Effect of an auditory training program on reading, phoneme awareness, and language

This investigation examined the effect of an auditory training program, Fast ForWord-Language, with 26 children ages 7 to 10 years. As two subgroups based on reading ability, all children received 6 wk. of intervention. Thresholds for three conditions of backward masking were obtained pre- and postintervention, and 6 mo. afterward. Immediately following the intervention period, backward masking thresholds improved for all backward masking conditions. Participants also showed increases in language skills and in phoneme awareness but not in reading skills. Six months after intervention, there were improvements in thresholds for backward masking but no improvements in language or reading skills for either group. This study calls into question the efficacy of an intensive auditory training program to improve reading skills.     

Improving reading and self-concept through communication and social skills training

A course of psychological education is described in which disruptive children were taught social and communication skills over two terms. The course was designed for 26 eight-year-olds in an EPA junior school. Ten of the children were from broken homes, six were itinerants, most had displayed undesirable behaviour, and their level of achievement had been below average. Tested at the end of the second term, they showed dramatic improvements in self-concept and reading ability.     

A comparison of componential and traditional approaches to training reading skills

Primary school children with average intelligence and no oral language comprehension deficits—but who were 18 or more months behind their peers in reading comprehension—served as subjects in an evaluation of two approaches to reading remediation. Half the children received teacher-based tutoring using the DISTAR programme (Science Research Associates, 1983). The remaining students received practice on four computer games. These games were designed to improve performance on a set of information-processing components shown in previous research to have an important impact on reading comprehension. Training in both conditions focused mainly on word decoding and phonics. Although almost all students improved their reading comprehension test scores after training, the poorest readers made significantly greater gains in the componential training condition than in the DISTAR condition. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the componential approach with a sample of specifically reading-disabled children. They also show that componential training can be a practical adjunct to a traditional tutoring programme.     

The development of visual information processing skills related to reading

Literate adults can use their familiarity with specific words and their knowledge of English orthography to facilitate word recognition processes. The development of word superiority effects in visual perception was investigated in the present study using a search task with kindergarten (5.7 years old), second (8.0 years old), and fourth grade children (10.0 years old), and college students. The search task consisted of the visual presentation of a target letter followed by a three-, four-, or five-letter display. The target letter was included in the display on half the trials, and the displays were common words, orthographically regular pseudowords, and irregular nonwords. Although response times decreased with age, the three oldest groups showed similar effects for the size and structure of the displays. That is, response times increased linearly with the number of display letters, and responses were faster for word and pseudoword displays than for nonwords. The data for the kindergarten children showed evidence for the use of a different search strategy, and they did not respond differentially to the three types of displays. The results are discussed in terms of the implications for developmental models of visual search and word superiority effects in visual perception.     

Effects of working memory and reading acceleration training on improving working memory abilities and reading skills among third graders

Working memory (WM) plays a crucial role in supporting learning, including reading. This study investigated the influence of reading acceleration and WM training programs on improving reading skills and WM abilities. Ninety-seven children in third grade were divided into three study groups and one control group. The three study groups each received a different combination of two training programs: only reading acceleration, WM followed by reading acceleration, and reading acceleration followed by WM. All training programs significantly improved reading skills and WM abilities. Compared with the control group, the group trained with only the reading acceleration program improved word accuracy, whereas the groups trained with a combination of reading and WM programs improved word and pseudo-word fluency. The reading-acceleration-alone group and the WM-program-followed-by-reading-acceleration group improved phonological complex memory. We conclude that a training program that combines a long reading acceleration program and a short WM program is the most effective for improving the abilities most related to scholastic achievement.     

Attention and reading skills

Attention plays a critical role in information processing. Its adequate functioning is required for correct development of complex cognitive abilities and regular scholastic progress. Children with attention deficits often have difficulties in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The present study investigated interactions among reading skills, overall scholastic performance as rated by teachers, and components of attention: visual reaction time, simple immediate span of attention, and selectivity. The sample was 98 students in the first and second years of public junior high school (age range 11-14 years, M = 12.6, SD = 1.2), i.e., with expected already well-established reading. Reading was evaluated using Comprehension, Accuracy, and Speed tests. Overall scholastic performance was obtained by means of teachers' ratings. Simple Reaction Time, Digit Span, and Color-Word Interference, included in a multitask computerized test, assessed attention. Analysis confirmed the hypothesis that the reading skills are strongly predictive of the Scholastic Assessment rated by the teachers. High scholastic ratings were correlated with Reading Speed and Accuracy rather than Reading Comprehension. Poor readers showed worse performances on the Digit Span test which measures simple immediate span of attention. Good and poor readers obtained a similar score on the Color-Word Interference task. This observation seems to contrast with the more common interpretation of this effect, suggesting that reading is an automatic process and, therefore, the semantic dimension overcomes the controlled perceptual one. According to other studies, an alternative explanation is suggested. In conclusion, present results confirm the hypothesis of a strong link among reading speed and accuracy, scholastic assessment as rated by teachers, simple immediate span of attention, and visual reaction time.     

The relationship between auditory temporal processing,phonemic awareness,and reading disability

Recent research suggests an auditory temporal deficit as a possible contributing factor to poor phonemic awareness skills. This study investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in children with a reading disability, aged 8-12 years, using Tallal's tone-order judgement task. Normal performance on the tone-order task was established for 36 normal readers. Forty-two children with developmental reading disability were then subdivided by their performance on the tone-order task. Average and poor tone-order subgroups were then compared on their ability to process speech sounds and visual symbols, and on phonological awareness and reading. The presence of a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on the order processing of speech sounds, to poorer phonological awareness or to more severe reading difficulties. In particular, there was no evidence of a group by interstimulus interval interaction, as previously described in the literature, and thus little support for a general auditory temporal processing difficulty as an underlying problem in poor readers. In this study, deficient order judgement on a nonverbal auditory temporal order task (tone task) did not underlie phonological awareness or reading difficulties.     

The interaction between reading skills and reading instruction

Research on the underlying nature of reading disability, exemplified in the present papers, is essentially correlational. Differences in acoustic memory skills, partial cue utilization, or symbol-sound knowledge may be a result rather than a cause of reading skill differences. Suggestions are made on how to untangle the cause-effect problem through longitudinal investigation and careful analysis of some possible interactions between cognitive skills and reading ability.     

The role of visual and auditory temporal processing in reading irregular and nonsense words.

In the present study, the role of rapid visual and auditory temporal processing in reading irregular and nonsense words was investigated with a group of normal readers. One hundred and five undergraduates participated in various visual and auditory temporal-processing tasks. Readers who primarily adopted the phonological route in reading (nonsense-word readers) showed a trend for better auditory temporal resolution but readers who primarily adopted sight word skills (irregular-word readers) did not exhibit better visual temporal resolution. Both the correlation and stepwise multiple-regression analyses, however, revealed a relationship between visual temporal processing and irregular-word reading as well as a relationship between auditory temporal processing and nonsense-word reading. The results support the involvement of visual and auditory processing in reading irregular and nonsense words respectively, and were discussed with respect to recent findings that only dyslexics with phonological impairment will display temporal deficits. Further, the temporal measures were not effective discriminants for the reading groups, suggesting a lack of association between reading ability and the choice of reading strategy.     

Relations among musical skills,phonological processing,and early reading ability in preschool children

We examined the relations among phonological awareness, music perception skills, and early reading skills in a population of 100 4- and 5-year-old children. Music skills were found to correlate significantly with both phonological awareness and reading development. Regression analyses indicated that music perception skills contributed unique variance in predicting reading ability, even when variance due to phonological awareness and other cognitive abilities (math, digit span, and vocabulary) had been accounted for. Thus, music perception appears to tap auditory mechanisms related to reading that only partially overlap with those related to phonological awareness, suggesting that both linguistic and nonlinguistic general auditory mechanisms are involved in reading.     

Effect of fine motor skills training on arithmetical ability in children

Previous researches have shown that there was a strong relationship between fine motor skills and arithmetical abilities in children. However, the majority of previous studies examined only the correlations between fine motor skills and arithmetical abilities, but did not attempt to determine their causal relationship. Thus, the aim of the present study was to examine the effect of motor skills training on arithmetical abilities among 80 first graders. One of the results showed that the intervention group, which received training in fine motor skills for 10 min, showed greater improvements in performance on an arithmetic task and a pegboard than did the active control group, which read their favourite book for 10 min. These findings have suggested that training in this study is an appropriate program for improving fine motor skills and further fine motor skills had a significant influence on arithmetical abilities in children, with a medium effect size. The present study has, for the first time, provided evidence that there will be a causal relationship between these factors.     

Early precursors and enabling skills of reading acquisition

Research on early linguistic precursors and enabling skills of reading acquisition among young children is reviewed. Language development starts early in infancy when the child learns to categorize the speech sounds according to the pattern typical of the mother tongue. Equipped with these sound categories the child is ready to learn to segment words from the sound stream and to understand and to use words. The precise phonological representation of words will facilitate the important development of phonological awareness, a basic prerequisite for reading acquisition. This paper reviews some of my longitudinal research and training studies indicating the causal direction of the relation between phonological awareness and reading and includes some ongoing studies, where gender differences, socio‐economic factors, dose‐response‐effects and motivational factors are explored. Preventive and remedial implications of the findings are pointed out. Finally, the complexity of the causal relationships between different aspects of early language development, including genetic influences and later reading is pointed out.     

Cross-modal training induces changes in spatial representations early in the auditory processing pathway

In the ventriloquism aftereffect, brief exposure to a consistent spatial disparity between auditory and visual stimuli leads to a subsequent shift in subjective sound localization toward the positions of the visual stimuli. Such rapid adaptive changes probably play an important role in maintaining the coherence of spatial representations across the various sensory systems. In the research reported here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify the stage in the auditory processing stream that is modulated by audiovisual discrepancy training. Both before and after exposure to synchronous audiovisual stimuli that had a constant spatial disparity of 15°, participants reported the perceived location of brief auditory stimuli that were presented from central and lateral locations. In conjunction with a sound localization shift in the direction of the visual stimuli (the behavioral ventriloquism aftereffect), auditory ERPs as early as 100 ms poststimulus (N100) were systematically modulated by the disparity training. These results suggest that cross-modal learning was mediated by a relatively early stage in the auditory cortical processing stream.     

Label training and auditory generalization

To investigate the Miller-Dollard hypothesis (Social learning and imitation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941) that verbal labels increase distinctiveness of cues, generalization gradients to pure tones were obtained before and after label training. One group was trained to label all seven tones in an array and another only the middle tone. Three additional groups controlled for nonverbal factors. Before training, gradients were characterized by progressive loss of stimulus control with exposure to the generalization test stimuli. The main effect of possession of labels was to retard this loss, but only in tests where S+ was a labeled stimulus. While the specificity of label effects was in line with the Miller-Dollard hypothesis, the finding that labels did not confer a clear advantage at the start of testing was not. It was suggested that the unlabeled stimuli may have been sufficiently distinct to mask label effects and that interference generated by the test stimuli reduced distinctiveness to levels needed for such effects to emerge.