Aaron. - . Abu-Rabia. - . Adams. - . Adlof . - . Altmann. - . A.Anderson. - . RC.Anderson. - . Anthony. - . Aram. - . Astolfo. - . Au. - . August. - . B.Baker. - . L.Baker. - . Balogh . - . Bates. - . Beall. - . Bell. - . Betjemann. - . Biancarosa. - . Biangardi. - . Blanchard. - . Bolger. - .. Bosman. - . Bournot-Trites. - .. Bramer. - . Branum-Martin. - . Braze. - . G.Brown. - .. H.Brown. - . Byrne. - . Cain. - . Cameron. - .. Caravolas. - . Carlisle. - . Carlo. - . Carroll. - . Cate. - . Chase. - . Cheng. - . Chiappe. - . Choi. - . Chong. - . B.Chow. - . E.Chow. - . Christensen. - . Cohen. - . Connor . - . Conrad . - . Corriveau. - . Craig. - . Cromley. - . Cronin. - . Cunningham. - . Cutting. - . Daigle. - . David. - . Davis. - . Davydovskaia. - . deBree. - . deJong. - . DePalma. - . Deacon. - . Dennis. - . Desrochers. - . Diamanti. - . Díaz. - . Douklias. - . Dreher. - . Dreyer. - . Dunlap. - . Elbro. - . Elleman. - . Evans. - . Farnia . - . Faroga. - . Farrington-Flint . - . Figueredo. - . Filippini. - . Fraser. - .. Frijters. - . Georgiou. - . Gerrits. - .. Gersten. - . Geva. - . Ghelani. - . Gidney. - . Given. - . Goetry. - .. Gong. - . Goodman. - . Gottardo. - .. Gregg. - . Gunn. - . Guron . - . Gutiérrez-Palma. - . Hall. - . Hamilton . - . Hamre . - . Hansen. - . Hart. - . Hasselman. - . Hawelka. - . Hayes. - . Hayward. - . Hindman. - . Ho. - . Hogan. - . Holliman. - . Hosp. - . Howard. - . Hulme. - . Hulslander. - . Hutzler. - . Inutsuka. - . Jackson. - .. Janzen. - . Jared. - . Jiménez. - . Johnson. - . Johnston. - . Joshi. - . Kahn-Horwitz. - . Kaplan. - . Karlson. - . Katenkamp. - . Keenan. - . Kemp . - . Kirby. - . Korat. - . Kruk. - . Kuhn. - . Kyle . - . Kyte. - . Lafrance. - . Landerl. - . Lehtonen . - . Leong. - . Lesaux. - . Leung. - . Levin. - . Lipka. - . Litt. - . Lombardino. - . Lonigan. - . Lorch. - . Manis. - . Martin-Chang. - . Mason . - . McTaggart . - . Miller. - . Mishra. - . Misra. - . Mordell. - . Mueller. - . Naples. - . Navas. - . Nelson. - . Newman. - . Oakhill. - . O’Brien. - . Olinghouse. - .. Olson. - . Ouellette. - . Overby. - . Owen. - . Parrila. - . Pasquini . - . Patton-Terry. - . Pearson. - . Penney. - . Perfetti. - . Petrill . - . Pollo. - . Pugh. - . Puranik. - . Rabin. - . Ramírez. - . Reitsma. - . J.Roberts . - . T.Roberts . - . Robertson. - . Rodríguez. - . Rogers Haverback. - . Rollins. - . Rosenthal. - . Roth . - . Roy-Charland. - . Ruetschlin. - . Rupley. - . Sabatini . - . Sadoski. - . Saiegh-Haddad. - .. Sainz. - . Samuelsson. - . Sandak. - . Sargent. - . Savage. - . Scarborough. - . Scheerer-Neumann . - . Schiff. - . Scott. - . Seidenberg. - . Seward. - . Seymour. - . Shen. - . Siegel. - . Sittner. - . Slominski. - . Smith. - . Snellings . - . Snowling. - . Solari. - . Son. - . Spear-Swerling. - . Stafford. - . Stainthorp. - . Steffler. - . Steinbach. - .. Stephenson. - . Sumutka. - . Sun-Alperin . - . Thaler. - . Thomson. - . Townsend. - . Tsai. - . Vaknin. - . VanDaal. - . VanDyke. - . Varnhagen . - . Vaughn. - . Verhoeven. - . Wang. - . Wechsler. - . Wiens. - . Williams. - . Wimmer. - . Wong. - . Wood. - . Wright. - . Yaghoubzadeh. - . Yang. - . Yin. - . Ying. - . Yuen. - . Zhang. - . Zipke.
P.G. Aaron (Indiana State U. ) - Learning
to spell English from print and learning to spell it from speech: A study
of children who speak Tamil, a Dravidian language.
English spelling of a group of Tamil-speaking children who learn English first
as a written language is compared with that of a group of American children who
learn English first as a spoken language. It is concluded that learning English
first as a written language helps children to avoid spelling errors that are
dialectical in nature, but the phonology of native Tamil leads children to
commit spelling errors of a different kind.
Top
Salim Abu-Rabia (U. of Haifa) - Bilingual
Literacy among regular and dyslexic Arabic readers.
The focus of this paper will be on the way native Arabic speakers acquire
second and third languages. An introduction about the Arabic orthography and
its characteristics will be presented. Data about regular and dyslexic readers
will also be presented. Two studies will be the focus of the presentation; the
first examined the relationship among reading , writing, phonological,
syntactic, orthographic, and memory skills in three languages with different
orthographies, and the second examined regular and dyslexic Arabic speakers
learning English as a second language. Based on this data some conclusions will
be drawn about bilingual education among regular and dyslexic readers.
Top
Marilyn Jager Adams (Soliloquy Learning)
- Using accuracy and fluency to estimate independent, instructional, and
frustration-level reading material.
Students in grades 2-6 were asked to read aloud a series of passages that
ranged in difficulty from beneath to above their grade-level. The readings were
captured by speech recognition technology so as to allow re-scoring of
accuracy, examination of dysfluencies, and precise measurement of both overall
and within-passage temporal parameters. The goals were (1) to identify factors
clustered at the transition from independent-level to instructional-level
reading, and (2) to develop heuristics for estimating performance across text
levels for individuals (e.g., predicting texts that should fall within a
child's independent level). The results are surprising.
Top
Suzanne M. Adlof (U. of Kansas) Hugh W. Catts,
Tiffany P. Hogan, Todd Little - The role of fluency in reading
comprehension.
Studies suggest that reading fluency plays an increasing role important role in
the reading comprehension abilities through the school years. In this study, we
examined this hypothesis using a large, longitudinal sample of children tested
in 2nd, 4th, and 8th grades on measures of word recognition, fluency, listening
comprehension, and reading comprehension. Confirmatory factor analyses and
structuring equation modeling were used to determine the unique contribution of
fluency to reading comprehension across the grades.
Top
Lori J. P. Altmann (U. of Florida)
Cynthia Puranik, Elizabeth Mikell, Linda J. Lombardino - Grammatical
sentence production in individuals with and without dyslexia.
Dyslexia can result in delays in language development affecting phonological,
morphological, and syntactic competence; however, the linguistic variables
causing these difficulties have not been identified. We hypothesized that using
noncanonical verb types might be particularly difficult for individuals with
dyslexia, because they constrain sentence production to constructions of
relatively low frequency. For example, a verb like “bored” requires an animate
direct object (e.g., “The lecture bored the student”), while an irregular past
participle like “hidden” requires a perfective, passive or adjectival
construction. Consequently, the current study analyzed the sentence production
of dyslexic and normal readers when using transitive verbs that varied in
morphological regularity and argument structure.
Top
Alida Anderson (U. of Illinois) Yeqin He,
Wenling Li - Children’s visual-orthographic representation of Chinese
characters.
Chinese children’s perceptual representation of characters was investigated in
four experiments in which several hundred children reproduced different types
of characters and noncharacters after each had been briefly presented. Results
indicate that major functional components of characters are more readily
perceived as chunks than subcomponents that do not represent semantic or
phonological information; however, subcomponents are reproduced far better than
arbitrary stroke configurations, indicating that subcomponents also serve as
perceptual chunks. The ability to see characters in terms of chunks develops
gradually over the early school years and is correlated with measures of
vocabulary and reading.
Top
Richard C. Anderson (U. of Maryland) - Linguistic
specificity in preschool age children with and without specific language
impairment.
This project describes linguistic specificity through literate language feature
(LLF) use in preschool age children, to include those children with specific
language impairment (SLI). Children’s linguistic specificity is examined in two
conditions of play and storybook sharing with caregivers, in order to determine
the extent to which young children use micro- and macro-level language features
for specificity in naturalistic contexts of conversational discourse.
Micro-level indices include children's use of elaborated noun phrases,
conjunctions, adverbs, and mental and linguistic verbs (i.e., LLFs). Children's
utterances will also be coded for linguistic specificity of utterance by
type, which range from labeling to interpreting.
Top
Jason L. Anthony (U. of Texas-Houston
Health Science Center) Renee McDonald - Socioemotional development IS
important for emergent literacy acquisition!
We examined the link between socioemotional development and school readiness in
375 Head Start children. Participants were administered emergent literacy tests
4 times per year, and teachers rated children's social, emotional, and
behavioral proclivities on the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC)
midyear. Mixed modeling controlled for classroom growth, while individual
growth trajectories for each emergent literacy skill were correlated with BASC
scores. Although only individual growth rates in phonological awareness were
predicted by BASC scores, end-of-year proficiencies in letter names, letter
sounds, phonological awareness, print discrimination, and word reading were
significantly predicted by BASC scores. Children's socioemotional and
behavioral health are important outcomes not only in their own right but also
because they appear related to literacy acquisition.
Top
Dorit Aram (Tel Aviv U. ) Sagit Hoshmand -
Maternal writing mediation to kindergartners: Analysis via a twins
study.
The study explored the nature of maternal writing mediation to kindergarten
twins. It investigated the extent to which the mothers are sensitive to their
children’s literacy level and tried to reveal if mothers have a mediation style
that they employ with both of their twins? The sample included 28 pairs of
kindergarten twins and their mothers. Children’s literacy was assessed
individually. Maternal pedagogical beliefs and estimation of their children’s early
literacy were assessed. Mother-child word writing interactions with each of the
twins were videotaped. The results proved that along with sensitivity to the
child’s literacy level, mothers of twins have a mediation style.
Top
Laura Astolfo (Brock U. ) John McNamara
- Using measures of phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge to
identify at-risk readers in Kindergarten: A follow-up in Grade Two.
This study represents a section within a larger longitudinal analysis in which
the primary purpose was to design and evaluate a school-based tool to identify
children at-risk for reading failure in kindergarten. This was a three-year
longitudinal study that followed a cohort of children from kindergarten to
grade three. 648 kindergarten children from three school districts in central
Saskatchewan, Canada made up the sample for this study. In kindergarten, all
participants in this study were measured for phonological processing and
letter/sound skills. Results show that many children who have poor pre-reading
skills display grade-appropriate skills in grade three. A smaller section of
children who have poor pre-reading skills remain poor readers in grade three
despite remedial instruction; this demonstrates the Matthew Effect (Stanovich,
1988). Interventions for children at risk for reading failure must take place
at the earliest possible stage.
Top
Mei-lan Au (Hong Kong Institute of
Education) Linda Siegel - The effectiveness of phonological awareness
training in English reading among Hong Kong children.
Many research studies on English reading support that phonological awareness is
crucial to reading success. This paper reports about a study which examined the
effect of phonological awareness training in English reading among Hong Kong
children who learn English as their second language. Participants were 5-year
old children studying the last year of preschool education, the year before
formal primary schooling. Children in the experimental group (184) received
phonological awareness training for about 6 months while the children in the
control group (166) were taught with their original English curriculum.
Children in the experimental group performed significantly better in both
reading¡Vrelated tasks (picture naming and word reading) and reading-related
skills (rhyme detection and phoneme identification). The findings indicate that
phonological awareness training is beneficial to the development of English
reading skills among Hong Kong children.
Top
Diane August (Center for Applied
Linguistics) Margarita Calderon, Maria Carlo, Michelle Nutall - Developing
literacy in English-language learners: An examination of the impact of
English-only versus bilingual instruction.
This study examined differences in broad reading outcomes (letter-word
identification and passage comprehension) for three groups of fifth grade
Spanish-speaking students: students instructed in Spanish only, students
instructed in English; and students instructed first in Spanish and then
transitioned into English-only instruction. Findings indicate instruction in
Spanish followed by instruction in English benefits Spanish-speaking children.
They perform as well in Spanish as students instructed only in Spanish and as
well in English as students instructed only in English. However, this is not
the case for students instructed in one language or the other. Without Spanish
instruction, English-instructed students do not perform as well as the other
two groups. Without English instruction, Spanish instructed students do not
compare as well as the other two groups.
Top
Bettina Baker (U. of Pennsylvania Linguistics
Laboratory) John Sabatini - A comparison of the effects of two phonologically-based,
remedial reading programs for struggling readers from different language and
ethnic backgrounds in low-income schools.
A study examined the effects of two phonologically-based interventions on
struggling Spanish-speaking and English-speaking readers in grades 2 through 4.
246 children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatment conditions. Descriptive
statistics, intercorrelations, and gain scores will be presented. Results show
gain scores across both interventions for Woodcock Johnson III word
identification, word attack, and reading fluency sub-tests in the range of an
effect size of 1.0, and approximately .75 for passage comprehension. There were
no significant differences in gains between interventions. Results will be
presented to determine whether sub-sets of the sample showed a differential
effect of intervention.
Top
Linda Baker (U. of Maryland) Mariam Jean Dreher - Balancing
learning to read and reading for learning: Intervention effects on students’
achievement.
A primary goal of the intervention was to increase students’ ability to
comprehend and use information text. Growth was assessed using the
Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test and researcher-developed tasks requiring students
to read expository text and use the information to respond in writing to
prompts. Reading motivation was also assessed. This paper reports the results
of these assessments, administered in Grades 2, 3, and 4. Gates-MacGinitie
scores improved steadily over time but did not differ across intervention
conditions, nor did scores on reading-to-learn and motivation tasks. However,
students in the information-books-plus-instruction condition were better able
to use text-access features.
Top
Jennifer Balogh (Ordinate Corporation)
John Strucker, Jared Bernstein, Isabella Barbier - Predictors of reading
fluency.
In the simple view of reading (Gough et al. 1992), decoding and linguistic
comprehension predict reading comprehension. Given the close relation between
reading comprehension and reading fluency, we considered whether the theory
generalized to reading fluency. To test this, we analyzed data from an
experiment in which adults read aloud, repeated sentences, and named
pseudowords. The results indicate that reading fluency is highly correlated
with the fluency of repeating sentences. When repeat fluency was combined with
weighted measures of decoding, there was a statistically significant increase
in the correlation. Findings are discussed in terms of fluency’s role in
reading theories.
Top
Timothy Bates (Macquarie Centre for
Cognitive Science) Anne Castles, Michelle Luciano, Margaret J. Wright, Max
Coltheart, Nicolas G. Martin - What do genes tell us about reading?
Research is presented using the genetic independence of psychological processes
to test competing cognitive models of reading. A model in which distinct genes
exist for lexical and nonlexical processing is supported. Semantic knowledge
and working memory processes are suggested to entail further distinct sources
of genetics variance. Multivariate linkage analysis is presented as a tool for
distinguishing genes which are specific for particular components of reading,
and linkage data in our sample is used to demonstrate this. Finally, evidence
from nonword repetition performance as a marker of SLI is presented, supporting
genetic independence between oral and written language processing.
Top
Lisa Beall (U. of Maryland) Faith Morse,
Linda Baker, Mariam Jean Dreher - Student book preferences and their
links to achievement.
Although the primary purpose of this project was to increase students' ability
to use and understand the "academic text" they are increasingly
exposed to in the intermediate grades and beyond, a corollary purpose was to
increase the amount of informational text students choose to read, given the
established benefits of enriched world knowledge and vocabulary on
comprehension. Accordingly, several measures of preference were collected
including the type of books indicated as favorites and the frequency of
choosing expository or narrative-informational books as gifts. This paper
examines the relations between these preferences and student achievement,
reading activity, and motivation to read.
Top
Nanci Bell (Lindamood-Bell Learning
Processes) - The role of imagery and verbal processing in comprehension.
In 1993, Durkin said that comprehension had come to be viewed as “the essence
of reading.” Years later the 2000 National Reading Panel (NRP) report listed
comprehension as one of the five essential components of reading instruction.
This presentation will involve a discussion of Dual Coding Theory (Paivio,
1971) as a theoretical basis for reading comprehension instruction that
integrates mental imagery and verbal processing. Additionally, individual,
single group pre/post, and comparative studies of students who are adequate
decoders and poor comprehenders will be presented to illustrate the efficacy of
developing mental imagery as a sensory-cognitive component in reading
comprehension.
Top
Rebecca S. Betjemann (U. of Denver)
Janice M. Keenan - Visual and auditory priming in Children with reading
disabilities.
Priming is an important component of reading that can affect a child's ease of
decoding and comprehension. We examined semantic, phonological/ graphemic, and
combined (i.e., FLOAT - BOAT) priming in children with reading disabilities
(RD) in both visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. Despite their
disability, children with RD show significant phonological and
phonological/graphemic priming, comparable to controls. Where they appear to
show a deficit is in semantics; there is a trend for children with RD to show
less semantic and less combined priming than controls.
Top
Gina Biancarosa (Harvard Graduate
School of Education) - Revisiting reading speed: How sentence reading
speed might reveal more about our students’ comprehension processes.
The current research sought to relate sentence reading speed to reading
comprehension. Third grade children read and retold stories in which the
protagonist is tricked. Children slowed down when reading a sentence
challenging to situation-model construction, but only when this sentence came
early in the story. When the sentence came later, children showed considerable
variation in the speed with which they read it. Only in the latter case did
their sentence-reading speed predict their ability to retell the story.
Competing hypotheses for these results and implications for classroom
assessment are discussed.
Top
Ulrike Biangardi (U. of Washington)
Deborah McCutchen - Morphological processes in 5th and 8th graders’ word
reading.
Previously we investigated whether morphological information aided
English-speaking 4th graders in a lexical-decision- priming task. Results
indicated that morphologically primed base words were recognized more quickly
than orthographically and control primed base words. However, contrary to
adults (Stoltz & Feldman,1995), no inhibition occurred when reading
orthographically primed base words. Our current study investigates whether
orthographically primed base words elicit inhibition effects in 5th and 8th
graders. Preliminary results indicate that both grades performed similar to the
4th graders in our previous study on the lexical decision priming task.
Top
Jay Blanchard (Arizona State U. ) Kim
Atwill, Karen Burstein, Jim Christie, Joanna Gorin, David Wodrich - An
investigation of cross-language transfer in phonemic awareness of kindergarten
Spanish-speaking children.
Phonemic awareness is considered a prerequisite for reading. However, issues
surround its prerequisite status. One is cross-language transfer. This issue is
of importance given the challenges facing children who must learn to read in a
language different from the one spoken at home. Unfortunately, there is a
paucity of studies on the issue (Manis, Lindsey & Bailey, 2004). This study
investigated cross-language transfer of PA among 80 kindergartners in Spanish
and English. Students were administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests
and DIBELS in both languages. Correlation and regression analyses within a
multi-trait, multi-method framework were conducted to investigate transfer
effects.
Top
Donald J. Bolger (U. of Pittsburgh)
Walter Schneider, Charles Perfetti - The development of orthographic
knowledge: A cognitive neuroscience investigation of the self-organizing
principles of the ventral visual cortex for reading.
This paper reports an fMRI study that investigates how cortical areas
associated with visual word recognition, particularly the visual word form area
(VWFA), are impacted when learning graphic forms including the native
orthography. In the study, participants are semantically trained (given a
context sentence) on words, digit-strings, and Chinese characters and then
given a set of dependent measures to assess learning. Following training,
participants are testing in an fMRI 1-back paradigm to examine the cortical
response of the target cortical regions to trained stimuli compared to
untrained stimuli (of high and low familiarity in the word and number
conditions). Our goal is to understand how the brain is organized to process
meaningful orthographic information
Top
Anna M. T. Bosman (U. of Nijmegen)
Marion IJntema-de Kok, Tom Braams, Fred Hasselman - Reading disabilities,
remediation, and the role of memory skills.
Two months after formal reading instruction had started, the reading and memory
skills of a large group of Dutch-speaking first graders were assessed. Children
who showed early reading disabilities (n = 54) received immediate remedial
treatment. Children without reading disabilities served as a control group (n =
46). After six months reading and memory skills of all children were tested
again. Children with reading disabilities had significantly lower memory skills
than of those without, and the memory skills of children whose reading
disabilities were successfully remediated were significantly better than of
those who still had reading problems after treatment.
Top
Monique Bournot-Trites (U. of
British Columbia) - Preventing reading difficulties in French immersion
and Francophone schools through instruction in phonemeic awareness and phonics.
..
This paper presents the effects of systematic training in phonological
awareness on reading in Grade 1 in French immersion and French schools in the
Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This one-year study followed 117 grade 1
children (111 in French immersion and 13 in French L1 schools). Sixty-eight
children, in the treatment group, were taught beginning reading skills using
the Jolly Phonics method in French, and 43 were in the control group being
taught without any systematic method. The experimental group did better in
reading tasks than the control group, after controlling for non-verbal
cognitive ability and language level prior to the intervention.
Top
Dawn Bramer (U. of Iowa) - Case
study of a pre-school aged precocious reader.
Case studies of very young precocious readers present valuable opportunities to
test hypotheses about the role of phonological awareness in reading
acquisition. Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson (2000) presented the case of Maxine,
a pre-school aged precocious reader who could decode pseudowords, but was not
able to complete phonemic awareness tasks. Her case was used as a model to
study another precocious reader, Jack, for one year beginning at age 2 years 6
months. Although similar to Maxine in many ways, Jack presented a contrasting
and previously unreported pattern of extremely early reading acquisition
including well-developed phonemic awareness and spelling.
Top
Lee Branum-Martin (U. of Houston)
David J. Francis, Paras D. Mehta - Bilingual phonological awareness:
Multilevel construct validation among Spanish-speaking Kindergarteners in
transitional bilingual education classrooms.
The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA)
tasks, including blending words, blending nonwords, segmenting words, and
phoneme elision, was examined via multilevel confirmatory factor analysis.
Results showed that the PA tasks defined a unitary construct in each language
both at the student as well as at the classroom levels. The results extend
previous findings that PA tasks are unidimensional in each language and provide
a framework for future comparisons of bilingual educational programs.
Top
David Braze (Haskins Laboratories) Einar
Mencl, Whitney Tabor, Donald Shankweiler - Speaking up for vocabulary in
interpreting reading skill differences in young adults.
We focus on young adults (16-24 years) emerging from the educational system
with sub-optimal reading skills. A comprehensive test battery assesses reading
and listening comprehension, decoding, vocabulary, verbal working memory, print
experience. The hypothesis that reading comprehension converges on listening
comprehension is found lacking. Both decoding and vocabulary play important
roles in reading comprehension. Functional brain activity studies of this group
shows that brain activity during a sentence comprehension task is modulated by
sentence complexity, reader skill and modality (speech vs. print). We discuss
how a specific connectionist model of lexical representation and lexical access
accounts for these findings.
Top
Gail Brown (Sydney) Herbert Marsh, Rhonda Craven, Mary
Cassar - An effective, theoretically-based and practical intervention for
significant improvements in reading comprehension.
This presentation outlines the theoretical foundation and methodology for
effective classroom instruction in question answering. Significant posttest
reading comprehension performance favoured intervention students compared to
controls completing year 5 reading programs. General education teachers
implemented thirty lessons with whole classes. Measures included reading
comprehension, question-answering and reading fluency, with some conclusions
about their relationships. A theoretical foundation in information processing
models was applied to the complex cognitive skill of question-answering. This
foundation ensured the efficacy of the intervention. Future applications of
information processing models will be presented.
Top
Hilary Brown (Wilfrid Laurier U. ) Sarah
Mordell, Tracee Fancis, Alexandra Gottardo. - Cognitive predictors of
reading ability in adolescents with learning disabilities.
The purpose of this study was to examine cognitive predictors of reading
ability in adolescents with learning disabilities. Twenty-seven adolescents
with formally diagnosed learning disabilities participated in the study. A
variety of reading measures were administered to participants over several one
hour sessions. The results show that the pseudoword phoneme deletion task
predicted word and pseudoword reading, while a memory for sentences task
predicted reading comprehension. Therefore, word and pseudoword reading are
related to phonological awareness, while reading comprehension was related to syntactic
processing. Word reading is driven by phonological awareness even in
adolescents.
Top
Brian Byrne (U. of New England) Richard
Olson, Sally Wadsworth, Robin Corley, Stefan Samuelsson, Peter Quain - Longitudinal
twin study of literacy and language: The first three years.
In this paper we provide an update on a continuing longitudinal study of
literacy development in a genetically sensitive design. We first report
univariate and multivariate analyses of the genetic and environmental
influences on Grade 1 decoding and comprehension measures, phonological
awareness, rapid naming, and aspects of learning. Then we model progress from
preschool and kindergarten to Grade 1 in these and related variables, tracing
the interplay of genes and environment as children develop their literacy
skills.
Top
Kate Cain (U. of Essex) - Reading
comprehension failure: Profiles of individuals from different populations.
Some children develop age-appropriate word reading but their reading
comprehension lags behind. I present profiles of the written and spoken
language comprehension abilities from two groups of poor comprehender: children
attending mainstream schools and children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder
(ASD). Assessments included short-term and working memory, inference making,
vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension, and understanding of
figurative language. Although the skills assessed are related to reading
comprehension in general, different patterns of strength and weakness were
apparent suggesting that deficits in key comprehension skills are not
necessarily present in all poor comprehenders, whether from a
"normal" or clinical population.
Top
Claire E. Cameron (U. of Michigan)
Carol McDonald Connor, Frederick J. Morrison - The impact of classroom
organization on decoding skill growth in First Grade.
This study examined the impact of classroom organization on literacy skill
growth in first-grade. The role of organization (i.e., a non-instructional
activity including the amount of time teachers spent orienting for new
activities and organizing for instruction) in decoding skill growth was
explored, considering background factors and children's entering skills.
Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to examine this influence in 108 children
nested within 44 first-grade classrooms. Amount and change over time in
organization were significantly associated with decoding outcomes. Students
demonstrated stronger decoding skill growth in classrooms that spent more time
in organization early in the year, but which also sharply decreased time in
this activity over the school year.
Top
Markéta Caravolas (U. of Liverpool)
Karin Landerl - Phonotactic structure of words in children's native
language specifically shapes the development of their phoneme awareness
skills.
The hypothesis was investigated that the typical phonotactic structures of
onsets and codas in children's spoken language specifically influence their
awareness of these units. Czech, which permits many different frequently
occurring complex onsets, but only a restricted diversity and frequency complex
codas, was compared with Austrian German, in which the opposite is true. The
phonotactic-input hypothesis was supported: while Czech (n= 43) non-reader
school beginners showed better awareness of phonemes in complex onsets than in
complex codas, the reverse pattern was obtained for their Austrian (n= 36)
peers. Moreover, this language-specific pattern of awareness persisted to
the end of first grade.
Top
Joanne F. Carlisle (U. of Michigan)
Lauren A. Katz - Lexical quality of derived words.
This presentation focuses on the characteristics of words that influence the
quality of the representation in memory. In theory, the lexical quality of a
derived word might depend of the exposure the base word in different members of
a word family, but the process might be influenced by the transparency of the
word’s structure. Building on previous studies, we examine the relation of
derived word characteristics on 4th and 6th graders’ performance on an oral
morphology task and on a derived word reading task. Characteristics explored
include frequency of the derived word itself (i.e., base word frequency and
derived word frequency), frequency of family (e.g., family size, total
frequency of family members, average family frequency, base word frequency),
and transparency (i.e., phonological transparency). Results showed that our
results support some previous findings (e.g., the relative importance of the
derived word frequency, as compared to base word frequency), but not others. Differences
in results might be attributable in part to research methods. However, in
particular, we did not find a strong effect for family size. We discuss how
high quality representations of derived words might come about, as well as
educational implications based on the results.
Top
Maria S. Carlo (U. of Miami) Diane August
- Predicting knowledge of low frequency English words that are cognates
to Spanish: A study of 4th grade ELLs.
This paper describes a study of 4th grade Spanish speaking English Language
Learners’ vocabulary knowledge. The study aimed to identify the sources of
knowledge that influence the acquisition of word meanings for lexical items
that have cognate status across Spanish and English and of noncognate lexical
items. The results revealed that performance on cognate items was predicted by
knowledge of Spanish orthography, breadth of vocabulary knowledge in Spanish
and knowledge of derivational morphology in Spanish. These factors were not
involved in the prediction of performance on the noncognate items.
Top
Julia M. Carroll (U. of Warwick ) James
E. Clyne - The development of letter knowledge: A micro-genetic analysis.
A sample of 65 children were tested several times throughout their first year
of school. At the start of the year their language skills and phonological
awareness were measured, and at the start of the second term their learning
skills were measured. Their letter name and letter sound knowledge was assessed
once a month throughout the year, and invented spelling was assessed on three
occasions. Language skills, phonological awareness and learning skills will be
used to predict growth in letter knowledge through the year, and the
relationship between all of these measures and spelling skill will be assessed.
Top
Chris Andrew Cate (U. of California at
Santa Barbara) Jeff Sklar, Michael Gerber - Development of an instrument
to test reading comprehension and memory—A pilot study.
This study will examine how well an instrument designed to measure both reading
comprehension and memory concurrently correlates with separate standardized
measures of both reading comprehension and memory. In a pilot study of 50
fourth grade students, the students will be given five different passages to
read and will be asked 20 questions that test their comprehension of the
passages and 20 questions that tested their working and long term memory. The
Woodcock Johnson-III and will be used to correlate the pilot data.
Top
Chris Chase (Claremont McKenna College)
Chinatsu Tosha, Joel B. Talcott - Meta-analysis of the visual
magnocellular deficit model of dyslexia.
Many studies report dyslexics to have mild to moderate impairments processing
visual information in their magnocellular (M) pathway. Recent narrative reviews
have claimed that visual impairments are not a significant cause of development
reading disorders and affect only a small portion of the dyslexic population,
but a comprehensive analysis of this literature has not been made. In this
study, a meta-analytic review of fifty-five studies involving dyslexia and
M-function showed consistently large effect sizes under conditions that
activate the M-pathway and weak effect sizes under conditions that did not.
Results support the magnocellular deficit model of dyslexia.
Top
Chenxi Cheng (U. of Maryland) Min Wang,
Shih-wei Chen - The role of morphological and phonological awareness in
Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition.
This study investigates the roles phonological processing and morphological
processing play in Chinese-English bilingual students’ reading acquisition.
Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were conducted to test students’
morphological awareness, phonological awareness, oral vocabulary, word reading,
and reading comprehension. The results showed that, after the impact of
Chinese-based predictors has been accounted for, English morphological
awareness of compound structure contributed unique variance to both real word
reading and reading comprehension in Chinese, thus suggesting the presence of
morphological awareness transfer. The backward transfer from English L2 to
Chinese L1 is hypothesized to have resulted from higher level of English
proficiency compared to Chinese among the subjects.
Top
Penny Chiappe (U. of California,
Irvine) Bettina P. Baker - Predictors of response to reading intervention
in English for struggling Latino/a readers.
This study examined 192 struggling readers’ response to intervention as a
function of language background, type of intervention, and basic cognitive and
linguistic processes. 57 Caucasian native English speakers, 72 Latino/a
children with experience reading in Spanish, and 63 Latino/a children who
learned to read only in English were tutored in one of two intervention
programs. Although both interventions led to significant growth on measures of
decoding, word attack and reading comprehension for the three groups, Spanish
readers tended to show the greatest growth. Phonological processing and oral
language skills' contributions to response to intervention were examined.
Top
Naya Choi (Seoul National U. ) An-jin Yoo
- Predictors of Korean preschooler’s words and sentences reading.
The purpose of this study was to explore the predictors of preschoolers’
reading abilities, in connection with the nature of the Korean alphabet
’Hangul’. The data collected from 204 preschoolers showed that alphabet
knowledge, phonological awareness, writing, and concept of words were
correlated to reading abilities. Regression analysis revealed that consonants
recognition and naming, finger-point reading, phoneme substitution, and level
of writing could predict reading, with a little difference in relative importance
between reading of real words, pseudo words, and sentences. It was implicated
that individual differences rather than chronological age counts more in
preschoolers’ reading development.
Top
Ka-yan Karen Chong (Chinese U. of Hong
Kong) Him Cheung - The effect of Mandarin Pinyin learning on phonological
awareness development and English reading in Hong Kong ESL learners.
The present study aimed to find out how learning Mandarin Pinyin, a transparent
phoneme-to-grapheme writing system, would affect phonological awareness
development across languages and English reading in a group of Hong Kong ESL
readers. A group of primary one children learning Mandarin with Pinyin were
compared against another group who learn Mandarin but not Pinyin. Children were
measured both before and after the 4.5 months intensive training. This allows
us to examine the effect of a transparent phonological script in isolation of
the spoken language, as well as the possibility of phonological awareness
transfer in a pair of foreign languages.
Top
Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow (Chinese U. of Hong Kong)
Catherine McBride-Chang, Richard K. Wagner, Andrea Muse - Associations of
morphological awareness to vocabulary development in English.
Tasks of speeded naming, phonological awareness, word identification, nonsense
word repetition, and vocabulary, morphological structure awareness and morpheme
identification, were administered to 115 kindergartners and 105 second graders
in the United States. After the variance contributed by the phonological
processing and reading variables was controlled, morphological structure
awareness and morpheme identification together predicted an additional unique
10% of variance in vocabulary knowledge. Both measures of morphological
awareness were uniquely associated with vocabulary knowledge. Results highlight
the importance of different facets of morphological awareness, as distinct from
phonological processing skills, for understanding variability in early
vocabulary acquisition.
Top
Eva Man Ching Chow (U. of Hong Kong) Connie Suk Han Ho - Paired
associated learning among Hong Kong Chinese dyslexic children.
Vocabulary learning is important in language learning and the growth in
vocabulary links closely to reading competency and school progress. Due to the
poor performance of dyslexic children in both productive and receptive; vocabulary,
the present study aims at investigating the underlying causes of poor
vocabulary development among Chinese dyslexic children. One aspect of
vocabulary learning, paired associate learning will be investigated. 30 Chinese
dyslexic children, 30 chronological age controls and 30 reading level controls
will be recruited. It is expected that dyslexic children will show difficulties
in forming verbal associations in paired associate learning.
Top
Carol A. Christensen (U. of Queensland
) Dian Jones - The impact of orthographic-motor integration of children’s
ability to learn to spell.
Orthographic-motor integration is the ability to integrate orthographic
knowledge with motor activity required in handwriting. In this study, 30 Grade
1 teachers were divided into two groups and given 1 hour professional
development. The control group covered general written language. The
experimental group discussed ways to teach orthographic-motor integration. Post
test was conducted after one year and a delayed post test was administered two
years after the professional development. There were no differences at pretest.
However, at both post and delayed post tests the experimental group wrote
significantly more text (approximately twice as much) and spelled significantly
more words correctly.
Top
Allan S. Cohen (U. of Georgia) Noel Gregg
- The long-term impact of test accommodations on reading test
performance.
The impact of test accommodations on reading test performance will be
investigated on a sample of students taking a statewide examination. This study
will employ a new method for detection of differences in use of cognitive
strategies by latent groups of examinees. Previous work with this methodology
indicates it can provide rich information about children’s use of cognitive
strategies based on their achievement test performance. In this study, we
extend this method to a longitudinal analysis of reading test performance with
an eye toward better understanding how the use of test accommodations affects
children’s reading achievement over time.
Top
Carol McDonald Connor (Florida State U.
) Frederick J. Morrison - Individual students’ differences in response to
preschool literacy instruction: Effects on vocabulary, alphabet and letter-word
recognition skill growth.
This study examines preschool teachers’ (n = 34) literacy instruction and its
effect on student’s (n = 157) early literacy skill development, specifically
vocabulary, alphabet and letter/word recognition. On average, teachers spent 13
minutes per day explicitly focused on literacy-related activities with amounts
ranging from 0-65 minutes per day. Time in both small-group and whole-class
teacher-managed-code-focused activities (e.g., labeling letters, rhyming) and
teacher-managed-meaning-focused activities (e.g., teacher read aloud,
discussion) predicted students’ vocabulary and early reading skill growth.
However, the effect of instruction depended on students’ entering vocabulary
and reading skills; there were child-by-instruction interactions. Implications
will be presented.
Top
Nicole J. Conrad (Brandon U. , Manitoba)
- Examining the relation between reading and spelling: A training study.
Children participated in a training study examining the benefits of two types
of practice with common orthographic patterns. Training consisted of either
repeated reading or repeated spelling of words with shared orthographic
patterns. The question was whether training in one skill transferred to the
other skill. Results indicated training in both skills transferred to the other
skill; however, this transfer was word specific. Trained words were read or
spelled better than new words. Although generalization to new words with
trained units occurred within a skill (reading to reading), there was little
generalization to new words across skill (reading to spelling). Results are
related to the development of orthographic representations.
Top
Kathleen H. Corriveau (Harvard
Graduate School of Education) Elizabeth S. Pasquini, Usha C. Goswami - Rhythmic
processing in specific language impairment.
Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) often have co-morbid reading
problems, although the underlying reasons for this co-morbidity are unknown. A
recent auditory processing theory suggests that children with reading problems
show deficits in phonological processing due to insensitivity to rhythmic
aspects of auditory signals. This study examines whether expressive and
receptive rhythmic deficits are characteristic of SLI children. Twenty-one
children with SLI, 21 age-matched controls and 21 language-matched controls received
phonological awareness, language, reading, spelling and rhythmic perception and
production tasks. Results indicate a clear rhythmic deficit in SLI with
severity linked to language and reading problems.
Top
Holly K. Craig (U. of Michigan) Julie A.
Washington, Stephanie L. Hensel, Erin J. Quinn - Oral language
differences between able and struggling African American readers.
This study compared the dialectal and non-dialectal oral language skills of
approximately 200 first through fifth grade African American elementary grade
students designated as able or struggling readers based on standardized tests
of reading achievement. The groups differed significantly in rates of African
American English (AAE) feature production. The able readers were dialect
shifting toward Standard American English and also demonstrated better
non-dialectal oral language skills than the struggling readers. Findings are
discussed in terms of the positive relationships between strong linguistic
skills and reading achievement for African American elementary grade students.
Top
Jennifer G. Cromley (U. of Maryland)
Roger Azevedo - Coordinating think-aloud data with the DIME model of
reading comprehension.
As part of a larger model-fitting project, we collected think-aloud protocols
and a free recall protocol from 44 9th grade students while they read a history
text about the American Revolution. We coded participants' verbalizations for
accurate and inaccurate use of five variables-background knowledge, inference,
strategies, vocabulary, and word reading. Spearman rank correlations on the
proportion of verbalizations for each variable were strongly consistent with
the Direct and Inferential MEdiation model of reading comprehension. Students
with high scores on a comprehension measure were also more accurate in their
use of all five variables.
Top
Virginia Cronin (George Washington U. )
- The double-deficit hypothesis and nonword reading.
Nonword reading is thought to assess phonological knowledge. This longitudinal
study examined the hypothesis that nonword reading also involves the development
of automaticity. Children were categorized
into Wolf and Bowers’ double-deficit groups by preschool and kindergarten rhyme
discrimination and picture naming. Woodcock tests of word identification, work attack,
and passage comprehension were given from the spring of kindergarten to the fall of grade 2.
Although the low naming group was similar to the no-deficit group in
phonological awareness, they developed nonword reading like the low
phonological group. It was concluded that fluent nonword reading
depended on the development of automatic grapheme-phoneme connections..
Top
Todd Cunningham (OISE/UT) Esther
Geva - The effects of reading technologies on literacy development of ESL
students.
One hundred ESL students between grades 4 to 6 participated in a
pre-intervention-post test design study evaluating the effects of two reading
remediation technologies in comparison to regular ESL instruction on literacy
skill development. The first technology listens to students read, and gives
feedback on misread words. The second technology displays stories on a computer
screen while it reads the text to students. Due to the unique approach of each
technology, different types of literacy skill gains are expected, and it is
predicted that the literacy skill gains will be greater for students using
technology than for students receiving regular ESL instruction.
Top
Laurie E. Cutting (Kennedy Krieger
Institute/Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) Hollis Scarborough - Prediction
of reading comprehension: Relative contributions of word recognition, fluency,
and cognitive-linguistic skills can depend on how comprehension is measured.
Research has demonstrated that decoding/word recognition is necessary for
reading comprehension (RC); nevertheless, it may not be sufficient. Although
effects of other influences (e.g., fluency/rate, oral language) have been
demonstrated, few studies have simultaneously examined their contributions and
most have used a single or composite RC measure. To examine various predictors'
influences on different RC measures, 70 children ages 7-14 were administered
three RC tests, as well as measures of decoding/word recognition, fluency/rate,
phonological awareness, memory, oral language, and IQ. Results confirmed that
decoding/word recognition is a strong limiting factor on RC and that both fluency/rate
and oral language contribute additionally to RC. When the RC measures were
analyzed individually, the predictors' contributions varied, suggesting the
need for multiple comprehension assessments.
Top
Daniel Daigle (Université de Montréal)
Françoise Armand, Elisabeth Demont, Jean-Emile Gombert - Implicit
learning of French morphological rules in deaf readers.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate morphological treatment acquired
through implicit learning in deaf readers of French. Experimental computerized
material constituted of pairs of multimorphemic pseudo-words respecting the
construction rules of French words (e.g. donnage) or not (e.g.dentage).
Subjects were asked to determine which of the two pseudo-words was the most
probable in written French. Results show that most subjects demonstrate
knowledge of word construction rules because they select more often
pseudo-words that respect those rules. The results are discussed in terms of
implicit learning of knowledge that contributes to word recognition.
Top
Dana David (Queen's U. ) Yolanda Yuen,
John R. Kirby, Katharine Smithrim, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Does musical
rhythm predict reading ability in the primary grades?
Rhythm production in 53 Grade 1 children (mean age = 76.1 months, SD = 3.4
months) was investigated as a possible predictor of reading ability one year
later in Grade 2. Correlations and hierarchical regression analyses were run,
controlling for shared variance with phonological awareness (PA) and naming
speed (NS). Rhythm was significantly correlated with both PA and NS. Rhythm
also significantly predicted reading ability, however once PA was controlled
for, it did not. When NS was controlled for, rhythm uniquely predicted reading
ability one year later. Implications for rhythm production as an early
predictor of reading ability are discussed.
Top
Claire Davis (Haskins Lab) Peter Bryant - Causal connections in the acquisition of an orthographic rule
In a longitudinal study Frith's causal hypothesis that children first learn orthographic knowledge through reading and then later through spelling was tested. Children from Years 2 and 3 were tested on three occasions over a two-year period of time on their reading and spelling of pseudo-words that conformed to the conditional 'final -e' rule. Results from cross-lagged panel correlation analyses showed that, consistent with Frith's hypothesis, the children's success in reading final -e words was a causal determinant of their learning to use these words in spelling, both in the 7- to 8-year period and in the 8- to 9-year period.
Top
Marina Davydovskaia (Queen’s U. )
Vincent Goetry, Lesly Wade-Woolley - Orthographic differentiation between
first and second language in the reading and spelling of French immersion
students.
Literacy development implies computation of statistical information on written
words (e.g., no geminate vowels in French). Bilingual children are challenged
with the need to build functionally independent orthographic lexicons in order
to compute language-specific statistical knowledge (especially with contrastive
languages, e.g. English, but not French, allows geminate vowels, e.g.
"seed"). First-, second, and fourth-graders schooled in French
Immersion were examined with various tasks assessing orthographic
differentiation ability. The findings suggest that orthographic differentiation
of bilinguals' two languages explain their reading and spelling in the two
languages.
Top
Elise de Bree (Utrecht U. ) - Word
stress production in young children at risk for dyslexia.
A deficit in phonological representations is widely acknowledged as a cause of
dyslexia. However, the acquisition of phonological skills that influence the
construction of these phonological representations has not received much
attention. The present study addresses the acquisition of word stress in Dutch
children at risk for dyslexia. Results of a non-word repetition stress task
show that three-year-old at-risk and control children are still in the process
of acquiring Dutch word stress. However, the at-risk group more often alters
targets with irregular and prohibited word stress to regular stress
realisations than the control children. The results suggest a delay in their
word stress development.
Top
Maria T. de Jong (Leiden U. )Adriana G. Bus -
Pattern detection in book reading sessions.
Book reading has the potential to familiarize children with stories and, more
than any other language situation, with complex language. We focused on parent
reading behavior and used Theme (Noldus) for detection of (complex) patterns.
We found support for the hypothesis that 3-year-olds’ active participation and
learning strongly depended on the parental ability to bridge the discrepancy
between the child’s world and the world of the book. Second, that it is of the
utmost importance that adults capitalize on intimate knowledge of their child’s
personal world. Lastly, that the adults’ agenda seems to be the maintenance of
discourse rather than teaching their infants.
Top
Maria De Palma (The Hospital For Sick Children) Jan C.
Frijters, Meredith Temple, Karen A. Steinbach, Maureen W. Lovett - Translating
research into practice: Generalizability of multiple component intervention
effects for children who are English language learners.
127 reading disabled children were randomly assigned in small groups to one of
two 105-hour research-based reading interventions (PHAST Decoding Program;
PHAST Decoding + Comprehension Program) or to a 105-hour control condition
(school-based special education reading program). Classes were taught by
community-based teachers trained by special research teachers. Remedial outcome
programs were evaluated separately for English as a first language (EFL)
children versus English Language Learners (ELL). The research-based reading
programs produced significant gains relative to the special education control
condition on decoding, word identification and passage comprehension measures.
ELL and EFL students made equivalent gains following the interventions.
Top
S. Hélène Deacon (Dalhousie U. ) Lesly
Wade-Woolley - Developing bilinguals: How the relationship between
morphological awareness and reading changes as language skills increase.
This study follows six-year-old English speaking children in a French immersion
programme, as they become bilingual. This research focuses on the role of
morphological awareness in reading development. Results show that Grade 1
English (but not French) morphological awareness is related to Grades 1 to 3
reading in French and English, after controlling for phonological awareness and
vocabulary. By Grade 2, both English and French morphological awareness are
related to Grade 2 and 3 reading in both languages. Morphological awareness may
depend, atleast in part, on vocabulary knowledge. Results will be discussed in
context of current theories of reading development.
Top
Maureen Dennis (Hospital for Sick
Children, Toronto) Joelene Huber Okrainec - Idioms as a tool for
understanding configurational and compositionallanguage and reading
comprehension: Evidence from children with spina bifida.
Idioms are non-literal phrases with a figurative meaning variably derived from
literal word meanings. Decomposable idioms, in which the individual lexical
items bias a figurative meaning (talk a mile a minute), require little context
for interpretation. Non-decomposable idioms, in which the figurative meaning is
syntactically and lexically frozen (kick the bucket), are context-dependent. We
report: 1) selective impairment of context-dependent, non-decomposable idioms
in children with spina bifida, a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with poor
comprehension; 2) the relation between decomposable and non-decomposable idioms
and reading comprehension; 3) the implications of the data for current theories
of configurational and compositional language comprehension.
Top
Alain Desrochers (U. of Ottawa)
Glenn Thompson, Frederick Grouzet, Pierre Cormier - The development of
graphemic knowledge through the primary grades: evidence from French.
Canadian French-speaking children, in Grade 1 through 6 (N = 810), were asked
to sound out 62 individual graphemes. The results indicated that (a)
single-letter graphemes were mastered by the end of Grade 1, (b) performance
with single-letter vowels + diacritics did not reach mastery at the end of
Grade 1 but improved subsequently, and (c) performance with multiple-letter
increased linearly from Grade 1 to 3 and leveled off before reading mastery
until the end of Grade 6. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) highlighted 6
difficulty factors in grapheme sounding (e.g., their frequency in print).
Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.
Top
Vassiliki Diamanti (U. College London)
Nata Goulandris, Ruth Campbell, Morag Stuart - Spelling of derivational
suffixes in Greek children with and without dyslexia.
This study investigated the ability of Greek-speaking children with and without
dyslexia to spell derivational suffixes. Twenty-three 10-13 year-old dyslexic
children, twenty-seven reading-level and twenty-three age-level-matched
children were asked to spell a series of nouns and verbs in dictated sentences,
as well as pairs of words comprising nouns and adjectives. Results showed that
children spell more accurately the suffixes of nouns than those of adjectives
and verbs. Additionally, dyslexic children are less accurate spellers than same
and younger age control children. It is suggested that dyslexics have
weaknesses in grasping the morphological rules of the Greek orthographic system
and applying this knowledge in the spelling of word suffixes.
Top
Alicia Díaz (U. of La Laguna) Juan E.
Jiménez - Assessment of academic performance of Spanish young adults with
reading disabilities and young adult normal readers.
The purpose of this research was to investigate the differences between
Spanish-speaking secondary grade students with reading disabilities and
Spanish-speaking secondary grade students without reading disabilities in
academic performance. In order to assess the academic performance we used the
Spanish version of the standard and supplemental battery WJ-R Test of
Achievement (Woodcock and Muñoz-Sandoval, 1996). This batteries consist of
eighteen tests, each measuring various aspects of scholastic achievement.
MANOVA were conducted to evaluate differential performance between the groups
on the measures of interest. The present study provides evidence that
demonstrates that the group with reading disabilities had a lower performance
in the academic tasks than the groups of students without reading disabilities.
Top
Sotirios Douklias (U. of Essex) Jackie
Masterson, Rick Hanley - Cognitive factors underpinning poor reading
ability in Greek: A group study in a transparent language.
The study investigates the cognitive processing of poor and good readers who
are speakers of Greek (a transparent writing system). 125 primary school
students (grades 3, 4, 5) were tested on semantic, phonological and syntactic
awareness tasks. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of features
of written Greek on processes involved in reading, in an attempt to improve our
understanding of dyslexia. The first set of results, based primarily on reading
and spelling of words and non-words will be presented. The results showed that
although the poor readers were significantly slower than the control readers on
reading speed, they achieved high word and non-word reading accuracy. It seems
that the consistency of the Greek writing system facilitates this high level of
accuracy.
Top
Mariam Jean Dreher (U. of Maryland)
Linda Baker - Balancing learning to read and reading for learning:
Infusing information books into primary-grade classrooms.
Many students experience difficulty in fourth grade when there is an increased
emphasis on reading to learn, a skill for which they are not well prepared in
the earlier grades. This symposium presents the results of a 3-year study,
beginning in 2nd grade and following children through 4th grade, of whether a
classroom intervention that enhances children's experience with information
books increases reading achievement and engagement. The five papers focus on
different aspects of this project. This first paper explains the rationale and
procedure for the study and reports classroom library data documenting
available books before and after the intervention.
Top
Lois G. Dreyer (CUNY) Linnea C. Ehri,
Bert Flugman - Reading rescue: First-Grade tutoring facilitates reading
acquisition in struggling readers.
We examined the effects of a one-to-one literacy intervention with
low-achieving bilingual, low SES first graders (N = 63) in an urban school
system. The program emphasized word reading and spelling skills, practice in
controlled vocabulary stories, and comprehension monitoring. At year¹s end, the
experimental group reached average levels of performance and significantly
outperformed matched controls (N = 60) in their own schools on measures of word
identification, decoding, and reading comprehension. They also outperformed a
control group drawn from comparable schools. Findings reveal the success of a
cost-effective tutoring program that makes use of personnel in the school.
Top
Susan Dunlap (U. of Pittsburgh) Ying
Liu, Charles Perfetti - Incidental Reading in L2, L1, and L0: An ERP
Study of Chinese and English.
We investigated whether level of familiarity with a language contributes to the
automaticity of word reading. We measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs)
in response to the passive viewing of Chinese and English items by 12
Chinese-English bilinguals and 12 native speakers of American English.
Participants counted geometric symbols (triangles) interspersed in a series of
words and nonwords in each language, while electrical brain activity was
recorded using a high-density Geodesic Sensor Net. We predicted early ERP
components sensitive to word form recognition and to lexicality in the language(s)
known to the participants.
Top
Linnea C. Elbro (U. of Copenhagen) - As
cheap as dirt, dust or what? The importance of lexical unit size for the
quality of the phonological representations in dyslexia.
An underlying cause of dyslexia may be poor quality of phonological
representations of lexical items. The nature of this poorness is far from
known. One possibility is that phonological representations are somehow
underspecified, i.e., each phonological segment is not fully specified. Because
of redundancy, one would then expect that long phonological representations
(similes, idioms and proverbs) are more vulnerable than short ones. This
possibility was studied in a comparison of dyslexic and normal readers matched
for basic vocabulary.
Top
Carsten Elleman (Vanderbilt U.,
Nashville) Jane Lawrence, Natalie Olinghouse, Jan Vining, Emily Bigalow, Donald
Compton - Predicting struggling reader’s responsiveness to reading
comprehension instruction.
There is renewed interest in matching reading interventions to child
characteristics in order to optimize treatment responsiveness. Sixty-eight 3rd
– 5th grade struggling readers participated in one of three different 25-lesson
reading interventions. Groups of struggling readers were assigned to either: 1)
decoding only, 2) decoding + traditional (TRAD) comprehension, or 3) decoding +
reciprocal teaching (RT) instruction. Employing an ATI approach we predicted
responsiveness using treatment group, child attributes (e.g., vocabulary, IQ,
word ID skill), and the interaction between the two. Results suggest that child
attributes differentially predict responsiveness across the TRAD and RT
interventions, suggesting the existence of ATI’s.
Top
Amy Evans (U. of Guelph) - Phonological
awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge.
The study examines children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowledge and the
interrelationship between letter sound and name knowledge, and phonological
awareness. Kindergarten children (n = 149) were assessed for these variables
plus cognitive ability (RAN, non verbal ability, receptive vocabulary and
short-term auditory memory). Knowledge of letter sounds was better for vowels
and for letters with consonant-vowel names, than for those with vowel-consonant
names or names not corresponding to their sounds. Knowledge of letter sounds
corresponding with the respective name was regressed on gender, family income,
cognitive abilities, and knowledge of letter sounds not corresponding with the
name as a control for instructional influences, and finally phonological
awareness. As the last step, phonological awareness predicted additional
variance.
Top
Fataneh Farnia (OISE/UT) Esther Geva - Reading
fluency: A prelude to reading comprehension? A growth curve study of ESL and
EL1 students.
There is no systematic longitudinal research on similarities and differences in
the growth patterns of reading fluency in ESL and English as L1 children. Not
much is known either on how variations in underlying cognitive, linguistic, and
reading factors at entry point (i.e., Grade 1) relate to growth in reading
fluency in L1 and ESL students up to Grade 6, and how reading fluency growth
patterns relate to growth in reading comprehension. A growth curve modeling
approach was utilized to determine an appropriate growth model for the
longitudinal data, and to quantify and describe change at the individual level.
Top
Iuliana Faroga (Wilfrid Laurier U. )
A.Gottardo, P. Chiappe - Engish reading strategies in Spanish-speaking
first graders.
How do low-achieving Spanish-speaking children acquire English via immersion?
How do they learn to read proficiently in English? This study examined the
hypothesis that English (L2) reading proficiency for 60 six to seven year-old
students, who spoke Spanish as their first language (L1), was predicted by
large-unit spelling-sound. A difference between measures of small-unit
correspondences (GPC1 and GPC2) was predicted as well. The results show that
the 60 children were not using any known reading strategies. Future research
will examine oral language skills as mediators for reading proficiency.
Top
Lee Farrington-Flint (De Montfort
U., Leicester) Clare Wood - Strategy variability among beginning
readers.
What kinds of strategies do children employ in beginning reading? Do
children show variability in their strategy choices? In the study, the types
of strategies children use in beginning reading, and the possibility of
identifying individual differences in strategy choice was examined. A group
of 67, 5-to-6 year-old beginning readers were given an experimental nonword
reading task and the accuracy, speed and frequency of each self-reported
strategy was recorded and then analysed. Children showed great variability:
7% of children used one strategy whereas 33% used two, and 60% used three or
more strategies. These strategies included making analogies, sounding out
and blending together phonemes, and guessing the answer. Cluster analysis
also identified 3 qualitatively distinct groups (efficient group, less
efficient group and inaccurate strategy group). The sophistication of
strategy choices was, furthermore, dependent on their levels of vocabulary,
single word reading, and letter identification. The findings illustrate the
importance of studying individual differences in children's strategy choices
in the context of word reading.
Top
Lauren Figueredo (U. of Alberta)
Connie Varnhagen. - Didn’t you run the spell checker? Effects of writer
background about proofreading practices and error type on the perception of
writers.
We investigated expectations regarding the writer’s responsibility to proofread
text for spelling errors when using a word processor. Undergraduates were asked
to read an essay and then rate both the author and the essay product. We
manipulated error type and the background information provided about the
author. We found that participants’ ratings of the author’s abilities and their
product suffered when the essay contained spelling errors. Further, participants
reported that they would be most likely to blame the writer rather than the
spell checker for spelling errors contained in the text. Results suggest that
perceptions of both the author’s abilities and their written products can be
affected by spelling errors. Further, even when supportive tools are available,
the responsibility for producing error-free text remains with the writer.
Top
Alexis Filippini (U. of California
Santa Barbara) Michael Gerber - Project La Patera: Relationships between
English learners' performance on kindergarten and third grade reading
measures.
Project La Patera began in July 2000 with a cohort (N=377) of Spanish-speaking
kindergarteners in three school districts and twenty-three (23) classrooms. La Patera
investigated long-term effects on English word decoding of intensive direct
instruction in Spanish on phonological processing skills for the bottom
performing 20% of its sample. La Patera was a three-year project, and was the
first federally-supported large-scale, field-based longitudinal investigation
to identify and conduct intensive phonological skills’ interventions for
at-risk preliterate Spanish-speaking children. In 2003-2004, follow-up data was
collected on over 100 participants in the sample, which is presented in this
paper.
Top
Jill Fraser (U. of Manchester) Gina
Conti-Ramsden - Reading and language disorders: Two sides of the same
coin?
This poster will present findings investigating the overlap between language
and reading impairments in children. Three groups of children took part in the
study; one group exhibited language difficulties but reading remained
unaffected. A second group presented with difficulties in both reading and
language, and the final group only manifested reading difficulties. Performance
of the three groups was compared on measures of reading comprehension,
spelling, phonological awareness, vocabulary, morphology and short-term memory.
The results show a separate pattern of impairments for each group with the
reading and language impaired group showing the greatest amount of difficulties
across all tasks.
Top
Jan C. Frijters (Brock U. ) M. De
Palma, R. W. Barron,. M. W. Lovett - Motivation as a moderator of
response to remedial reading instruction: A (modifiable) aptitude x treatment
interaction.
This paper presents a comprehensive and multifaceted view of the self-reported
motivation of reading-disabled (RD) children who participated in intensive
small-group remedial intervention. Three sub-domains of motivation (i.e.,
interest, sense of competence, and perceived effort) were measured at multiple
time points, with item content tailored to the dominant activities of the
intervention as they unfolded. The paper presents motivation as an individual
difference aptitude, but also as a fluid person-level factor that can change
during intervention. Motivational profiles were identified among the RD
children that moderated treatment outcome, determined rate of skill growth, and
were themselves changing as intervention progressed.
Top
George K. Georgiou (U. of Alberta,
Edmonton) Rauno K. Parrila - Rapid naming speed components and reading
acquisition from kindergarten until grade 2: A follow-up study.
This study examines (a) how three RAN components – articulation time, pause
time, and consistency of pause time – assessed in kindergarten, grade 1, and
grade 2 predict reading accuracy and fluency in grade 2, and (b) how the RAN
components develop from kindergarten to grade 2. Fifty-three children were
administered RAN tasks in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2. Word reading and
reading fluency were assessed in grade 1 and grade 2. Sound files of
kindergarten and grade 1 RAN responses have been analysed (reported in Georgiou
& Parrila, 2004) and grade 2 RAN responses are currently being analyzed.
Top
Ellen Gerrits (U. Hospital Maastricht)
M. Derksen - Speech perception and phonological processing in
reading-impaired children.
There is a growing consensus that developmental dyslexia is caused by a
phonological processing deficit. This phonological deficit again is hypothesised
to be attributed to a subtle speech perception disorder. To assess the nature
of the phonological processing deficit we studied the relationship between
phoneme perception, phonological encoding, and phonological awareness. The
participants were 8-year-old Dutch children with severe reading difficulties
and age-matched average readers. The findings of this study showed that the
poor readers' phonological encoding and phonological awareness were impaired
but that there was no indication of a (subtle) speech perception disorder.
Top
Russell Gersten (Instructional Research
Group) Madjavi Lavanthi, Joe Dimino, Jonathan Flojo. - Measuring
implementation of the vocabulary and comprehension components of Reading First
at the classroom level: First steps.
This presentation describes the strengths and weaknesses of two approaches for
assessing classroom implementation of Reading First. The first system used a
Likert rating scale and consisted of 29 items; the second was a frequency scale
consisting of 24 items, but only addressing the domains of comprehension and
vocabulary. We will discuss the relative advantages of each approach, and also
argue that either would be useful for formative evaluation purposes and could
be used by literacy coaches to target areas of emphasis for both individual
teachers and for entire schools or clusters of schools. For example, the fall
2004 data demonstrated infrequent use of most of the recommend practices from
the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) in the areas of
comprehension in vocabulary in approximately three-fourths of the sample of
classrooms.
Top
Esther Geva (OISE/UT) Michal Shany - A
comparison of reading fluency development in children of Ethiopian immigrants
and non-Immigrant children learning to read Hebrew.
The development of Hebrew reading fluency in Ethiopian and Non-Ethiopian
Israeli children in grades 1,2, and 4, all coming from similar (low) SES, was
targeted. No significant differences were found on phonemic awareness, and
basic reading skills in Hebrew. However, there were significant grade effects,
and significant group effects (Ethiopian vs. Non-Ethiopian) on each of the 3
fluency indices (RAN letters, isolated word, text). However, the language group
effect vanished by grade 4. Both groups performed significantly more poorly
than the national norms. Reading fluency development in at-risk children is
better understood when cognitive, language proficiency, and familial factors
are considered.
Top
Karen Ghelani (Hospital for Sick
Children, Toronto) Rosemary Tannock - The relationship between
inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms and reading skills.
This study examined reading comprehension and reading-related abilities in
adolescents with ADHD and /or Reading Disabilities (RD). The study also
explored the contribution of inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms to
reading difficulties. High levels of inattention are documented in individuals
with RD as well as those with ADHD. The study included 96 adolescents (ADHD,
RD, ADHD+RD, and controls). The results of the study suggest that inattentive
symptoms rather than hyperactive/impulsive symptoms are predictive of
performance on reading comprehension and reading-related tasks. These results
highlight the importance of examining inattention as a risk factor in the
development of reading difficulties.
Top
Calvin Gidney (Tufts U. ) Andrea
Marquant, Maryanne Wolf, Robin D. Morris & Maureen W. Lovett - An
examination of African-American and European-American children with reading
disabilities.
In an earlier pilot study by our group, the performances of 52 young
African-American disabled readers on reading and language batteries (WRMT-R,
WRAT, RAN, PSB) were compared to a sample of 52 European-American disabled
readers (N=104) matched for age, IQ, and SES. Analyses of the data indicated
first that there were no differences between the two groups on measures of
naming speed but that, controlling for age, SES, and IQ, African-American
students performed significantly less well on phonological tasks than their
matched European-American counterparts. Subsequent classification of the young
readers into the dyslexic subtypes of the Double Deficit Hypothesis revealed
that 83% of the African-American children could be classified as having some
form of phonological difficulties while only 32% of European-American students
could be classified as having difficulties in phonology. In the current study
we will present a replication of these analyses with 280 subjects in an ongoing
NICHD study.
Top
Barbara K. Given (George Mason U. ) - Investigating
double deficit theories of dyslexia at the middle school level.
Several double-deficit theories of dyslexia have been advanced, but most data
supporting them were gathered with elementary-aged youngsters. In this study,
the following double deficits were investigated with middle school students:
phonological awareness and rapid naming; phonological processing and listening
comprehension; phonological processing and visual recognition. Eighty-three
middle-school readers below the 29th percentile on a reading comprehension test
were given a full battery of psychometric measures. Their scores were analyzed
for deficits in the areas noted above. It was determined that no single
double-deficit theory accounted for the majority of reading deficits in this
small sample.
Top
Vincent Goetry (Queens’s U. ) Philippe
Mousty, Régine Kolinsky - Do different linguistic inputs promote
different patterns of metaphonological development? Longitudinal evidence from
French and Dutch.
This longitudinal research examined whether metaphonological development is
modulated by the salient characteristics of the phonological input, by
comparing French-schooled and Dutch-schooled monolingual and bilingual
children. The monolingual results show cross-linguistic differences consistent
with the salient phonological structures of the two languages (better syllable
awareness in French, better rime awareness in Dutch). However, the bilinguals'
results were influenced only by the salient phonological characteristics of
their instruction (second) language. This suggests that cross-linguistic
differences in phonological awareness do not result directly from differing
phonological inputs, but from the analytical acquisition of phonological
representations at school.
Top
Zhiyu (Ellen) Gong (McMaster U. ) Betty
Ann Levy - How to improve preschooler's visual/orthographic knowledge
during storybook reading.
In this study we explored the use of animated storybooks to guide the
acquisition of print concepts by four-year olds. Children's attention was drawn
to the print by an animation that was synchronized with the voice reading the
story. Print violations were cued and required the child's response. These
manipulations were contrasted with presentation of the print and voice alone.
Results showed that four-year-olds' knowledge of acceptable print improved
after just 6 days of exposure to the animated texts. These children also
improved on letter knowledge, even although this was not part of the training.
Top
Nina Goodman (Fordham U. ) Joanna Uhry
- Word-reading strategy use by English-speaking first-graders learning
Hebrew as a second language.
This study compares English and Hebrew word-reading strategies used by
English-speaking first-graders learning Hebrew as a second language. Strategy
use is identified through miscue analysis and student self-reporting during and
after reading. Initial data suggest that while students transfer some
strategies from English (L1) to Hebrew (L2), there are specific L1 strategies
which are not successful when reading a second language with a different
orthographic structure. Strategy instruction is examined in English and Hebrew,
for the same students, and compared to student strategy use in both languages.
Top
Alexandra Gottardo (Wilfrid Laurier U.
) Esther Geva - A comparison of English reading development in young
bilingual children from at-risk groups.
Nonverbal reasoning, English reading, oral language and phonological processing
skills were compared in Portuguese-English and Spanish-English children in
kindergarten. The Portuguese-speaking children belong to a well-established
minority group while Spanish-speakers are more recent immigrants to Canada. The
groups differed on measures of L2 vocabulary and grammatical proficiency with
the Portuguese-speakers having better oral English skills. No other differences
were significant. Hierarchical regression analyses show that components of
phonological processing (e.i. phonological awareness, rapid naming) account for
unique variance in reading. Kindergarten predictors of Grade 1 reading will
also be examined. Findings are discussed in terms of demographic variables and
L1 exposure.
Top
Noel Gregg (U. of Georgia) Chris Coleman,
Mark Davis, Al Cohen - Written discourse complexity – A multidimensional
analysis.
We investigated specific word, sentence, and text-level features used in the
expository writing of college writers with and without dyslexia (n= 180).
Corpus-based analysis, holistic ratings, error analyses, and feature counts
were used to examine the lexical complexity, spelling errors, syntactic
elements, and text structure of the writing samples. The interaction of
verbosity and quality with word, sentence and text features was examined
through structural equation modeling. In addition, a comparison of ratings
based on hand written and word-processed versions of essays was made.
Top
Barbara Gunn (Oregon Research Institute)
Anthony Biglan, Keith Smolkowski, Carol Black, Jason Blair - Fostering
the development of reading skill through supplemental Instruction: Results for
Hispanic and Non-Hispanic students.
This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for
K-3 students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading
fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were randomly assigned to receive
supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants'
reading ability was assessed at baseline, and again in the spring of years 1,
2, 3, and 4. At the end of the intervention, treatment students performed
significantly better than their matched controls on measures of decoding, oral
reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Two years after instruction
ended treatment students showed significantly greater growth in oral reading
fluency.
Top
Louise Miller Guron (U. of Cambridge)
Usha Goswami - Rhythm detection, phonological awareness and word reading
in Swedish children.
Reading difficulties across languages are characterised by deficits in
phonological representation. Recent studies of English and French children have
found evidence that individual differences in auditory tasks requiring
amplitude envelope rise time processing explained significant variance in
phonological processing skills. In a study of 54 Swedish speakers aged 8-10
years, relations between auditory processing and phonological processing were
explored. Here it was found that individual differences both in rise time
processing and in intensity and duration processing explained significant
variance in phonological processing tasks and in spelling. These results are
discussed with reference to the phonological characteristics of English and
Swedish.
Top
Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma (U. of
Jaén) - Rules for lexical stress assignment in Spanish: A study with
adults and children.
This paper aims to investigate the rules through which lexical stress is
assigned during reading. In Spanish lexical stress is completely predictable
from orthography. Therefore, readers may use orthographic cues to assign
lexical stress in reading aloud. In order to investigate such a possibility a
nonword task was used with adults and children. Preliminary results showed that
subjects assigned the stress by analogy to others words. Moreover, they used
the orthographic and phonological cues which point out the stress in Spanish.
These findings show that lexical prosody is related to both orthographic and
phonological lexical information. This suggests that the performance on nonword
reading tasks could be another way of measuring prosodic sensitivity.
Top
Jerry A. Hall (Texas Scottish Rite
Hospital for Children, Dallas) Jeremiah Ring, Jeffrey L. Black - Relationship
between reading motivation and reading intervention effects in children with
reading disability.
This study examined the self-reported motivation for reading in 137
reading-impaired, 3-5th grade students receiving an Orton-Gillingham based
reading intervention program. This study examined changes in reading motivation
during intervention, effect of baseline motivation on intervention gains, and
relationship between intervention gains and changes in motivation. Analysis
indicated statistically significant gains after intervention in reading
measures, but not reading motivation. No reliable correlation was found between
baseline motivation factor scores and gains on reading measures. A reliable
correlation was seen between nonword decoding gains and motivation gains. The
nature of the relationship between motivation and treatment effects remains to
be determined.
Top
Ellen Hamilton (U. of Michigan) Twila
Tardif, Paul Fletcher, Weilan Liang, Zhixiang Zhang, Virginia Marchman, Jiayin
Wu - Size matters: The efficacy of phonological neighborhoods as a
measure of phonological representations.
Well-specified phonological representations are critical for successful
reading. However, there is little consensus about how or when these
representations develop. One reason for the continuing debate is the
wide-variability in methodological approaches. In the current study, we
investigate the effect of different methodological decisions on how sound
properties appear to influence children’s word knowledge in a sample of over
1500 8-to-30-month-old English-speaking children tested on the MacArthur CDI.
Through this comparative approach, we may help reconcile the differing views on
the role of phonological development in word learning, a result with direct
implications for later reading development.
Top
Bridget Hamre (U. of Virginia) Robert
Pianta - Large-scale observation of early education classroom settings:
Are classrooms part of readiness?
Drawing from several large-scale observations of classroom settings from pre-k
through third grade, this presentation will focus on what we know about the experiences
of children in these settings in terms of instructional quality and practices
and aspects of socioemotional support for learning. As a set, these findings
are the largest compilation of observations in early education classrooms in
the US and provide a comprehensive view of the extent to which schools and
classrooms are "ready" for children. Results will be reported also
for the associations of observed quality and practices with the use of
curricula, teacher qualifications, and a number of related structural,
policy-relevant features of schooling.
Top
Julie Hansen (Queensland U. of
Technology) Eunice Van Veen - Are specific reading comprehension problems
specific to reading? A test of the simple view of reading.
Children’s syntactic ability, complex memory span and prosodic sensitivity have
been identified as skills that predict their reading comprehension. This study
examined whether these skills make a unique contribution to reading
comprehension, beyond their importance in language comprehension. Fifty-nine
fourth grade students completed tests of reading and listening comprehension,
word-reading ability, syntactic competence, complex memory span, and prosodic
sensitivity. The results support Gough’s simple view of reading. Hierarchical
regression analyses revealed that, while syntactic proficiency was a strong
predictor of reading comprehension, the role of syntactic competence in reading
comprehension was explained by its more general role in language comprehension.
Top
Lesley Hart (Yale U. Child Study Center)
Elena L. Grigorenko - A study of spoken and written language disorders in
an extended pedigree.
This proposal describes our preliminary studies aimed at clarifying the
phenotypic and etiological overlap between disorders of spoken and written
language (DSWL). We will describe the manifestation of DSWL in a small,
isolated population in Northern Russia with a unique genetic profile, and a
high incidence of DSWL. Our preliminary studies in the referred isolate (1)
revealed that a large portion of this isolated population are related to each
other through one extended pedigree and (2) provided initial behavioral data
capturing specifics of manifestation and severity of language disorders in this
isolate; and (3) provided a basis for formulating a hypothesis that the
disorders have genetic bases.
Top
Fred Hasselman (Radboud U. ,
Nijmegen) Ludo Verhoeven, Saskia de Graaff - Learnability of
grapheme-phoneme connections in kindergarten as a predictor of reading
development in Grade 1: A study of children with a genetic risk for dyslexia.
Children who were genetically at risk for dyslexia (n=30) received an
intervention during kindergarten and were followed until the end of Grade 1.
The intervention consisted of a computer program in which grapheme-phoneme
correspondences were taught. A strong relationship between children's
performance during the intervention and their reading skill in Grade 1 was
found. Two important predictors proved to be the amount of trials needed before
a letter was learned and the actual learning curves which plotted performance
throughout the intervention.
Top
Stefan Hawelka (U. of Salzburg)
Christine Huber, Heinz Wimmer - Is impaired reading speed caused by a
deficit in the simultaneous processing of multiple visual elements?
This hypothesis was examined by estimating the recognition threshold for each
of the elements of digit and letter arrays with each array presenting 5
elements. Our participants were German adults with a history of reading
impairment and matched nonimpaired readers. Nonimpaired readers exhibited
parallel processing of all elements as evident from flat or M-shaped position
thresholds curves. Speed impaired readers gave little evidence for this
parallel processing and exhibited much higher thresholds for both digit and
letter arrays. The multi-element processing deficit of the impaired readers was
independent from their performance on a phonological speed task.
Top
Heather Hayes (Washington U. in St.
Louis) Rebecca Treiman, Brett Kessler - Children use vowels to help them
spell consonants.
In this study, we investigated children’s use of vowel context to help them
spell consonants. We examined children’s understanding that some consonants are
doubled depending on the preceding vowel, and that the spellings of some
initial consonants depend on the following vowel. Children as young as second
grade showed a sensitivity to vowel context in spelling final consonants, and
this sensitivity increased with age. Second graders also used vowels to help
them spell initial consonants. Surprisingly, this effect was as strong for
second graders as for adults. Results suggest that even novice spellers take
advantage of contextual clues in spelling.
Top
Denyse Hayward (U. of Alberta) Troy
Janzen, J.P. Das - Comparisons between cognitive-based and phonetic-based
reading remediation with a Canadian First Nations children.
Cognitive-based and phonetic-based reading remediation programs were compared
for improvement in word reading and information processing with a cohort of
Grade 3 First Nations students. Results showed statistically significant within
group differences pre- and post but no significant differences between groups
nor significant interactions. However, evidence for clinically meaningful gains
in reading were found for both of the remediation groups compared to the control
group. Results are discussed with respect to the non-significant findings along
with future research directions.
Top
Annemarie Hindman (U. of Michigan)
Frederick J. Morrison - Multiple variables in book reading with young children:
Impacts of language use, child skills, and instructional context on early
literacy outcomes.
Research suggests that reading books with young children can support the
development of early decoding and comprehension skills, but the degree to which
book reading actually impacts learning is widely debated. The purpose of this
study is to explore multiple contextual and individual factors that impact
children's learning from book readings. Examination of book readings both at
home and school for 180 preschool children suggest that parent-child readings
focus on and build decoding skills, while teacher-child book readings focus on
an build comprehension skills. Children's literacy skills also affect the
influence of book-related adult talk on their literacy outcomes.
Top
Connie Suk-Han Ho (U. of Hong Kong) David W.
Chan, Kevin Chung, Suk-Han Lee, Suk-Man Tsang - The relevance of a
modified dual-route model of subtyping for developmental dyslexia in Chinese.
The present study examined whether a revised version of the dual-route model
was applicable to understand the varieties of developmental dyslexia in a
nonalphabetic script, Chinese. Three groups of Chinese children (dyslexics,
chronological age controls, and reading level controls) were tested on Chinese
exception word reading, pseudoword reading, novel word learning, and some
phonological and orthographic skills. We expect to find a strong link between
lexical dyslexia and orthographic deficit, but a weak one between sublexical
dyslexia and phonological deficit in Chinese. Given the morphosyllabic nature
of Chinese, a higher proportion of lexical dyslexia than sublexical dyslexia is
also expected.
Top
Tiffany Hogan (U. of Kansas) Rochelle
Harris - Reading development in a first and second language: The case of
French immersion in an urban school district.
This study investigated native language, English, and second language, French,
reading skills longitudinally in 65 children enrolled in a French immersion
program from 1st to 5th grades. Results showed that English and French reading
skills were stable across time although children with poor 1st grade French
reading skills from low income families were most likely to leave the school by
5th grade (N=25). Of those children who stayed (N=40), 1st grade English
phonological awareness and rapid naming skills predicted English reading,
whereas only English phonological awareness predicted French reading. The
theoretical and clinical implications of these findings will be discussed.
Top
Andrew John Holliman (Open U. ) Clare
Wood, Kieran Sheehy - The role of metrical stress sensitivity in the
development of phonological awareness, reading ability, and spelling ability,
in a group of beginning readers.
Stress sensitivity, a form of speech rhythm may influence phonological
awareness and literacy development (Black & Byng, 1986; Gutierrez-Palma,
2004; Wood, 2004). Eighty reception-age children with good and poor
phonological awareness were compared for their reading ability, spelling
ability, and their metrical stress sensitivity. The research hypothesis posited
whether metrical stress sensitivity could discriminate between beginning
readers with good and poor phonological awareness and their reading ability.
Results are pending. If results support the hypothesis, these findings would
add to the under-researched literature that suggests the important role of
metrical stress sensitivity in the development of phonological awareness and literacy
development.
Top
Michelle Hosp (U. of Utah) John Hosp,
Janice A. Dole - Reading First teachers’ use of instructional time and
Its relation to reading achievement.
While research derived from national reports advise a number of recommended
instructional practices that have been shown to affect reading achievement, the
extent to which these practices are being implemented in American classrooms is
relatively unknown. In fact, relatively little research has been conducted on
what teachers teach in their reading and language arts classrooms and how that
teaching gets done. Additionally, little is known about the total effects of
teaching different reading and language arts activities on reading achievement.
For this study, an observational instrument was developed to determine the
reading and language arts instruction of K-3 teachers, the amount of time they
spend on various activities, and how these activities relate to reading
achievement.
Top
Elizabeth Howard (Center for Applied
Linguistics) Cate Coburn - A developmental investigation of
cross-linguistic spelling errors in Spanish/English bilingual students.
Research has documented the presence of Spanish-influenced errors in the
English spellings of Spanish/English bilingual students. The purpose of this
longitudinal study, which involved 220 two-way immersion students, was to
investigate the developmental progression of these cross-linguistic errors and
to test for their potential effects on English reading comprehension. Findings
based on the first three years of data collection (grades 2-4) indicate that
these errors generally extinguish themselves over time without any targeted
intervention and are not predictive of English reading comprehension beyond
second grade.
Top
Charles Hulme (U. of York) Markéta
Caravolas, Gabriela Málková, Sophie Brigstocke - Phoneme isolation
ability is not simply a consequence of letter-sound knowledge.
Two studies investigated whether knowledge of specific letter-sound
correspondences is a necessary precursor of children’s ability to isolate
phonemes in speech. In both studies, Czech and English children reliably
isolated phonemes for which they did not know the corresponding letter. These
data refute the idea that phoneme manipulation ability can only develop as a
consequence of specific orthographic (letter-sound correspondence) knowledge.
Top
Jacqueline Hulslander (U. of
Colorado, Boulder) Richard Olson, Chelsea Trinka, Sophia Zavrou - A
reading-level match comparison of fluency and comprehension for continuous
text.
Reading disabled children and younger, isolated-word-reading matched controls
were compared on reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension in stories. The
results suggest greater world-knowledge and increased processing speed
associated with age allows reading disabled children to compensate for deficits
in word-level reading skills when measured on comprehension, reading speed, and
overall accuracy. However, the quality of their reading mistakes does differ
from controls; they tend to avoid phonological decoding strategies by making
more real word substitutions and make phonetically less accurate nonword
substitutions. Controlling forword reading, comprehension was not influenced by
RAN or any of the word-level reading skills, but RAN was correlated with
reading fluency.
Top
Florian Hutzler (Freie Universität
Berlin) Arthur M. Jacobs, Marcus Conrad - Constraining future models of
reading: The effect of first syllable-frequency in eye movements & event
related potentials.
In two studies, the inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency during
reading and visual word recognition was explored for the German orthography.
Using an eye movement paradigm, the task specificity (naming vs. lexical
decision) of the syllable-frequency effect was investigated in three
experiments in the first study. In a second study, event related potentials
were used to explore the time course of the first syllable-frequency effect,
revealing its’ prelexical nature - a result that was also confirmed by a novel,
item-based analysis of ERP data. Implications of the present studies’ findings
for computational models of reading are discussed.
Top
Kumiko Inutsuka (OISE/ U. of Toronto)
- Component skills of reading in English for adult second language
readers.
This study assessed the second language skills related to reading (oral
language proficiency, phonological and orthographic processing), first language
reading skills (reading comprehension, word recognition, phonological and
orthographic processing), and cognitive skills (rapid automatized naming,
working memory, and non-verbal intelligence) of 47 adult second language
readers of English from a non-alphabetic language background (Japanese). The
results will be discussed in terms of what skills can predict the English
reading performance (reading comprehension and word recognition) of adult
non-alphabetic second language readers and which of their first language skills
are transferable across languages.
Top
Nancy Ewald Jackson (U. of Iowa) Susan
E. Dunn - Good and poor readers who are good or poor spellers read
Scientific American.
Scientific texts may be especially difficult for adult readers with poor
decoding ability. Three small groups of U. students (total N = 14) were
selected for extreme combinations of spelling (a proxy for word decoding) and
ACT Reading scores. They were given tests of component reading skills, reading
comprehension, and intelligence. After demonstrating their lack of prior
knowledge of the topic, the students silently read several paragraphs from the
beginning of a difficult Scientific American article about functional
glycomics. The groups were compared on reading speed, persistence, looking back
to prior paragraphs, and accuracy of their oral summaries.
Top
Troy Janzen (Taylor U. College,
Edmonton) J.P. Das - Cognitive processing, speed of articulation and
reading: A study with a Canadian Native Children.
A sample of 85 Canadian First Nations (FN) children were assessed for their
reading ability (word identification and attack), articulation speed, and
ability to process information using the Planning, Attention, Successive and
Simultaneous (PASS) model of intelligence. The purpose of this study was to
explore the role of cognitive processes as they relate to reading problems
within this cultural group. Results confirmed that this sample had relative and
normative weaknesses on successive processing and that these were related to
and predictive of word identification and attack scores. The typical subtypes
of reading problems (single and double deficit) were found.
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Debra Jared (U. of Western Ontario)
Pierre Cormier, Betty Ann Levy, Lesly Wade-Woolley - The development of
reading fluency in native English speakers enrolled in French immersion.
We will present results from a longitudinal study of English-speaking children
who are enrolled in early French Immersion programs and who are learning to
read in French and English simultaneously. Children were tested on a large
battery of measures in the Spring of 2002 when they were in Kindergarten, and their
reading accuracy and fluency in English and French as well as their receptive
oral French has been assessed each Spring since then. We will present data
concerning Kindergarten predictors of reading fluency in each language,
correlations of reading fluency across languages, the relationship between L2
oral language proficiency and L2 reading fluency, and the relationship between
out-of-school reading in each language and reading fluency.
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Juan E. Jiménez (U. of La Laguna) - Are
there differences in phonological processes between illiterate adults and
dyslexic children?
The assessment of phonological awareness has included different tasks but the
complexity of syllable structure has not been controlled. The main purpose of the
study reported here was to investigate the relative importance of complexity of
syllable structure and task differences in measuring phonological awareness in
children and low literacy adults.
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Carol A. Johnson (U. of Cambridge) Usha
C. Goswami - Phonological skills, vocabulary development and reading
development in deaf children with cochlear implants.
In a three year study, we are following the reading progress of deaf children.
We investigate whether cochlear implantation has a positive effect on the
development of phonological representations and whether this will, in turn,
affect reading development. We are comparing two groups of implanted deaf
children with a hearing aid group and with hearing controls. Second year data
indicate that three variables, vocabulary, rhyme awareness and speechreading,
show strong and independent associations with single word reading even after
controlling for age and IQ. These data support our hypothesis that deaf
children develop phonological awareness and use these skills to acquire
literacy.
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Rhona S. Johnston (U. of Hull) Joyce
E. Watson - Synthetic phonics teaching reduces the disadvantage in
reading and spelling shown by children from poor socio-economic backgrounds.
We carried out a 7 year longitudinal study of the effectiveness of a synthetic
phonics programme in teaching reading and spelling to around 300 children from
advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. No significant difference was found
between the advantaged and disadvantaged children in word reading and spelling
until the end of the seventh year at school. However, in another study, where
children were taught by the analytic phonics method, it was found that the
children from disadvantaged homes had lower word reading and spelling skills
than the children from advantaged homes by the end of the second year at
school.
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R. Malatesha Joshi (Texas A & M U. )
P. Prakash, N. Surendranath - Are reading disabilities orthography
specific? Evidence from bilinguals.
Are reading disabilities orthography specific or is it a constitutional problem
that cuts across writing systems is the question investigated in this
presentation. We present two cases MS and VN who had reading disability in two
languages, English and Kannada. MS showed good decoding ability but his
comprehension was poor in both the languages. The performance of VN, on the
other hand, was below average on decoding tasks but his comprehension was adequate
in both the languages. These two cases lend support to the view that reading
disability cuts across writing systems and is not orthography specific.
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Janina Kahn-Horwitz (U. of Haifa)
Joseph Shimron, Richard Sparks - Predictors of English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) spelling development.
In an effort to identify the major factors that affect success in spelling of a
foreign language, this study examined which Hebrew and English literacy-related
variables predict EFL spelling in 4th and 9th grade. The study assessed
predictability value of phonological and morphological awareness, orthographic
ability, word recognition and word attack, measured in Hebrew, as well as
knowledge of letter sounds and names, word recognition and word attack, naming
speed, working memory and semantic knowledge, measured in English. Stepwise
hierarchical analyses showed that knowledge of English letter sounds and names
strongly predicted early EFL spelling; and EFL word decoding strongly predicted
advanced EFL spelling. Qualitative analyses of spelling samples showed distinct
developmental stages amongst strong versus weak spellers. Weak spellers
exhibited L1 interference in EFL spelling.
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Dafna Kaplan (Tel Aviv U. ) Dorit Ravid
- The connection between reading comprehension and linguistic knowledge.
The study examines the connection between reading comprehension and linguistic
knowledge in Hebrew. 112 4th, 7th, and 11 graders and a group of adults, all
monolingual speakers of Hebrew with no learning or reading disabilities, were
administered a battery of 20 morphological, syntactic and morpho-syntactic
Hebrew tasks. They also read 6 narrative and expository texts and answered
comprehension questions about them. Results indicate that linguistic knowledge
contributes to reading comprehension over and above the effect of age and
school grade. Stepwise regressions found several of the syntactic and
derivational tests to have more contribution than others in explaining reading
comprehension.
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Jenay L. Karlson (U. of Michigan) Abigail
M. Jewke, Frederick J. Morrison - Fact or fiction? Gender differences in
early literacy and learning.
This study explores gender differences in children’s learning from preschool
through fifth grade in order to identify (1) when such differences emerge, (2)
in what areas of learning—language, literacy, numeracy, and self-regulation,
and (3) how the results change over time. Data from the NICHD Study of Early
Childhood and Youth (N=831) were analyzed for gender differences in language,
literacy, numeracy, and self-regulation from preschool through the elementary
grades. Results indicated a general trend beginning in preschool favoring girls
over boys, yet this advantage dissipated over the elementary grades.
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Angela Katenkamp (U. of Maryland)
Adia Garrett, Linda Baker - Opportunities to read in the classroom:
Observations of reading activities in Grades 2-4.
This paper examines children’s reading activities in three schools within the
same school district. Differences in practices among the schools and changes in
instructional practices from second to fourth grade are addressed.
Practices of interest include how often teachers read aloud to their students
and what types of materials students read (e.g., fiction vs. non-fiction).
Relations among reading practices, achievement, and motivation are discussed.
For example, it was found that the frequency of choral reading during reading
group instruction in the fourth grade was negatively related to comprehension
scores.
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Janice M. Keenan (U. of Denver) Rebecca
S. Betjemann, Laura S. Roth - Inferencing in reading & listening
comprehension in reading disability, comprehension deficit, and ADHD.
Making inferences is an important component of comprehension; so comprehension
tests often include inferential as well as literal questions. We used two tests
to evaluate inference skill in three populations with learning disabilities:
reading disability, comprehension deficit, and ADHD. We find no evidence for a
specific deficit in inferencing in any of the groups. We contend that such
results are not surprising because from a theoretical perspective, there is not
a sharp distinction between literal and inferential processing, and from a
measurement perspective, there is a confounding of question type with specific
information.
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Nenagh Kemp (U. of British Columbia) - Discreet
is to disgression: Adults’ spelling of base-derived relationships.
According to traditional spelling development models, English spellers learn to
represent simple morphological relations by late childhood. However, the
present study showed that even U. students have problems maintaining the
spelling of