Perception of voice and tone onset time continua in children with dyslexia with and without attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Tasks assessing perception of a phonemic contrast based on voice onset time (VOT) and a nonspeech analog of a VOT contrast using tone onset time (TOT) were administered to children (ages 7.5 to 15.9 years) identified as having reading disability (RD; n = 21), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 22), comorbid RD and ADHD (n = 26), or no impairment (NI; n = 26). Children with RD, whether they had been identified as having ADHD or not, exhibited reduced perceptual skills on both tasks as indicated by shallower slopes on category labeling functions and reduced accuracy even at the endpoints of the series where cues are most salient. Correlations between performance on the VOT task and measures of single word decoding and phonemic awareness were significant only in the groups without ADHD. These findings suggest that (a) children with RD have difficulty in processing speech and nonspeech stimuli containing similar auditory temporal cues, (b) phoneme perception is related to phonemic awareness and decoding skills, and (c) the potential presence of ADHD needs to be taken into account in studies of perception in children with RD.     

Form effects on the estimation of students' oral reading fluency using DIBELS

This study examined the effects of passage and presentation order on progress monitoring assessments of oral reading fluency in 134 second grade students. The students were randomly assigned to read six one-minute passages in one of six fixed orders over a seven week period. The passages had been developed to be comparable based on readability formulas. Estimates of oral reading fluency varied across the six stories (67.9 to 93.9), but not as a function of presentation order. These passage effects altered the shape of growth trajectories and affected estimates of linear growth rates, but were shown to be removed when forms were equated. Explicit equating is essential to the development of equivalent forms, which can vary in difficulty despite high correlations across forms and apparent equivalence through readability indices.     

How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading

Contents:
Introduction, p.31
Writing Systems and the Alphabetic Principle, p.32
The Development of Reading Skills, p.34
Development Dyslexia, p.43
Skilled Reading, p.45
Using Connectionist Models to Understand Reading and Dyslexia, p.52
Methods of Teaching Reading, p.55
What Happens in Classrooms During Reading Instruction?, p.57
Reading Instruction Is a Politically Charged Issue, p.61
Research Findings on Teaching Reading, p.63
Summary and Conclusions, p.68     

Gender Differences in Healthcare Utilization: The Mediating Effect of Utilization Propensity

To evaluate the mediating effect of utilization propensity (UP) on gender differences in healthcare utilization (HCU), a representative sample of the German general population (N = 2,510) was assessed with questionnaires. Gender differences in HCU, UP, and the mediating effect of UP were investigated using regression analyses. UP was significantly associated with HCU. The explanatory power of gender for UP, and of UP for HCU was prevailingly weak. UP had a mediating effect on gender differences in HCU, but the effect was very small. This is partly attributable to common problems in the prediction of behavior by attitudes and the operationalization of UP.     

The role of discourse context in developing word form representations: a paradoxical relation between reading and learning

To acquire representations of printed words, children must attend to the written form of a word and link this form with the word's pronunciation. When words are read in context, they may be read with less attention to these features, and this can lead to poorer word form retention. Two experiments with young children (ages 5-8 years) confirmed this hypothesis. In our experiments, children attempted to read words they could not previously read, during a self-teaching period, either in context or in isolation. Later they were tested on how well they learned the words as a function of self-teaching condition (isolation or context). Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation. Furthermore, this benefit from learning in isolation was larger for less skilled readers. This effect of poorer word retention when words are learned in context is paradoxical because context has been shown to facilitate word identification. We discuss factors that may influence this effect of context, especially the role of children's skill level and the demands of learning new word representations at the beginning of reading instruction.     

Perception of speech and nonspeech stimuli by children with and without reading disability and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

The auditory temporal deficit hypothesis predicts that children with reading disability (RD) will exhibit deficits in the perception of speech and nonspeech acoustic stimuli in discrimination and temporal ordering tasks when the interstimulus interval (ISI) is short. Initial studies testing this hypothesis did not account for the potential presence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Temporal order judgment and discrimination tasks were administered to children with (1) RD/no-ADHD (n=38), (2) ADHD (n=29), (3) RD and ADHD (RD/ADHD; n=32), and (4) no impairment (NI; n=43). Contrary to predictions, children with RD showed no specific sensitivity to ISI and performed worse relative to children without RD on speech but not nonspeech tasks. Relationships between perceptual tasks and phonological processing measures were stronger and more consistent for speech than nonspeech stimuli. These results were independent of the presence of ADHD and suggest that children with RD have a deficit in phoneme perception that correlates with reading and phonological processing ability. (c) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).     

Measures of information processing in rapid automatized naming (RAN) and their relation to reading

The letters, numbers, and objects subtests of the Rapid Automatized Naming Tests (RAN) were given to 50 first- and second-grade students. Student performance on the three RAN subtests were audiotaped and subjected to postacquisition processing to distinguish articulation and interarticulation pause times. This study investigated (1) the relations between the articulation and pause durations associated with the 50 stimuli of each RAN subtest and (2) the relations between the pause and articulation latencies of the three RAN subtests and reading. For both first- and second-grade students, pause and articulation times for RAN letters and objects were not found to be reliably related, in contrast to RAN numbers articulation and pause durations. RAN subtest pause durations were differentially related to reading; however, articulation was rarely related to reading. The RAN letters pause time was the most robust predictor of decoding and reading comprehension, consistently predicting all first- and second-grade measures. Analysis supported the view that reading is predicted by speed of processing associated with letters, not general processing speed.     

Assessment of Reading and Learning Disabilities A Research-Based Intervention-Oriented Approach

Assessment practices for children with learning disabilities (LD) in reading are driven by the three primary components of the federal definition of LD: discrepancy, heterogeneity, and exclusion. This article reviews the implications of these three components for the assessment of children with reading disabilities and other forms of LD. We propose a rationale and procedures for more efficient approaches to the identification of children as learning disabled in reading or at-risk for these disabilities that are aligned with research on reading disabilities and other forms of LD. This approach emphasizes the assessment of academic skills and their components in an effort to develop intervention plans. Intelligence tests are not necessary for the identification of children as learning disabled and do not contribute to intervention planning.