Not all phonological awareness deficits are created equal: evidence from a comparison between children with Otitis Media and poor readers

Children with reading difficulties and children with a history of repeated ear infections (Otitis Media, OM) are both thought to have phonological impairments, but for quite different reasons. This paper examines the profile of phonological and morphological awareness in poor readers and children with OM. Thirty‐three poor readers were compared to individually matched chronological age and reading age controls. Their phonological awareness and morphological awareness skills were consistently at the level of reading age matched controls. Unexpectedly, a significant minority (25%) of the poor readers had some degree of undiagnosed mild or very mild hearing loss. Twenty‐nine children with a history of OM and their matched controls completed the same battery of tasks. They showed relatively small delays in their literacy and showed no impairment in morphological awareness but had phonological awareness scores below the level of reading age matched controls. Further analysis suggested that this weakness in phonological awareness was carried by a specific weakness in segmenting and blending phonemes, with relatively good performance on phoneme manipulation tasks. Results suggest that children with OM show a circumscribed deficit in phoneme segmentation and blending, while poor readers show a broader metalinguistic impairment which is more closely associated with reading difficulties.     

Spoken language correlates of reading impairments acquired in childhood

This study reports the reading difficulties of five children following unilateral left hemisphere stroke sustained either before or during the early stages of literacy acquisition. Although each of the children experienced a period of disturbed language processing in the initial stages postonset, at the time of testing none of the children were considered to be clinically aphasic. Yet, on a standardized test of oral reading each of the children achieved a reading age that lagged behind chronological age and marked reading impairments were disclosed in four of the five children. A set of standardized and nonstandardized tests, aimed at measuring aspects of cognitive and spoken language processing that are considered to be important for normal reading acquisition, was administered. Where nonstandardized tests were used, performance of each of the stroke children was compared to that of groups of normally developing control children, closely matched for chronological age. A range of residual deficits in cognitive and spoken language processing was disclosed among the five brain-damaged children that appeared to be associated with their reading impairments. Two children had expectedly poor reading due to a selective impairment in verbal IQ; a specific phonological reading disorder was revealed in two children, each of which had a residual impairment to phonological awareness; and delayed reading acquisition was observed in one child with a general language deficit. It is suggested that when a child suffers damage to the left hemisphere in the early stages of reading acquisition, difficulties with learning to read are likely to ensue and may arise as a consequence of an underlying cognitive or linguistic deficit.     

Picture Naming Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia: The Phonological Representations Hypothesis

The picture and word naming performance of developmental dyslexics was compared to the picture and word naming performance of non-dyslexic (“garden variety”) poor readers, reading age, and chronological age-matched controls. The stimulus list used for both tasks was systematically manipulated for word length and word frequency. In order to examine picture naming errors in more depth, an object name recognition test assessed each subject's vocabulary knowledge of those names which they were unable to spontaneously label in the picture naming task. Findings indicated that the dyslexic and the garden variety poor readers exhibited a picture naming deficit relative to both chronological and reading age-matched controls. Findings also indicated that both groups of impaired readers obtained superior scores in the word naming task than in the picture naming task, while both groups of controls showed no difference in performance across tasks. The dyslexics' picture naming errors, but not those of the garden variety poor readers, were particularly marked on polysyllabic and/or low frequency words, indicating a possible phonological basis to the picture naming deficit of the dyslexic children. These children also recognized significantly more unnamed target words than all comparison groups, suggesting a particular difficulty inretrievingthe phonological codes of known picture names rather than a vocabulary deficit. Results are discussed in terms of dyslexics' difficulty in encoding full segmental phonological representations of names in long-term memory and/or in processing these representations in order to generate required names on demand.     

Evaluating current deficit theories of poor reading: role of phonological processing, naming speed, balance automaticity, rapid verbal perception and working memory

To clarify the nature of cognitive deficits experienced by poor readers, 9-10-yr.-old poor readers were matched against 9 chronological age and 9 younger reading age-matched controls screened and selected from regular classrooms. Poor readers performed significantly more poorly than chronological age-matched peers on digit naming speed, spoonerisms, and nonsense word reading. Poor readers were also significantly poorer than reading age-matched controls on nonword reading but were significantly better than reading age-matched controls on postural stability. Analyses of effect sizes were consistent with these findings, showing strong effects for digit naming speed, spoonerisms, and nonword reading. However, effect size analysis also suggested that poor readers experienced moderate difficulties with balance automatisation but did not show verbal speech perception deficits relative to either control     

An investigation of first‐order false belief understanding of children with congenital profound visual impairment

This study assessed theory of mind understanding in children with congenital profound visual impairment (CPVI): children who have had no access to visual information throughout development. Participants were 18 children with CPVI and no other impairments, aged between 5 and 11 years, and 18 children with normal vision, matched individually on chronological age, verbal IQ and verbal mental age. Three first‐order false belief tasks were presented twice each; the three tasks varied in the extent of deception and involvement of the child. Six of the children with CPVI failed one or more of the false belief tasks; all sighted children passed all of the tasks. The manipulations of deception and involvement did not influence the performance of the children with CPVI. Participant characteristics of the children with CPVI were examined in relation to their performance on the false belief tasks: chronological age and type of school attended were not found to be related to performance; verbal IQ and verbal mental age were found to differ in children with good and poor performance on the false belief tasks. The results are consistent with either a general pattern of delay in theory of mind development for children with CPVI, or with a subset of children who have longer‐term difficulties in this area.     

Sentence Context and Word Recognition in Children with Average Reading Ability and with a Specific Reading Disability

The inhibitory and facilitatory effects of context on word recognition were investigated in 24 8-to 10-year-old children with a specific reading disability in comparison with a group of 24 children matched for reading ability and a group of 24 children matched for chronological age. To avoid confounding the effects of reading level with those of word difficulty, target words of equivalent relative familiarity for each participant were presented in congruous, neutral, and incongruous sentence contexts. In agreement with previous studies, there was clear evidence of both general inhibitory and facilitatory effects. In contrast to previous findings, however, reading level did not have a major impact on the inhibition of word recognition in incongruous contexts compared with neutral contexts, although it may have led to greater facilitation in congruous contexts compared with neutral contexts. Although further research is required, these results suggest that if reading-age appropriate materials are selected, less skilled readers and those with a reading disability may not be as influenced by context as has been claimed previously.     

Morphological Knowledge in Children with Dyslexia

The phonological skills are not the only linguistic abilities which are observed to have some influence on reading achievement in dyslexics. In addition to phonological skills, morphological skills should be also taken in consideration. The aim of this study is to extend investigation the linguistic abilities of children with dyslexia to the morphological level through examination whether there is a lack of morphological knowledge in children with dyslexia for Bosnian language with transparent orthography. Testing sample included 45 children with dyslexia that are compared with chronological age and reading level controls. The dyslexic children performed significantly worse than same age controls on all forms of word and the most complex word formation tasks. Based on the examination of standardized discriminant function coefficients the variable with the highest weight in defining the first discriminant function was the suffixal formation, declination of personal pronouns, changing gender of adjectives with regard to the gender of a noun, and changing of gender of cardinal numbers with regard to the gender of a noun best differentiates groups. Results of multivariate analyses of variance also showed that chronological age and reading level groups outperformed dyslexics on all these tasks. Our results suggest that dyslexics have problems with morphological knowledge which indicate that certain actions regarding the development of morphological abilities in dyslexics should be taken in the elementary grades.     

A small-to-large unit progression in metaphonological awareness and reading?

The paper reports a series of studies of reading and metaphonological processing by children in their second year in primary school(aged 6 years). An earlier study had established that, in the first year of learning, performance was characterized by a small-unit approach in which graphemes and phonemes were emphasized. In the second year, reading became more sensitiveto the frequencies of rime structures in the lexicon. Capacity to generate word analogies for nonwords also showed increasing commitment to rime-based responses, and this trend was strongly linked to reading age. The present results suggest that a small-unit approach to reading is augmented by a large-unit approach as development proceeds. This trend was reflected in performance on a test of explicit phonological awareness. When asked to report the segment of sound shared by two spoken words, Primary 1 children were poor in reporting shared rimes but relatively adept in reporting shared phonemes. During Primary 2 there was an improvement in ability to report shared rimes, and this trend was also related to reading age. These results are discussed in relation to the influence of instruction and the nature of the orthography in determining the course of reading development.     

The effect of word length on lexical decision in dyslexic and normal reading children

In the present study, the effect of word length on lexical decision in dyslexic and normal reading children was investigated. Dyslexics of 10-years old, chronological age controls, and reading age controls read words and pseudowords consisting of 3 to 6 letters in a lexical decision task. Length effects were much stronger in dyslexics and reading age controls than in chronological age controls. These results support the contention that dyslexics continue to rely on a predominantly sub-lexical reading procedure, whereas for normal readers the contribution of a lexical reading procedure increases. The relevance of the findings for current computational models of reading is discussed.     

The use of phonological information by good and poor readers in memory and reading tasks

There has been a recent debate about the utilization of phonological information by poor readers in both working memory and reading tasks. The purpose of the first experiment in this study was to examine whether the absence of phonological similarity effects in working memory reported in previous studies was due to inappropriate levels of task difficulty. Poor readers and their reading age controls were found to show a normal effect when the memory task was at an appropriate level of difficulty, but no effect when a large number of items had to be recalled. However, in a recognition memory task, the poor readers chose orthographically similar pairs, whereas the reading-age and chronological age controls chose phonologically similar pairs. The purpose of a final experiment was to determine whether or not the good and poor readers could be differentiated in terms of their reading strategies; both groups showed regularity effects in a naming task and pseudohomophone effects in a lexical decision task. However, although poor readers could read three-letter nonwords as well as their controls, they were significantly impaired in reading more complex one-syllable nonwords. It was concluded that poor readers may have a phonological dysfunction in some aspects of reading that is unrelated to whether or not they show phonological similarity effects in working memory. Impaired segmentation skills may underly their difficulties in both reading and nonreading tasks.     

Memory Span,Naming Speed,and Memory Strategies in Poor and Normal Readers

Eleven-year-old severely impaired poor readers failed to show a word length effect with pictorial presentation, but showed an effect of equal magnitude to that of reading age and chronological age controls with auditory presentation. The lack of a pictorial word length effect was unlikely to be due to slow speed of naming skills, as in one study these were at least as fast as those of the reading age controls. It is possible that the poor readers failed to verbally encode the pictures. However, they reported using verbal rehearsal, and lip movements were often observed during presentation, suggesting that they did verbally encode the items. Therefore they may have failed to show a word length effect because they did not retrieve information from the phonological store at recall. Although the poor readers had impaired naming speed skills for their age on both discrete item identification and articulation rate tasks, they could not be equated with their chronological age controls on memory span or reading when these naming speed differences were controlled. However, the groups were matched on the naming speed measures when differences in reading ability were controlled.     

The rule learning behavior of reading disabled and normal children as a function of task characteristics and instruction

The purpose of this research was to investigate rule learning in reading disabled (RD) and normal children (chronological age and reading age (RA) match) when required to (a) abstract rules independently, and (b) use rules after instruction. Study 1 required the children to solve problems using shapes and letters. Although there was no difference between groups in the rate of problem solving when children were asked to abstract rules independently, the pattern of errors was different. The RD children made a greater proportion of errors on the negative instance for the more complex problems. In particular, this occurred on the letter task which involved psycholinguistic categorization. After instruction, the RA controls made more errors than the other groups. Study 2 was an analogous pseudoword reading task. Even with statistical adjustment for differences in prior grapheme-phoneme (g-p) rule knowledge, the RD children performed less accurately than the RA controls when they had to abstract rules, although this was restricted to the most difficult rule (rule of e). There was no difference after instruction in rule application, although the pattern of errors and post-test results indicated that the RD children continued to experience decoding difficulty. These results suggest a phonologically based productive deficit which interferes with the learning of g-p rules. This may be part of a more general language deficit which includes psycholinguistic categorization. Despite the severity of this handicap, RD children seem responsive to instruction.     

Discrimination of speech sounds by children with dyslexia: comparisons with chronological age and reading level controls

Previous studies have shown that children suffering from developmental dyslexia have a deficit in categorical perception of speech sounds. The aim of the current study was to better understand the nature of this categorical perception deficit. In this study, categorical perception skills of children with dyslexia were compared with those of chronological age and reading level controls. Children identified and discriminated /do-to/ syllables along a voice onset time (VOT) continuum. Results showed that children with dyslexia discriminated among phonemically contrastive pairs less accurately than did chronological age and reading level controls and also showed higher sensitivity in the discrimination of allophonic contrasts. These results suggest that children with dyslexia perceive speech with allophonic units rather than phonemic units. The origin of allophonic perception in the course of perceptual development and its implication for reading acquisition are discussed.     

The relationship between language-processing and visual-processing deficits in developmental dyslexia.

Some research on developmental dyslexia focuses on linguistic abnormalities such as poor reading of nonwords or poor reading of exception words. Other research focuses on visual abnormalities such as poor performance on psychophysical tasks believed to assess the functioning of the magnocellular and parvocellular layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Little is known about what the relationships are between these two types of abnormalities. We measured nonword reading, exception word reading, and performance with Ternus apparent movement displays (the perception of which is believed to depend upon the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways) in dyslexic children and children without reading difficulties. Our results indicate that performance on the Ternus task is related to nonword reading ability but not to exception word reading ability. We offer two alternative interpretations of these findings. According to the first of these, nonword reading requires a serial left-to-right allocation of covert attention across the letter string being read and the neural systems involved in this attentional process also play a part in responses to the Ternus display. According to the second, poor nonword reading and abnormal Ternus performance are not directly related: perinatal/neurodevelopmental insult has affected the LGN (influencing Ternus performance) and the adjacent medial geniculate nucleus (MGN; affecting phonological ability) and the MGN abnormalities may be more functionally related to poor nonword reading.     

Hidden talents in harsh conditions? A preregistered study of memory and reasoning about social dominance

Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even enhanced, social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high‐adversity contexts (i.e. ‘hidden talents’). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory (number of learning rounds needed to memorize relations between items) and reasoning performance (accuracy in deducing a novel relation) on transitive inference tasks involving both violence‐relevant and violence‐neutral social information (social dominance vs. chronological age). We hypothesized that individuals who had more exposure to violence would perform better than individuals with less exposure on the social dominance task. We tested this hypothesis in a preregistered study in 100 Dutch college students and 99 Dutch community participants. We found that more exposure to violence was associated with lower overall memory performance, but not with reasoning performance. However, the main effects of current (but not childhood) exposure to violence on memory were qualified by significant interaction effects. More current exposure to neighborhood violence was associated with worse memory for age relations, but not with memory for dominance relations. By contrast, more current personal involvement in violence was associated with better memory for dominance relations, but not with memory for age relations. These results suggest incomplete transfer of learning and memory abilities across contents. This pattern of results, which supports a combination of deficits and ‘hidden talents,’ is striking in relation to the broader developmental literature, which has nearly exclusively reported deficits in people from harsh conditions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/e4ePmSzZsuc .     

Picture naming deficits in developmental dyslexia in German

Recent research with English developmental dyslexics comparing the picture naming performance of these children to the picture naming performance of non-dyslexic (‘garden variety’) poor readers, reading age matched controls and chronological age matched controls has suggested that a selective difficulty in retrieving the phonological codes of known names on demand underlies the picture naming deficit found in developmental dyslexia (Swan & Goswami, Picture naming deficits in developmental dyslexia: the phonological representations hypothesis, Brain and Language, 56 (1997), 334–353). If the underlying causal factors in dyslexia are independent of the orthography that the child is learning to read, then a difficulty in retrieving the phonological codes of known names on demand should also be found in developmental dyslexics who are learning to read other languages. We therefore set out to replicate Swan and Goswami’s study with a group of German developmental dyslexics. We were interested to see whether a phonological deficit is characteristic of dyslexia in all orthographies, even those, such as German, in which high orthographic transparency means that dyslexic children read with considerable accuracy.     

Developmental and acquired dyslexia: A comparison

Jorm (1979a) has drawn attention to similarities between developmental dyslexia and acquired deep dyslexia, an analogy which has been criticized by A. W. Ellis (1979). A series of three experiments compared the two syndromes, using the techniques applied by Patterson and Marcel (1977) to adult deep dyslexics, to study a group of 15 boys suffering from developmental dyslexia. Patterson and Marcel's patients were able to perform a lexical decision task but showed no evidence of phonemic encoding of nonwords; our dyslexic children performed this task very slowly and with reduced accuracy but showed clear evidence of phonemic coding of the nonword items. Patterson and Marcel observed that their patients could not read out orthographically regular nonwords; our dyslexic children were able to do this task, although more slowly and somewhat less accurately than their chronological age or reading age controls. Finally, Patterson and Marcel observed that highly imageable words were more likely to be read correctly than words of equal frequency but low imageability; we observed a similar effect in both our dyslexic group and in their reading age controls. This implies that the imageability effect may not be peculiar to dyslexics but may be characteristic of normal reading under certain conditions. It is concluded that developmental dyslexics differ from the patients studied by Patterson and Marcel in demonstrating a pattern of reading which, though slow, is qualitatively similar to the reading of normal readers of a younger age. As such, our results do not support Jorm's position.     

Spatial coding in the processing of anaphor by good and poor readers: Evidence from eye movement analyses

An experiment that examined the way in which young readers deployed eye movements while reading sentences and while answering questions containing either a pronominal or noun anaphor is reported. To evaluate the possible causal role played by differences in inspection strategies between readers of above- and below-average reading skill, a third“age control” group of younger children was also tested. This group was matched on absolute reading ability with the less skilled group of older children, and on relative reading ability (i.e. reading quotient) with the more skilled group. Differences in inspection strategy were apparent between the groups of good and poor readers. Good readers launched more selective reinspections, whereas the poorer readers were more inclined to engage in“backtracking” and appeared to make less use of the displayed text. In every case there was a marked similarity in the behaviour of the good readers and the“age controls”. These results suggest that the ability to code the spatial location of words in a sentence, and, where necessary, to use this information to launch accurately targetted selective reinspections of previously read text, plays a crucial role in the development of skilled reading performance.     

汉语阅读障碍的语音加工及正字法加工缺陷的实验研究

本研究对汉语阅读障碍的加工缺陷进行探讨,期望有助于揭示语言加工的普遍性与特殊性,以及阅读障碍的成因,并可为后期的干预提供帮助。研究采用改编的言语认知测验对阅读水平匹配组与阅读障碍组和生理年龄匹配组进行比较后发现,阅读障碍组在语音意识和正字法加工任务上的成绩均明显差于生理年龄控制组和阅读水平匹配组;阅读障碍组在快速命名和语音记忆任务上的成绩不如生理年龄匹配组,仅达到阅读水平匹配组水平。因此,汉语发展性阅读障碍儿童存在语音意识和正字法加工缺陷,这两种缺陷可能是阅读障碍儿童面临的最主要的两大缺陷;阅读障碍儿童在快速命名和语音记忆上的不足可能是发展迟滞所致。同时,大多数的汉语阅读障碍儿童存在不止一种的认知缺陷。阅读障碍儿童在语音意识和正字法加工上存在缺陷的比例最高。     

Executive functions underlying multiplicative reasoning: Problem type matters

We investigated the extent to which inhibition, updating, shifting, and mental-attentional capacity (M-capacity) contribute to children’s ability to solve multiplication word problems. A total of 155 children in Grades 3–6 (8- to 13-year-olds) completed a set of multiplication word problems at two levels of difficulty: one-step and multiple-step problems. They also received a reading comprehension test and a battery of inhibition, updating, shifting, and M-capacity measures. Structural equation modeling showed that updating mediated the relationship between multiplication performance (controlling for reading comprehension score) and latent attentional factors M-capacity and inhibition. Updating played a more important role in predicting performance on multiple-step problems than did age, whereas age and updating were equally important predictors on one-step problems. Shifting was not a significant predictor in either model. Implications of proposing executive function updating as a mediator between mathematical cognition and chronological age and attention resources are discussed.