Prosodic Awareness Skills and Literacy Acquisition in Spanish

There has been very little research in Spanish on the potential role of prosodic skills in reading and spelling acquisition, which is the subject of the present study. A total of 85 children in 5th year of Primary Education (mean age 10 years and 9 months) performed tests assessing memory, stress awareness, phonological awareness, reading and spelling. In written language tests, errors were classified as phonological (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules) or stress-related (placement of the stress mark). Regression analyses showed that, once memory and phonological awareness were controlled, stress awareness partially explained reading and spelling performance as well as error type; however, differences were found between reading and spelling errors. These results show a relationship between prosodic skills--namely stress sensitivity--and the acquisition of reading and spelling skills that seems to be independent of phonological awareness skills.     

The interaction between phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and naming speed in the reading and spelling performance of first-grade children

The performance of 267 first-grade children was examined on tasks assessing phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and naming speed. The children were also given several measures of word and pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and pseudoword and dictation spelling. A series of hierarchical analyses indicated that three variables (phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and naming speed) were still predictors of reading and spelling performance after variance in the others had been controlled for. The results, which confirm that syntactic awareness can account for variance in written language after phonological ability had been controlled for, support the hypothesis concerning the relationships between naming-speed processes and written language, and challenge the unitary phonological theory of reading difficulty.     

A longitudinal study of children's text messaging and literacy development

Recent studies have shown evidence of positive concurrent relationships between children's use of text message abbreviations ('textisms') and performance on standardized assessments of reading and spelling. This study aimed to determine the direction of this association. One hundred and nineteen children aged between 8 and 12 years were assessed on measures of general ability, reading, spelling, rapid phonological retrieval, and phonological awareness at the beginning and end of an academic year. The children were also asked to provide a sample of the text messages that they sent over a 2-day period. These messages were analyzed to determine the extent to which textisms were used. It was found that textism use at the beginning of the academic year was able to predict unique variance in spelling performance at the end of the academic year after controlling for age, verbal IQ, phonological awareness, and spelling ability at the beginning of the year. When the analysis was reversed, reading and spelling ability were unable to predict unique variance in textism usage. These data suggest that there is some evidence of a causal contribution of textism usage to spelling performance in children aged 8-12 years. However, when the measure of rapid phonological retrieval (rapid picture naming) was controlled in the analysis, the relationship between textism use and spelling ability just failed to reach statistical significance, suggesting that phonological access skills may mediate some of the relationship between textism use and spelling performance.     

Effects of computer-assisted practice on reading and spelling in children with learning disabilities

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of computer-assisted practice on reading and spelling in children with learning disabilities (LD). We compared three practice conditions, one with reading and two with spelling, in order to test whether computer-based reading and spelling practice has an influence on the development of reading and spelling ability in children with LD. A sample was selected of 85 children with LD, with age range between 8 years and 10 years (age, M=111.02, SD=9.6), whose spelling performance was two years below grade level. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: 1) Copy the target word from the computer screen (n=22), 2) Memorize the target word and write it from memory (n=21), 3) Word reading (n=21), and 4) the untrained control group (n=21). We administered measures of pseudoword reading, phonological awareness, phonological word decoding and orthographical word decoding tasks. We examined the learning effects and transfer effects on words classified as a function of length, consistency, and complexity of syllable structure. Overall, the results showed that reading training did not improve spelling; however, the children who participated in the copy training condition improved their spelling skills.     

Modelling relations between sensory processing, speech perception, orthographic and phonological ability, and literacy achievement

The general magnocellular theory postulates that dyslexia is the consequence of a multimodal deficit in the processing of transient and dynamic stimuli. In the auditory modality, this deficit has been hypothesized to interfere with accurate speech perception, and subsequently disrupt the development of phonological and later reading and spelling skills. In the visual modality, an analogous problem might interfere with literacy development by affecting orthographic skills. In this prospective longitudinal study, we tested dynamic auditory and visual processing, speech-in-noise perception, phonological ability and orthographic ability in 62 five-year-old preschool children. Predictive relations towards first grade reading and spelling measures were explored and the validity of the global magnocellular model was evaluated using causal path analysis. In particular, we demonstrated that dynamic auditory processing was related to speech perception, which itself was related to phonological awareness. Similarly, dynamic visual processing was related to orthographic ability. Subsequently, phonological awareness, orthographic ability and verbal short-term memory were unique predictors of reading and spelling development.     

LEADERS IN READING RESEARCH AND INSTRUCTION

In this review, we examined the role of phonological awareness in literacy development for Spanish-speaking students. There appears to be a close relationship between Spanish-language phonological awareness and literacy development. In particular, Spanish phonological awareness appears to develop in stages. Not only is the development of phonemic awareness skills probably supported by reading instruction, but it likely contributes to reading development as well. Sensitivity to syllables in Spanish may be particularly important for later reading success, and the ability to segment words into their phonemes may play a critical role in reading acquisition. Training students in spelling, blending, and segmenting syllables and phonemes may be especially valuable because these skills are closely related to those which students use when actually reading and writing words. Finally, there is evidence of cross-language transfer of phonological awareness skills between Spanish and English. Suggestions for Spanish phonological awareness instruction are given, and an agenda for further research is included. Based on this review, many different experimental procedures have been used to evaluate students' Spanish-language phonological awareness, but there is a need for measures that are psychometrically sound and that have documented validity and reliability to assess phonological awareness in Spanish. In addition, although training in Spanish phonemic awareness seems to have a positive effect on the development of spelling ability, we found little direct evidence that this type of training increases Spanish reading performance. Further research in this area is needed.     

Predictive influence of phonological processing, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling performance

This paper focuses on the predictive influence of phonological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling. The retrospective study correlated spelling performance in a group of 199 French-speaking children at the end of grade 2 with earlier capacities for phonemic manipulation, morphological/syntactic correction, and naming speed, assessed at the end of grade 1. The results are consistent with an integrative model that challenges the unitary phonological disorder hypothesis and confirmed that in French, as in other languages, naming speed is an independent predictor of reading performance.     

Reading with partial phonology: Developmental phonological dyslexia

Recent psycholinguistic investigations have advanced our understanding of the acquired dyslexias. Developmental analogues have been described to some of these disorders. A new case of developmental phonological dyslexia is described here. A.H. is an intelligent 10-year-old boy with no neurological abnormality. Reading and spelling are below age level. A.H. is poorer at reading words than nonwords. The majority of his errors are paralexias: visual, derivations, or visuosemantic. Spelling-to-sound regularity does not affect the ability to read aloud. A.H.'s reading performance is significantly impaired when words are presented typed in reverse order, thereby prohibiting global strategies. Spelling of nonwords is no better than reading of nonwords. Only one-fifth of spelling errors are phonologically valid. A.H. has imperfect development of both the phonological route to reading and the phonological route to spelling.A shortened version of this paper was presented at the European meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Lisbon, Portugal, June 1983.     

Phonological Errors Predominate in Arabic Spelling Across Grades 1–9

Most of the spelling error analysis has been conducted in Latin orthographies and rarely conducted in other orthographies like Arabic. Two hundred and eighty-eight students in grades 1–9 participated in the study. They were presented nine lists of words to test their spelling skills. Their spelling errors were analyzed by error categories. The most frequent errors were phonological. The results did not indicate any significant differences in the percentages of phonological errors across grades one to nine.Thus, phonology probably presents the greatest challenge to students developing spelling skills in Arabic.The authors wish to thank all the students who participated in this study.     

Home literacy activities and their influence on early literacy skills.

The relationship between the home environments of 66 children and their language and literacy development was examined. After accounting for child age, parent education, and child ability as indexed by scores on a rapid automatized naming task and Block Design of the WPPSI-R, shared book reading at home made no contribution to the prediction of the literacy skills of letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten. In contrast, home activities involving letters predicted modest and statistically significant amounts of variance. For the areas of receptive vocabulary and phonological sensitivity, neither shared book reading nor letter activities were predictive. Follow-up to mid-Grade 2 underscored the importance of letter name/sound knowledge and phonological sensitivity in kindergarten in accounting for individual differences in later achievement in reading comprehension, phonological spelling, and conventional spelling.     

Influence of auditory-verbal, visual-verbal, visual, and visual-visual processing speed on reading and spelling at the end of Grade 1

This study examined cognitive processing speed through four modalities (auditory-verbal, visual-verbal, visual, and visual-visual) at the end of Grade 1 and how it influences reading and spelling. The subjects were 124 French-speaking children, selected for their contrasting performance on reading and spelling tasks. The children in the first group (N=69) were average readers; the second group of children (N=55) performed worse or much worse on all reading and spelling tasks. The experimental design consisted of a set of 10 tasks administered in two sessions. The major findings reveal that: (1) the children with reading difficulties displayed low and slow performance on most cognitive tasks, whatever the modality; (2) auditory-verbal and visual-verbal processing speed significantly predicted written language, which was not the case with the visual modalities; and (3) that visual problems did not appear to be a potential cause of reading problems in most delayed readers. The findings also confirm the independence of phonological and naming-speed skills in reading development and reading impairment.     

A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling,sound, and reading

Skilled readers generally are assumed to make little or no use of words’ phonological features in visual word identification. Contrary to this assumption, college students’ performance in the present reading experiments showed large effects of stimulus word phonology. In Experiments 1 and 2, these subjects produced larger false positive error rates in a semantic categorization task when they responded to stimulus foils that were homophonic to category exemplars (e.g., ROWS for the category A FLOWER) than when they responded to spelling control foils. Additionally, in Experiment 2, this homophony effect was found under brief-exposure pattern-masking conditions, a result consistent with the possibility that phonology is an early source of constraint in word identification. Subjects did, however, correctly reject most homophone foils in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 3 investigated the source of this ability. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that subjects detected homophone impostors, such as ROWS, by verifying target foil spellings against their knowledge of the correct spellings of category exemplars, such as ROSE.     

Phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia in a highly literate subject: A developmental case with associated deficits of phonemic processing and awareness

This paper describes some aspects of reading and writing in a highly literate subject who has unusual difficulty in reading and spelling non-words. No cerebral trauma is indicated, and she performs at above average levels on standard tests of reading, spelling and cognitive ability. Only digit span is significantly impaired. Although auditory phoneme discrimination is normal, she performs poorly on aural tasks, like rhyme judgement and homophone matching, that require awareness of phonemic structure, and she is impaired at segmenting heard words into their component sounds.

Tests of immediate memory confirm abnormal span and indicate a failure to use normal phonological coding in immediate recall. We argue that a deficit in phonological processing underlies impaired performance on tasks of reading, spelling and immediate memory.     

Pinyin and English Invented Spelling in Chinese-Speaking Students Who Speak English as a Second Language

This study examined pinyin (the official phonetic system that transcribes the lexical tones and pronunciation of Chinese characters) invented spelling and English invented spelling in 72 Mandarin-speaking 6th graders who learned English as their second language. The pinyin invented spelling task measured segmental-level awareness including syllable and phoneme awareness, and suprasegmental-level awareness including lexical tones and tone sandhi in Chinese Mandarin. The English invented spelling task manipulated segmental-level awareness including syllable awareness and phoneme awareness, and suprasegmental-level awareness including word stress. This pinyin task outperformed a traditional phonological awareness task that only measured segmental-level awareness and may have optimal utility to measure unique phonological and linguistic features in Chinese reading. The pinyin invented spelling uniquely explained variance in Chinese conventional spelling and word reading in both languages. The English invented spelling uniquely explained variance in conventional spelling and word reading in both languages. Our findings appear to support the role of phonological activation in Chinese reading. Our experimental linguistic manipulations altered the phonological awareness item difficulties.     

Lexical and Nonlexical Spelling Deficits in Dementia of the Alzheimer Type

Written spelling was assessed in 16 subjects with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) using an information processing approach. The results were compared to the performance in a group of healthy elderly subjects. The Alzheimer subjects scored significantly lower in word spelling and nonword spelling ability than the controls (F(1, 7) = 187,p< .0001), and both the lexical and the nonlexical spelling strategies were affected. The results did not support the hypothesis that nonlexical ability is preserved in DAT. In the DAT group, spelling correlated significantly (p< 0.01) with the severity of dementia, but spelling performance was not associated with the age of onset of dementia or family history of dementia.     

Spelling in Adults: The Combined Influences of Language Skills and Reading Experience

One hundred and twelve university students completed 7 tests assessing word-reading accuracy, print exposure, phonological sensitivity, phonological coding and knowledge of English morphology as predictors of spelling accuracy. Together the tests accounted for 71% of the variance in spelling, with phonological skills and morphological knowledge emerging as strong predictors of spelling accuracy for words with both regular and irregular sound-spelling correspondences. The pattern of relationships was consistent with a model in which, as a function of the learning opportunities that are provided by reading experience, phonological skills promote the learning of individual word orthographies and structural relationships among words.     

Age-related differences in learning disabled and skilled readers' working memory

This study determines whether age-related deficits in learning disabled (LD) readers' working memory performance reflect delays in retrieval efficiency and/or storage capacity. The study compared LD and skilled readers' working memory performance (N=226) across four age groups (7, 10, 13, and 20) for phonological, visual-spatial, and semantic information under initial (non-cued), gain (cues that bring performance to an asymptotic level), and maintenance conditions (asymptotic conditions without cues). The important results were that LD readers' working memory performance was inferior to skilled readers on verbal and visual-spatial working memory tasks across all age groups and these differences increased on gain and maintenance conditions when compared to initial conditions. These reading group differences remained when age, reading, and mathematics were partialed from the analysis. The results support a general capacity explanation of reading group differences that is not totally dependent on reading skill. These differences in capacity reflect demands placed on both the accessing of new information and the maintenance of old information that extend beyond the phonological system.     

Nature of spelling errors in a Thai conduction aphasic.

A Thai conduction aphasic's performance on a written confrontation naming task is reported. Analysis of his spelling errors indicated that errors rarely violated Thai phonotactic constraints; consonant substitutions were phonologically similar to the target stimuli; longer stimuli were more likely to be in error; distribution of errors was the same across consonants, vowels, and tones; and distribution of error types varied between segmentals (consonants, vowels) and suprasegmentals (tones). Error patterns were similar to those observed in oral reading and repetition. The pattern of impaired writing performance is discussed in relation to a functional model of the spelling process, and it is hypothesized to reflect primarily a functional lesion to the phonological buffer.     

Processing strategies in a phoneme deletion task

The present study explores the factors underlying competence in a difficult consonant deletion task, using a sample of nine-year-old children whose development had been followed from the age of four. In particular it examines the factors governing use of phonological and orthographic strategies in the deletion task, and the relations between strategy use, current reading and spelling ability, and earlier phonological awareness skills. Processes in consonant deletion are then mapped on to current dual-route models of reading and spelling.