and morphemic spellings of the past tense (e.g., -ed in English and -er in French) in both languages. Earlier results suggested connections between morphological awareness and spelling in each language. New data will test these relations by examining both real and pseudo-words, as well as longitudinal connections. Further, spellings will be examined for the use of phonological, orthographic and morphological information. Results will be discussed in relation to current models of spelling development.
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Elise deBree (Utrecht University), Petra van Alphen, Ellen Gerrits, Jan de Jong, Frank Wijnen, Carien Wilsenach - Early language development in children with a genetic risk for dyslexia: a longitudinal and prospective study .
The goal of the project at Utrecht University is to test the assumption that SLI and dyslexia are related language disorders and to search for linguistic precursors of dyslexia. We compare the language development of children genetically at risk for dyslexia with that of normally developing children and children with SLI. A broad range of language abilities are assessed between 18-60 months. The results from various perception and production tasks show that the at-risk children perform in-between normally developing children and children with SLI. A subset of the at-risk children displays language delays similar to those of children with SLI.
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Sylvia Defior (Universidad de Granada), Rosa Titos, Jesus Alegria, Francisco Martos - Is morphological information used in spelling by Spanish children?
This study aims to determine the extent to which the morphological information related to the plural nouns and verb is used by Spanish children from first, 2nd and 3rd grades of Primary Education, when writing words. A word dictation task was designed. The task included high and low frequency nouns and verbs ended in ´-s´. The nouns were singular (lexical ´-s´ condition), plural (morphological ´-s´ condition) and the verbs were in the second person singular (morphological ´-s´ condition). Results show that the writing of Spanish is influenced by phonology but morphological information is also used. These results are discussed in relation to current models of word spelling
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Evelien Dirks (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ginny Spyer, Ernest van Lieshout, Leo de Sonneville - Differences between children with specific reading and specific arithmetic difficulties.
The purpose of this study was to further our understanding of a possible link between reading and arithmetic difficulties. We compared the performance of 61 nine and ten year olds with specific reading difficulties (RD), specific arithmetic difficulties (AD), and children without reading or arithmetic difficulties (NA) on a visual-phonological reading task (VPT), and on three naming speed tasks (NST).The main findings were as follows: the RD groups’ performance was inferior to that of the AD and NA groups on both VPT and alphanumerical naming speed, and slower than the control group on object naming.
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Janice Dole (University of Utah), Michelle Hosp, John Hosp - Educators’ knowledge of SBRR .
It is widely believed that teacher knowledge of scientifically based reading research is a critical component of effective reading instruction as well as effective professional development. The purpose of this study was to examine initial teacher knowledge of SBRR. A teacher knowledge measure developed by Torgesen (personal communication, 2003) was used to measure K-3 classroom teachers, reading coaches, and reading experts. These data were collected as baseline data for Utah’s Reading First evaluation. Data analyses will compare the level of SBRR knowledge between teachers and reading coaches and between reading coaches and experts. Results will indicate various levels of educators’ knowledge about SBRR that are likely to affect their instruction and professional development in reading.
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Daphne A. Ducharme (University of Ottawa), Rachel I. Mayberry - Can reading be achieved without phonological decoding?
We studied word recognition in deaf adult readers of French, whose first language was Langue des signes québécoise to determine whether phonological decoding was an important strategy for deaf readers who were also signers. We tested 39 participants using a lexical decision task as well as a reading comprehension test and a vocabulary test. The results show that frequency significantly influences word recognition latency and error scores in deaf readers of French, just as it does in hearing readers. Our subjects were also sensitive to French graphemic-phonemic complexity and showed phonological decoding effects.
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Lynne G. Duncan (University of Dundee), Sheila Baillie - Regional differences between English dialects create variation in the acquisition of reading and spelling skills.
The effect of orthographic depth on literacy acquisition is related to regional differences between English dialects. Southern British English is a non-rhotic accent whereas Standard Scottish English (like General American English) is rhotic. Such phonological differences alter the depth of the mapping with the English orthography. The study compares English and Scottish children during the first year of literacy acquisition. Performance on tests of reading, spelling and phonological awareness is examined and related to letter knowledge. The findings highlight orthographic features which are complex for reading and spelling in non-rhotic accents but completely transparent in rhotic accents.
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Marianne Durand (University of York), Charles Hulme, Margaret J Snowling, Rebecca Larkin - Concurrent predictors of reading and arithmetic skills in 7- to 10-year-olds.
A range of possible concurrent predictors of reading accuracy and arithmetic were assessed in a large (N=162) sample of children (aged 7:5 to 10:4). A confirmatory factor analysis revealed a good fit to a model comprising 6 latent variables: Verbal Ability, Nonverbal Ability, Comparative Number Judgements, Search Speed, Phonological Memory, and Phoneme Deletion. Path analyses showed that Phoneme Deletion and Verbal Ability were unique predictors of reading, whereas Comparative Number Judgements and Verbal Ability predicted arithmetic. These results are related to current theories of the development of reading and arithmetic skills.
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Gad Elbeheri (University of Durham). - Can the phonological awareness deficit theory be considered the underlying cognitive deficit responsible for the incidence of dyslexia amongst monolingual Arabic speakers?
This paper investigates the importance and/or contribution of phonological awareness amongst monolingual Arabic speakers. The paper draws upon data collected from some 382 monolingual Arabic speaking participants (average age is 10 year) from three mainstream government primary schools in Alexandria, Egypt. Results in a number of various tasks such as Phoneme Deletion, Rhyme Detection, Non-word Reading as well as Spelling, Reading Accuracy and Reading Comprehension are investigated and statistically analysed which all conclude that there seems to be an underlying orthographic processing deficit amongst monolingual dyslexia Arabic speaker and that phonological processing difficulties do not seem to be the overriding cognitive deficit amongst monolingual Arabic speakers; a fact that can be partially attributed to the close and consistent relationship between Arabic phonology and orthography.
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Carsten Elbro (University of Copenhagen). - Predicting reading comprehension in grade 7 - from preschool abilities and parent's SES and abilities.
This study focussed on the development of reading comprehension in at-risk children of dyslexic parents. Eighty-two children were followed from the beginning of the kindergarten grade until the beginning of grade 7 when reading comprehension was assessed. Controlling for decoding ability in early grade 3 allowed us to focus on the specific, early predictors of reading comprehension. Significant predictors were found even among the children's preschool abilities. In addition, significant amount of residual variation was explained by parental reading habits and abilities suggesting that genetic and/or family environment still contribute to reading development between grade 3 and 7.
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Mary Ann Evans (University of Guelph), Jubilea Mansell, Laura Hamilton, Betty Ann Levy - Parental responses to child miscues during shared reading: stability and effects of parent style from Kindergarten through Grade 2 .
Shared reading is normally thought of as preschool activity. Our observations from kindergarten through grade 2, show that parents continue to read to their children but encourage them to take on the reader role and actively coach them in word recognition. The presentation will describe the stability of coaching styles across this period and the effect that different forms of miscue feedback have on reading skill in a sample of 50 normally developing children who were observed reading with their parents in each of these three grades. The extent to which parents supplied misread words, gave graphophonemic clues, or pointed out errors without further help correlated between .39 and .64 between the grades, showing the stability of parent style. ANOVA with reading skill as a covariate revealed that children whose parents rarely ignored miscues had higher word attack and reading comprehension scores in grades 1 and 2. After accounting for kindergarten skill, the type of feedback provided by parents from kindergarten through grade 1 predicted 11-15% of the variance in grade 1 word identification scores. However after accounting for grade 1 reading skill, the type of feedback observed from grade 1 to grade 2 did not predict grade 2 reading scores.
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Lee Farrington-Flint (Open University) Clare Wood, Katherine H. Canobi, Dorothy Faulkner - Strategic variability and the precise nature of analogy in children's early reading.
Individual differences in young children's analogy in the context of early reading were examined. Despite considerable interest in the role of analogy in children's early reading, there is a tendency for research to average data across samples without fully considering the potential scope for individual differences. The study was designed to develop a more detailed understanding of analogy in the context of children's reading by identifying profiles of individual differences in children's performance. Similarly, using measures of children's self-reports, the study intended to investigate patterns of individual differences in strategy choices.
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Lauren Figueredo (University of Alberta) Connie Varnhagen - Is it a typo or a spelling error? Use of the spell checker during the composing process.
We investigated the use of spell checkers during the composing process. Participants were asked to compose a short essay on a computer with the aid of the spell checker. Results showed that participants used both their own correction knowledge and the spell checker to correct different types of errors (i.e., typographical errors, spelling/unclear errors). Participants used the spell checker more often for spelling/unclear errors (errors that were either clearly spelling errors or possibly a combination of spelling and typographical errors) than for typographical errors. These results demonstrate that methods of correction may be differentially used depending on error type.
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Alexis Filipppini (University of California, Santa Barbara), Cara Richards, Mike Gerber - The spelling errors of English Learners: Analyses of pattern differences in English and Spanish instructed students.
A 15-item English dictation spelling measure was used to assess first grade English Learners (EL) in two different instructional programs: Spanish language arts and English language arts. Error patterns were analyzed for each item, first across the whole sample, then between instructional groups and finally by individual student. Initial quantitative analyses indicate a large amount of variability within each group. Further qualitative investigation of the specific errors and the relationships to the L1 and L2 phonological systems provide details about the nature of the intrusions that can be used to guide instruction and improve later reading and writing skills.
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Barbara R. Foorman (University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center), Sharolyn D. Pollard-Durodola - Supplementing implicit vocabulary learning through instruction: primary-grade curriculum.
Knowledge of the meanings of words forms the basis for reading comprehension. Decoding skills may be adequate, yet text comprehension suffers because students fail to grasp the meaning of individual words. Rather than teach definitions of specific words for specific text, teachers must help students develop generative knowledge about words so that vocabulary grows and transfers to comprehending new text. Three empirically-validated vocabulary curricula for primary grades will be presented. One of these was developed by the presenters, with an emphasis on literature depicting African American heroes and heroines. Details of word selection, instructional strategies, and assessment of student learning will be discussed.
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Jørgen Frost (Bredtvet kompetansesenter, Oslo), Sigrid Madsbjerg, Jan Niedersøe, Åke Olofsson, Peer M. Sørensen - Prediction of reading development: >From 3 to 16 years of age.
The present longitudinal study investigated the relationship between pre-school listening comprehension and expressive language skills and later word decoding and reading comprehension skills. More than 200 Danish children were followed from a speech-therapist screening at age 3 years, through word decoding tests in Grade 2 and sentence reading tests in Grade 3, 4 and 6, and to a text reading test in Grade 9 (age 16). The predictor variables consisted of both standardized test results and professional ratings. The results showed that both poor listening comprehension skills and poor expressive language skills predict poor word decoding and reading comprehension 13 years later. Further analysis also showed that children that were reported to have a low interest for books and story reading before age 5 scored lower on reading at age 15. The implications of these results for assessment and remediation of reading disabilities are discussed.
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Elaine Funnell (University of London), Morag Stuart - Regular, exception and nonword reading.
There is a long respectable history of using regular, exception and nonwords as stimuli for investigating reading difficulties. Children with phonological deficits show a pattern of poor nonword reading and no regular word advantage. Children with presenting with a more surface dyslexic profile are likely to show a regular word advantage and relatively good nonword reading. This paper reports on the development of a graded stimulus set for use with children between the ages of 4 and 11 years. The regular, exception words are controlled for concreteness and frequency using the CPWD.
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Isabel Garcia Gomez (University of Seville), Gary Morgan - Describing signing deaf children's reading of single words with different length, frequency, and lexical features.
Deaf readers have a different language experience compared to hearing readers, but features of the word in the reading task are similar. We described through a dual-route model how words (with lexical, length and frequency features controlled) were recognized by a sample of 32 signing deaf children (17 Spanish; 15 English). Results show how signing deaf children found the biggest difficulty with non-frequent words, but not with irregular or long words. This can give a new insight to the dual route model and can have further educative implications for signing deaf children.
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Nathalie Genard (Free University of Brussels), Jacqueline Leybaert, Philippe Mousty,Jesus Alegria - Impact of the teaching methods on metaphonological development and reading and spelling acquisition.
This study examines the impact of the methods for teaching to read (phonics versus whole-word) on the acquisition speed of cognitive processes involved in reading and spelling acquisition. A longitudinal study was carried out with French-speaking children all along the first school year. The use of the phonological procedure in reading and spelling as indexed by important effects of length, complexity and syllabic structure, was markedly more present in children learning to read with a phonic method than in children from the whole-word approach who displayed some difficulties to develop phonemic awareness. These differences will be discussed in the light of developmental models.
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George K. Georgiou (University of Alberta), Rauno Parrila - Rapid automatized naming components and reading acquisition in first grade.
This study examines (a) how Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) components: articulation time, pause time, and consistency - are related to preliteracy and reading measures, and (b) how RAN components develop from kindergarten to the end of first grade. Sixty children were administered RAN tasks in kindergarten and at the beginning and end of grade 1. Preliteracy skills (phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge) were assessed in kindergarten. Word reading and reading fluency were assessed at the end of grade 1. Results showed that pause time and the consistency of the pause time were significantly related to both preliteracy and reading skills. Pause and articulation times decreased significantly from kindergarten to the end of grade 1.
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Michael M. Gerber (University of California). - Experimental measures of comprehension by 3rd Grade English learners: Continued longitudinal research.
We report data from a fourth year of longitudinal research on a cohort of Spanish-speaking students who are acquiring reading skills. Our previous reporting has presented evidence of individual differences in phonological ability and cross-linguistic transfer of this ability to acquisition of important English pre-reading skills (e.g., rime and onset detection, phonemic segmentation and blending). In this presentation we present results from a study of experimental measures of English reading comprehension with a sample from the larger cohort, and relate results to previous phonological, vocabulary, fluency, word reading, and working memory performance.
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Astrid Geudens (University of Antwerp), Dominiek Sandra - Children´s performance in a similarity judgment and a serial recall task the distance between rhyming words and the onset/rime structure of the syllable.
We studied Dutch-speaking prereaders' sensitivity to the onset-rime structure in two tasks that do not require explicit phonological knowledge: similarity judgment and recall of syllable lists. In the similarity judgment task, prereaders judged pseudowords sharing a rime (/fo:s/ - /mo:s/) more similar than pseudowords sharing a CV (/fo:s/ - /fo:k/) or an onset-coda margin (/fo:s/-/fe:s/). However, in the recall task without rhyming words, no support for a fixed onset-rime structure of the syllable could be established. In the recall errors, retentions of the rime did not outnumber retentions of the CV and occurred less than retentions of the onset-coda margin.
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SallyAnn Giess (University of Florida), Wayne King, Linda Lombardino - Using the gap statistic to estimate clusters of individuals with reading disabilities.
Persons with reading disabilities exhibit considerable heterogeneity making it important to develop an accurate and reliable subtyping method. The Gap statistic overcomes previous issues with the optimal number of clusters; in the current proposal it will be applied to a clinical database of 100 individuals with a diagnosis of dyslexia. The characteristics of the resulting clusters will be thoroughly described. Clusters from an earlier study (King, Giess, & Lombardino, paper under review) that included individuals with spoken language deficits and dyslexia will be compared to the current cluster analysis of the dyslexic only population.
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Martine Gijsel (University of Nijmegen), A. Bosman, L. Verhoeven - Reading difficulties in Grade 1: A comparison of the effects on decoding skills of a semantically rich context and a semantically poor context intervention program.
In this study, the effect of two intervention programs on decoding skills was investigated. Participants were about 150 Dutch students of 25 regularly schools from primary Grade 1. All students exhibited reading problems eight weeks after formal reading instruction had started. Each school (the number of participants within a school ranged from 1 to 14) was randomly subjected to the control group (group without extensive training) or an experimental group (group exposed to a computer training program). Results and implications will be discussed.
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Rebecca Godfrey (University of Auckland), G. Brian Thompson - Ignoring what you've been taught? Phonics and the English orthography.
The extent to which beginning readers are disadvantaged by irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences is compared in 5 to 8 year old children who in the classroom received systematic explicit phonics instruction with other children who did not. This was examined in the reading of regular and irregular words and in non-words with regular and irregular rime components. Predictions were made and the results discussed in terms of whether children implicitly learnt to ignore aspects of their phonics instruction that were not consistent with some of their reading vocabulary.
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Dalva M. A. Godoy (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina). - Phonological development in two Brazilian Portugese classrooms with differenct methods of teaching reading.
This study is part of a wider longitudinal study. It intends to examine the evolution of the phonological abilities of two different groups of Brazilian children. They were at the initial stage of literacy acquisition, and following two different methods of teaching. Before the beginning of learning to reading a few children, in both groups, had phonological abilities at the phonemic level. After seven months of instruction, most of them present a good performance in some phonemic tests but with a significant difference between both groups.
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Vincent Goetry (Queen's University), - Reading development in a syllable-based vs. stress-based second language: Evidence from bilingual children schooled in French vs. Dutch .
This study examined the relationship of stress processing abilities (measured with a discrimination task on minimal stress pairs) to literacy-related measures in French-native first graders schooled in a stress-based language (Dutch) and Dutch-native children schooled in a syllable-based language (French). For the French-native children schooled in Dutch, significant relationships were observed between stress processing abilities and vocabulary as well as reading performances. Moreover, the bilinguals who showed poor stress processing abilities also showed significantly lower reading performances than the bilinguals who displayed good stress processing abilities, although the two subgroups did not differ significantly on phonological awareness (measured with syllable, onset-rime and phoneme deletion tasks). None of the relations described above were observed in the Dutch-native children learning to read in French. Taken together, results suggest that stress processing abilities make a unique contribution in reading development in stress-based languages.
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Kristina Goetz (University of York), Margaret J. Snowling - An investigation into verbal-verbal paired-associate learning ability of poor and typical readers.
Three experiments assess the relationship between phonological skills and verbal-verbal paired-associate (PA) learning. Groups of poor readers, chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA) controls were administered tests of word and nonword reading, phoneme deletion and three different verbal-verbal PA learning tasks, which required them to learn pairs of CVC nonwords. There were group differences on all of the reading and phonological tasks. However, group differences on the verbal-verbal PA learning task were only found when the response items of the learning task were phonetically similar to one another. The results are discussed reference to a developmental model of reading.
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Scott J. Goldberg (Yeshiva University NY), Bruce D. Home - The relationship between English (L1) and Hebrew (L2) reading comprehension and teacher reported behavior problems.
The relationship between reading difficulties and behavior problems has been established for children learning to read English. The current study investigated this relationship in schools where students learn to read in two languages to determine if reading problems in a particular language are associated with behavior problems in the setting in which that language is taught. The role of other factors associated with behavior problems for children was also examined. Results substantiated a relationship between reading and behavior for children in bilingual situations complicated by mechanisms of first and second language reading comprehension.
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M. Carmen González-Trujillo (University of Granada), Francisca Serrano, J. Márquez, Sylvia Defior - Initial phoneme awareness development: Spanish preschooler follow up.
The aim of this study is to follow the development of phonemic awareness skills and the way these skills are influenced by linguistic complexities of the items along preschool years. 105 preschool children (mean age = 4 years 5 months) were tested with a phonemic awareness task. Four test-points were carried out in the course of two academic years. Linguistic complexity of the initial phoneme was taken into account (articulation placement, articulation mode and voicing). Results showed that emergent phonemic awareness skills are present at early stages of development in Spanish children. As an additional result, linguistic complexity of the items might condition children performance. Discussion is provided in the framework of emergent literacy skills in preschoolers and the importance of the linguistic complexities in task performance.
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Alexandra Gottardo (Wilfrid Laurier University), Heidy Stanish - Longitudinal predictors of word reading and reading comprehension in Spanish-speaking children.
First grade predictors of second and third grade English word reading and reading comprehension were examined in Spanish-speaking children. Predictors of second grade reading include first (L1) and second language (L2) reading and phonological processing in grade 1. Predictors of third grade word reading include L1 phonological processing in grade 1. Predictors of third grade reading comprehension include L1 and L2 vocabulary knowledge in first grade. These results replicate results found in monolingual readers and show that L2 early reading comprehension is driven by decoding but later reading comprehension is driven by vocabulary knowledge in the child¹s L1 and L2.
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Nata Goulandris (University College London), Teresa To - The role of phonological awareness in bilinguals learning to read English and Mandarin.
The relative importance of phonological awareness and visual skills in bilingual children learning to read English and Mandarin simultaneously was investigated in 35 8-year-old bilingual English-Mandarin primary 2 children. In the first year of school these children had been taught an alphabetic script, Hanyu Pinyin, in order to facilitate the identification of Chinese characters. A battery of cognitive, visual, visual-orthographic, phonological and reading assessments was administered - generally in both languages. The results are discussed in relation to the hypotheses that learning Pinyin is beneficial for learning to read Chinese and that phonological awareness is of importance not only in the acquisition of alphabetic reading skills but also for learning to read logographic scripts.
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Noel Gregg (University of Georgia), Randy Floyd, Jennifer Hartwig - Reading comprehension: Cognitive and linguistic predictors across the lifespan.
The purpose of this presentation will be to present the findings from two large studies investigating the cognitive and linguistic abilities that effect reading comprehension. The first study presented used measures of seven CHC broad abilities as possible aptitudes for reading comprehension. Participants were drawn from the standardization sample of the Woodcock-Johnson III. The four subsamples used in this investigation included 1,1096 (ages 6-8); 2,241 9ages 9 thrrough 13); 1,642 9ages 14 through 19); and 1,423 (ages 20 through 39) participants. Amos 4.0 was used to analyze the specified SEM modes maximum likelihood estimation was used to estimate free parameters. The second study pertained to the college population with and without dyslexia (n=200). Specific cognitive and linguistic tasks were used as predictors of three different reading comprehension tasks (recall, read and answer questions, cloze).
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Adenike K. Griffin (University of Michigan), Fred Morrison - The black-white test score gap: Role of the home environment in predicting higher SES African American children’s reading skills development.
Traditionally, test-score gap research has compared school-age, at-risk African-American children to their European-American peers. This study explores whether proven positive predictors of the vocabulary and decoding skills of ’mainstream’ American children, prior to school entry, also positively predict the same skills in a sample of higher SES African-American children. This study uses data from a sample of sixty African American mother-child dyads involved in phases 1 & 2 of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. It employs theoretically driven hierarchical regression models to measure the extent to which gender, family income, the home literacy environment, mother sensitivity, responsivity and hostility, daycare hours and daycare quality at 36 months positively predict children’s vocabulary and decoding skills at 54 months of age. Results reveal that the 36-month total HOME score positively predicts vocabulary and decoding at 54-months and that home learning materials were the best positive predictor of these outcomes.
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Elena Grigorenko (Yale). - Introduction symposium: Genetic bases of reading and reading-related difficulties.
This symposium provides a brief overview of the frontiers of the investigation of genetic bases of reading and reading-related (e.g., speech and language) problems. The symposium will cover a range of methodologies employed by the field (behavior-genetic analyses, analyses of patterns of familial transition, and molecular genetic analyses) in a variety of populations (Australian, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, and USA), speaking a number of languages (English, Finnish, Norwegian, and Russian). The objective of this symposium is to present a snapshot of the field and to expose the audience to the field’s most recent accomplishments and inspirations. The symposium will start with a brief overview of the field (E. Grigorenko) that will contextualize the specific presentations from different research groups.
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Pascal Gygax (University of Fribourg), Julien-François Gerber - Inferring character¹s emotional status: Plausibility does not mean relevance.
This paper presents evidence to show that researchers studying emotion inferences in text comprehension have inaccurately interpreted their findings regarding the automatic elaboration of emotional inferences. Researchers often have tested the comprehension of "matching" vs "mismatching" emotions. This paper shows that what they have actually tested is "plausible" vs "implausible" emotions. However, "plausible" emotions are not likely included in readers¹ mental representation, as they are not "relevant" to the situation (i.e. they are only "plausible"). Therefore, in light of these present findings, the belief that emotional inferences are included in readers¹ mental representation during reading needs to be revisited.
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Bente E. Hagtvet (University of Oslo), Sol A. H. Lyster, Erna Horn - The relationship of phonemic awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading skills in normal and disordered developmente: A longitudinal study of children of dyslexic parents.
The present study focuses on the predictive power of PA and RAN to reading performance in a sub-study of a large-scale study of Norwegian children aged five to eight years. 70 children of dyslexic parents were followed longitudinally from preschool to school, and oral and written language skills were assessed yearly. Approximately 50% of these children had problems in learning to read. The results suggest that phonological processing and rapid naming both predict reading skills, but their relative impact varies with developmental level and reading tasks. The results are discussed with reference to developmental and linguistic theory.
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Ellen Hamilton (University of Michigan), Marilyn Shatz - The relation of two-year-olds' lexical knowledge to later performance on phonological working memory tasks.
Undifferentiated treatment of heterogeneous predictors of reading skill may obscure important developmental features in the language-literacy relationship. We related the lexical acquisition of 46 two-year-olds to their pre-reading skills at 5-6 years of age. We identified two aspects of early word-learning that are differentially related to later phonological working memory in theoretically meaningful and interpretable ways. Early productive vocabulary is significantly related to later nonsense word repetition whereas early performance in a letter-labeling task is significantly correlated with later digit and nonword repetition (controlling for early vocabulary). These findings suggest separable developmental subskills in specific reading predictors and may have implications for early identification of reading difficulty.
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Fred Hasselman (University of Nijmegen), Ludo Verhoeven, Saskia de Graaff - Early treatment of children with a genetic risk for dyslexia: Does slowing down the speech signal aid in phonics training?
This study is part of a larger effort to investigate the possibility of early diagnosis and treatment of kindergartners who are genetically at risk for dyslexia. We set out to investigate the results reported in literature of treatment aided by speech manipulation (see for instance Merzenich et al., 1996) and conducted an experiment in which kindergartners participated in a training program with the entire speech signal being slowed down. Results show positive effects of the training program as a whole, but additional effects of slowing down the speech signal were not found.
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Yeqin He (University of Illinois), Qiuying Wang, Richard C. Anderson - Chinese children's use of subcharacter information about pronunciation.
Two experiments involving Mandarin-speaking second graders and fourth graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound Chinese characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that phonological awareness generally facilitates learning. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children can utilize the information in bound-phonetic characters as well as, or even better than, the information in independent-phonetic characters. This implies that Chinese children can employ an analogy strategy for decoding semantic-phonetic compound characters. The analogy strategy has a substantially greater likelihood of success than the simple strategy of naming the phonetic.
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Annemarie Hindman (University of Michigan) Frederick J. Morrison - Tailoring best practices in book reading: An analysis of differential effects of immediate and non-immediate talk related to individual and contextual variation.
This study examined whether the "best practices" in reading books with young children, such as using non-immediate talk, vary with the child's level of language skill and engagement and between the contexts of the home and school. Language exchanges between adults and preschool children during home and school readings were coded and analyzed. Findings indicate systematic shifts in the optimal ratio of immediate to non-immediate talk; children with lower language skills show more vocabulary growth and attention in lower-level language exchanges, while the opposite is true for more skilled children. All children were engaged in more non-immediate talk at home than school. Implications for individualized and coordinated home-school book readings are discussed.
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Connie Suk-Han Ho (University of Hong Kong), David W. Chan, Suk-Man Tsang, Suk-Han Lee, Kevin K. H. Chung - Paired associate difficulty in verbal learning among Chinese dyslexic children.
Past studies in alphabetic languages have shown that dyslexic readers have difficulties in learning visual-verbal associations, and much overlearning is required for long-term retention. The present study examined the universality of this impairment in dyslexic readers by studying children reading a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. Three groups (dyslexic, CA control, and RL control) of Chinese primary school children were recruited. It was found that the Dyslexic group performed less well than both the CA and RL groups in writing familiar words (e.g., the childs own name). The Dyslexic group also performed less well than the RL group in learning vocabularies without phonological cues but not for words with phonological cues. These findings suggest that Chinese dyslexic children have particular difficulty learning arbitrary associations between written symbol and sound like their alphabetic counterparts.
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Sherri L. Horner (Bowling Green State University). - Young children's use of strategies during environmental print tasks.
This study investigated whether children use different types of strategies to read contextualized and decontextualized environmental print (EP) and words. In my previous study, results showed that the majority of children attempted to make meaning in the more contextualized measures but only those children who could read words could also read the decontextualized EP. I have re-analyzed this data by coding responses into context-based, alphabet-based, and "other" categories. I predict that most children will use a context-based strategy in the contextualized EP tasks while only those children who have a good alphabet knowledge base (as determined by the letter naming and word reading tasks) will be able to shift to alphabet-based strategies in the decontextualized EP tasks. Those children without this knowledge will use 'other' strategies for these tasks.
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John Hosp (University of Utah), Michelle Hosp, Janice A. Dole - Knowledge and attitudes toward Reading First.
It is often the case that knowledge and attitudes are highly related to one another. The purpose of this paper was to examine the relationship between educators’ knowledge of scientifically based reading research and their attitudes toward Reading First. The researchers hypothesized that teachers, principals, reading coaches and district coordinators who know more about SBRR will have more positive attitudes towards Reading First. Data were collected on all adult participants in Utah’s Reading First. Correlations will determine the extent to which more knowledge about SBRR relates to more positive attitudes about Reading First. Data will be discussed in terms of their implications for the successful implementation of Reading First.
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Diana Hughes (University of London), Elaine Funnell - Age of acquisition.
This paper presents object naming data (72 items, 4 categories) collected from children aged 2y1m - 14y 6m. Their knowledge of the same items (as shown by their response to probe questions) has also been assessed. This has enabled Objective Ages-of-Acquisition (Obj AoA) to be computed for both naming and knowing and thus comparisons to be made. Younger children were able to name some objects about which they had little knowledge and older children were able to demonstrate knowledge about some objects they were unable to name. Subjective AoA for naming and knowing have been collected for the same objects from a group of 60 adults, and compared with the Obj AoA.
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Jacqueline Hulslander (University of Colorado), Richard Olson - The influence of orthographic skills on phoneme awareness task performance.
The influence of orthographic skill on two phoneme awareness tasks wasinvestigated in 1286 children aged 8-18. In a reading-level match,younger, normal readers scored significantly higher than older, disabledreaders on both orthographically transparent and orthographic-foil wordsin a phoneme deletion task. The groups did not differ in the proportionof errors which revealed an overt orthographic strategy, and there was nointeraction of group by orthographic transparency. Transparent itemscores correlated more strongly than orthographic-foil scores with wordreading, phonological decoding, and orthographic coding, suggesting thatthe phoneme deletion task is influenced by, but not limited to, orthographic influences. Similar results were found for a Pig Latin task.
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Florian Hutzler (Freie Universität Berlin), Heinz Wimmer - Poor readers' eye movements: No deficits in oculomotoric control during a reading-like visual-search task.
In the present study, eye-movements of German poor reading boys and controls were recorded during pseudoword reading and during a reading-like visual-search task. For both tasks, items were presented listwise: During the first task, pseudowords had to be read, during the second task, consonant strings had to be searched through for targets with two adjacent identical letters. Whereas requirements on visual perception and oculomotoric control were kept constant for both tasks, reading processes were involved in the first but not in the second task. During pseudoword reading, poor readers exhibited the typical eye-movement pattern of more and prolonged fixations and a higher number of regressions. In contrast, no differences in eye movement patterns were observed during the visual-search task. This finding ruled out explanations of dyslexia in terms of eye-movement control deficits as proposed by Fischer (2001), in a revival of Pavlidis, (1981)
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Sudha Iyengar (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland), Catherine M. Stein, Barbara A. Lewis, James H. Schick, H. Gerry Taylor, Lawrence D. Shriberg, Christopher Millard, Amy Kundtz-Kluge, Karlie Reading, Nori Minich, Amy Hansen, Lisa A. Freebairn, Robert C. Elston - Pleiotropic effects of a chromosome 3 locus on speech-sound disorder and reading.