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.     

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.     

Individual differences in gains from computer-assisted remedial reading

Two hundred second- to fifth-grade students (aged approximately 7 to 11 years) spent 29 h in a computer-assisted remedial reading program that compared benefits from accurate, speech-supported reading in context, with and without explicit phonological training. Children in the "accurate-reading-in-context" condition spent 22 individualized computer hours reading stories and 7 small-group hours learning comprehension strategies. Children in the "phonological-analysis" condition learned phonological strategies in 7 small-group hours, and divided their computer time between phonological exercises and story reading. Phonologically trained children gained more in phonological skills and untimed word reading; children with more contextual reading gained more in time-limited word reading. Lower level readers gained more, and benefited more from phonological training, than higher level readers. In follow-up testing, most children maintained or improved their levels, but not their rates, of training gains. Phonologically trained children scored higher on phonological decoding, but children in both conditions scored equivalently on word reading.     

Letter names and phonological awareness help children to learn letter-sound relations

Two experimental training studies with Portuguese-speaking preschoolers in Brazil were conducted to investigate whether children benefit from letter name knowledge and phonological awareness in learning letter-sound relations. In Experiment 1, two groups of children were compared. The experimental group was taught the names of letters whose sounds occur either at the beginning (e.g., the letter /be/) or in the middle (e.g., the letter /‘eli/) of the letter name. The control group was taught the shapes of the letters but not their names. Then both groups were taught the sounds of the letters. Results showed an advantage for the experimental group, but only for beginning-sound letters. Experiment 2 investigated whether training in phonological awareness could boost the learning of letter sounds, particularly middle-sound letters. In addition to learning the names of beginning- and middle-sound letters, children in the experimental group were taught to categorize words according to rhyme and alliteration, whereas controls were taught to categorize the same words semantically. All children were then taught the sounds of the letters. Results showed that children who were given phonological awareness training found it easier to learn letter sounds than controls. This was true for both types of letters, but especially for middle-sound letters.     

Delivering phonological and phonics training within whole‐class teaching

Background Early, intensive phonological awareness and phonics training is widely held to be beneficial for children with poor phonological awareness. However, most studies have delivered this training separately from children's normal whole‐class reading lessons. Aims We examined whether integrating this training into whole class, mixed‐ability reading lessons could impact on children with poor phonological awareness, whilst also benefiting normally developing readers. Sample Teachers delivered the training within a broad reading programme to whole classes of children from Reception to the end of Year 1 (N = 251). A comparison group of children received standard teaching methods (N = 213). Method Children's literacy was assessed at the beginning of Reception, and then at the end of each year until 1 year post‐intervention. Results The strategy significantly impacted on reading performance for normally developing readers and those with poor phonological awareness, vastly reducing the incidence of reading difficulties from 20% in comparison schools to 5% in intervention schools. Conclusions Phonological and phonics training is highly effective for children with poor phonological awareness, even when incorporated into whole‐class teaching.     

Deficit in phonological processes: a characteristic of the neuropsychological profile of children with NF1

Learning disabilities are one of the most frequent complications of neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) in children. Studies of the effects of the neurocognitive deficit on academic performance are relatively rare, owing to the small size of the populations concerned. However, research is needed to develop effective rehabilitation programs. In the present study, we explored the impact of a possible phonological deficit on the reading abilities of children with NF1. A multicenter, cross-sectional study was conducted in France on two groups of 75 children with or without NF1 aged 8–12 years, matched for age, sex, handedness, and reading level. All participants underwent a neuropsychological evaluation to assess their general cognitive level, reading skills, phonological processes, visuoperceptual abilities, and attentional capacity. Phonological skills were assessed by means of two phonological awareness tasks and one short-term memory task. In the group of children with NF1, 41% had reading difficulties. Phonological processes were impaired in this group, compared with the children without NF1. Similar differences were found for a phoneme deletion task after adjustment for reading difficulties, IQ level, and visuoperceptual abilities. Phonological awareness, but not phonological short-term memory, was impaired in children with NF1, and not just those whose reading was impaired. Results suggest that children with NF1 have a phonological awareness deficit, whatever their reading level. Identification of reduced phonological skills may warrant the implementation of a specific rehabilitation program before early reading difficulties emerge.     

A connectionist perspective on the development of reading skills in children

The development of decoding skills has traditionally been viewed as a stage-like process during which children's reading strategies change as a consequence of the acquisition of phonological awareness. More explicit accounts of the mechanisms involved in learning to read are provided by recent connectionist models in which children learn mappings initially between orthography and phonology, and later between orthography, phonology and semantics. Evidence from studies of reading development suggests that learning to read is determined primarily by the status of a child's phonological representations and is therefore compromised in dyslexic children who have phonological deficits. Children who have language impairments encompassing deficits in semantic representations have qualitatively different reading problems centring on difficulties with reading comprehension and in learning to read exception words.     

Paired associate learning in Chinese children with dyslexia

A total of 82 Chinese 11- and 12-year-olds with and without dyslexia were tested on four paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal short-term memory in three different experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that children with dyslexia were significantly poorer in visual-verbal PAL than nondyslexic children but that these groups did not differ in visual-visual PAL performance. In Experiment 2, children with dyslexia had more difficulties in transferring rules to new stimuli in a rule-based visual-verbal PAL task as compared with children without dyslexia. Long-term retention of PAL was not impaired in dyslexic children across either experiment. In Experiment 3, rates of visual-verbal PAL deficits among children with dyslexia were all at or above 39%, the highest among all cognitive deficits tested. Moreover, rule-based visual-verbal PAL, in addition to morphological awareness and rapid naming ability, uniquely distinguished children with and without dyslexia even with other metalinguistic skills statistically controlled. Results underscore the importance of visual-verbal PAL for understanding reading impairment in Chinese children.     

Reading and Phonological Awareness Skills in Children Exposed to Domestic Violence

This study examined whether children exposed to domestic violence perform worse on tests of reading and phonological awareness than children from nonviolent homes. Forty children, ages 6 to 9 years, were divided into control or domestic violence groups based on their mothers' responses on the revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2). The groups were matched on age, gender, nonverbal IQ, and socioeconomic status. The domestic violence group performed worse than the control group on all measures of reading and phonological awareness. Significantly more children in the domestic violence group were identified as having reading difficulties compared to the control group. The results suggest that domestic violence may negatively impact children's reading skills, and appropriate intervention techniques should be developed.     

Longitudinal relationships between speech perception,phonological skills and reading in children at high‐risk of dyslexia

Speech perception deficits are commonly reported in dyslexia but longitudinal evidence that poor speech perception compromises learning to read is scant. We assessed the hypothesis that phonological skills, specifically phoneme awareness and RAN, mediate the relationship between speech perception and reading. We assessed longitudinal predictive relationships between categorical speech perception, phoneme awareness, RAN, language, attention and reading at ages 5½ and 6½ years in 237 children many of whom were at high risk of reading difficulties. Speech perception at 5½ years correlated with language, attention, phoneme awareness and RAN concurrently and was a predictor of reading at 6½ years. There was no significant indirect effect of speech perception on reading via phoneme awareness, suggesting that its effects are separable from those of phoneme awareness. Children classified with dyslexia at 8 years had poorer speech perception than age‐controls at 5½ years and children with language disorders (with or without dyslexia) had more severe difficulties with both speech perception and attention control. Categorical speech perception tasks tap factors extraneous to perception, including decision‐making skills. Further longitudinal studies are needed to unravel the complex relationships between categorical speech perception tasks and measures of reading and language and attention.     

Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: a meta-analytic review

The authors report a systematic meta-analytic review of the relationships among 3 of the most widely studied measures of children's phonological skills (phonemic awareness, rime awareness, and verbal short-term memory) and children's word reading skills. The review included both extreme group studies and correlational studies with unselected samples (235 studies were included, and 995 effect sizes were calculated). Results from extreme group comparisons indicated that children with dyslexia show a large deficit on phonemic awareness in relation to typically developing children of the same age (pooled effect size estimate: -1.37) and children matched on reading level (pooled effect size estimate: -0.57). There were significantly smaller group deficits on both rime awareness and verbal short-term memory (pooled effect size estimates: rime skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.93, and reading-level controls, -0.37; verbal short-term memory skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.71, and reading-level controls, -0.09). Analyses of studies of unselected samples showed that phonemic awareness was the strongest correlate of individual differences in word reading ability and that this effect remained reliable after controlling for variations in both verbal short-term memory and rime awareness. These findings support the pivotal role of phonemic awareness as a predictor of individual differences in reading development. We discuss whether such a relationship is a causal one and the implications of research in this area for current approaches to the teaching of reading and interventions for children with reading difficulties.     

The relationship between phonological skills and word decoding

Word decoding ability is a critical factor in reading performance. In the present study, we examined the relationship between word decoding ability and three different phonological skills; phonemic awareness, verbal short-term memory (V-STM), and rapid automatic naming (RAN) in 1007 Scandinavian third- and fifth-graders. In the first part of the study, we sought to investigate the influence of the three phonological skills on word decoding ability. Using multiple regression analysis, our result clearly demonstrated that phonemic awareness was the most powerful phonological skill explaining variance in word decoding ability among average decoders. Among children with poor decoding skills, however, RAN was the most important factor in Grade 3, whereas V-STM was the main contributor to decoding ability among children in Grade 5. In the second part of the research, we examined the relationship between poor phonological skills and word decoding ability. Interestingly, our result revealed that approximately one half of the children with phonological difficulties, still performed within the average range with regard to word decoding ability. However, our analyses confirmed earlier research concerning the severe word decoding difficulties children with both poor phonemic awareness and restricted V-STM, experience.     

What is the deficit in phonological processing deficits: auditory sensitivity, masking, or category formation?

Although children with language impairments, including those associated with reading, usually demonstrate deficits in phonological processing, there is minimal agreement as to the source of those deficits. This study examined two problems hypothesized to be possible sources: either poor auditory sensitivity to speech-relevant acoustic properties, mainly formant transitions, or enhanced masking of those properties. Adults and 8-year-olds with and without phonological processing deficits (PPD) participated. Children with PPD demonstrated weaker abilities than children with typical language development (TLD) in reading, sentence recall, and phonological awareness. Dependent measures were word recognition, discrimination of spectral glides, and phonetic judgments based on spectral and temporal cues. All tasks were conducted in quiet and in noise. Children with PPD showed neither poorer auditory sensitivity nor greater masking than adults and children with TLD, but they did demonstrate an unanticipated deficit in category formation for nonspeech sounds. These results suggest that these children may have an underlying deficit in perceptually organizing sensory information to form coherent categories.     

The relationship between phonological processing and arithmetic in children with learning disabilities

Phonological processing skills have not only been shown to be important for reading skills, but also for arithmetic skills. Specifically, previous research in typically developing children has suggested that phonological processing skills may be more closely related to arithmetic problems that are solved through fact retrieval (e.g., remembering the solution from memory) than procedural computation (e.g., counting). However, the relationship between phonological processing and arithmetic in children with learning disabilities (LDs) has not been investigated. Yet, understanding these relationships in children with LDs is especially important because it can help elucidate the cognitive underpinnings of math difficulties, explain why reading and math disabilities frequently co-occur, and provide information on which cognitive skills to target for interventions. In 63 children with LDs, we examined the relationship between different phonological processing skills (phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and rapid serial naming) and arithmetic. We distinguished between arithmetic problems that tend to be solved with fact retrieval versus procedural computation to determine whether phonological processing skills are differentially related to these two arithmetic processes. We found that phonemic awareness, but not phonological memory or rapid serial naming, was related to arithmetic fact retrieval. We also found no association between any phonological processing skills and procedural computation. These results converge with prior research in typically developing children and suggest that phonemic awareness is also related to arithmetic fact retrieval in children with LD. These results raise the possibility that phonemic awareness training might improve both reading and arithmetic fact retrieval skills.

Research Highlights

• Relationships between phonological processing and various arithmetic skills were investigated in children with learning disabilities (LDs) for the first time.
• We found phonemic awareness was related to arithmetic involving fact retrieval, but not to arithmetic involving procedural computation in LDs.
• The results suggest that phonemic awareness is not only important to skilled reading, but also to some aspects of arithmetic.
• These results raise the question of whether intervention in phonemic awareness might improve arithmetic fact retrieval skills.

     

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。     

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.     

Influence of Distal and Proximal Cognitive Processes on Word Reading

The objectives of the present study were twofold: (a) to explore the interrelationship among distal, proximal cognitive skills, and word reading; and (b) to identify those cognitive processes that predict phonological awareness and rapid naming. Seventy First-Nation Canadian children attending grades 3 and 4 were examined on phonological awareness, rapid naming, Word Identification, Word Attack, and the cognitive processing measures of planning, attention, successive, and simultaneous (PASS). Results indicated that phonological awareness and rapid naming uniquely predicted reading, whereas PASS variables did not, when the effects of phonological awareness and rapid naming were controlled. Finally, both phonological awareness and rapid naming were predicted by planning. Implications for diagnosis of children at risk for reading difficulties and remediation are discussed.     

Phonological Awareness and Beginning Reading in Spanish-Speaking ESL First Graders: Research into Practice

In the first study, 30 Spanish-speaking English-as-a-second language (ESL) first graders whose families were Latino immigrants and who received all their school instruction in English completed an assessment battery with both Spanish and English measures of phonological awareness, Verbal IQ (VIQ), oral language proficiency, and single-word reading (real words and pseudowords); they also named English alphabet letters. Phonological awareness in Spanish predicted (a) phonological awareness in English and (b) English word reading; thus, phonological awareness may transfer across first and second languages and across oral and written language. English VIQ and oral language proficiency predicted both English and Spanish word reading, but Spanish VIQ and oral language proficiency did not predict English word reading. In the second study, the 4 males and the 4 females with the lowest reading achievement participated in an instructional design experiment in which empirically supported instructional components for teaching beginning reading to monlingual English speakers were included. These components were phonological awareness training (in both Spanish and English), explicit instruction in alphabetic principle (in English), and repeated reading of engaging English text with comprehension monitoring (in English). Both individual students and the group as a whole increased in real-word reading and pseudoword reading beyond the level expected on the basis of their Spanish or English VIQ or oral proficiency. Implications of this research for school psychology practice are discussed, especially the importance of early reading intervention and progress monitoring for Spanish-speaking ESL first graders.     

The improvement of reading skills of L1 and ESL children using a Response to Intervention (RtI) Model

This study examined the development of literacy skills in children in a district that used a Response to Intervention (RTI) model. The district included children whose first language was English and children who were learning English as a second language (ESL). Tasks measuring phonological awareness, lexical access, and syntactic awareness were administered when the children entered school in kindergarten at age 5. Reading, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, memory, and spelling were administered in grade 7. When the children entered school, significant numbers of them were at risk for literacy difficulties. After systematic instruction and annual monitoring of skills, their reading abilities improved to the extent that only a very small percentage had reading difficulties. The results demonstrated that early identification and intervention and frequent monitoring of basic skills can significantly reduce the incidence of reading problems in both the ESL and language majority children.     

Early cognitive profiles of emergent readers: a longitudinal study

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability to reading development in 142 English-speaking children from the start of kindergarten to the middle of Grade 2. Partial cross-lagged analyses revealed significant relationships between early performance on block design and matching letter-like forms tasks and later reading ability. Rhyme awareness correlated with later reading ability during the earliest stages, but onset awareness did not emerge as important until after the children had started reading. Digit span correlated significantly with future reading ability at every stage. These findings indicate that although phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability are all necessary for emergent reading, their relative importance varies across the first 2 years of reading development.