Showing papers in "Reading and Writing in 1995"
TL;DR: The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies as mentioned in this paper, where 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonology awareness.
Abstract: The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies. Large sample sizes allowed for sensitive differentiation of constructs. In the first study, 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, syllable counting, initial-phoneme matching, initial-phoneme deletion, phoneme blending, and phoneme counting. Three basic components were extracted in a principal component analysis: a phoneme factor, a syllable factor and a rhyme factor. Cross-tabulations indicated considerable dissociation between performance on phoneme, syllable, and rhyme tasks. The structural relationships were replicated on a much larger sample (n=1509) in the second study. Subjects in this study were one year older and were attending grade 1 thus providing an opportunity to test their reading achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the phonemic factor was by far the most potent predictor. However, the rhyming factor made an independent (although small) contribution to explaining the reading variance. Among the phonemic tasks, phoneme identification proved to be the most powerful predictor.
345 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the nature of language, memory, and reading skills of bilingual students and determined the relationship between reading problems in English and reading problems on the Portuguese side.
Abstract: The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of language, memory, and reading skills of bilingual students and to determine the relationship between reading problems in English and reading problems in Portuguese. The study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 37 bilingual Portuguese-Canadian children, aged 9–12 years. English was their main instructional language and Portuguese was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program at school where they were taught to read and write Portuguese. The children were administered word and pseudoword reading, language, and working memory tasks in English and Portuguese. The majority of the children (67%) showed at least average proficiency in both languages. The children who had low reading scores in English also had significantly lower scores on the Portuguese tasks. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudoword reading, working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The Portuguese-Canadian children who were normally achieving readers did not differ from a comparison group of monolingual English speaking normally achieving readers except that the bilingual children had significantly lower scores on the English syntactic awareness task. The bilingual reading disabled children had similar scores to the monolingual reading disabled children on word reading and working memory but lower scores on the syntactic awareness task. However, the bilingual reading disabled children had significantlyhigher scores than the monolingual English speaking reading disabled children on the English pseudoword reading test and the English spelling task, perhaps reflecting a positive transfer from the more regular grapheme phoneme conversion rules of Portuguese. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of reading skills. In both English and Portuguese, reading difficulties appear to be strongly related to deficits in phonological processing.
210 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the contributions of naming speed measured on both serial-list and various discrete-trial formats to several reading subskills were examined longitudinally to determine their impact independent of other reading-related skills on reading disabilities.
Abstract: The contributions of naming speed measured on both serial-list and various discrete-trial formats to several reading subskills were examined longitudinally to determine their impact independent of other reading-related skills on reading disabilities. Tests of symbol naming speed, phonological awareness, vocabulary, memory span and coding speed were given to 38 poor and average readers when they were in Grades 2, 3 and 4. Grade 4 poor readers were discriminated from moderately poor or good readers on serial-list and discrete-trial naming speed tests in all grades. In addition, phonological awareness and vocabulary, but not memory span or coding speed, discriminated groups. These variables in Grade 2 contributed unique variance to reading scores in Grade 4 in differing patterns. Hypotheses about the nature of the reading — naming speed relationship are discussed.
188 citations
179 citations
TL;DR: In this article, reading and written spelling skills for words and non-words of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders, and the results showed that reading accuracy is significantly better than spelling.
Abstract: Reading and written spelling skills for words and non-words of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders. The regularity and transparency of the mapping between letters and phonemes make Italian orthography an unlikely candidate for discrepancies between reading and spelling to emerge. This notwithstanding, the results showed that reading accuracy is significantly better than spelling. The difference is particularly striking in first graders, but it is still evident in 2nd graders, though most strongly on non-words. The data show that reading and written spelling are non parallel processes and that the developmental asynchrony reflects a partial structural independence of the two systems.
114 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the relationship between phonological awareness (measured by tests of onset and rime, phonemic segmentation and phoneme deletion), verbal working memory and the development of reading and spelling.
Abstract: This paper describes a 2-year longitudinal study of 76 initially prereading children. The study examined the relationships between phonological awareness (measured by tests of onset and rime, phonemic segmentation and phoneme deletion), verbal working memory and the development of reading and spelling. Factor analyses showed that the verbal working memory tests which were administered loaded on two distinct but highly related factors, the first of which,simple repetition, involved the repetition of verbal items exactly as spoken by the experimenter, whereas the second,backwards repetition, involved repetition of items in reverse order. Factor analyses also showed that, whist the phonological awareness variables consistently loaded on the backwards repetition factor at the beginning and end of Grade 1, by Grade 2 the phonological awareness variables loaded on a separate factor which also included sentence repetition. Results of multiple regression analyses, with reading and spelling as a compound criterion variable, indicated that phonological awareness consistently predicted later reading and spelling even when both simple and backwards repetition were controlled. In contrast, verbal working memory did not consistently predict reading and spelling across testing times. Whilst there was some indication that verbal working memory, especially backwards repetition, measured during Grade 1 did predict reading and spelling in Grade 2, these effects were no longer evident when all three phonological variables were controlled. Nevertheless, with 4 individual reading and 2 individual spelling measures as the criterion variables, it was shown that phonological awareness was not quite such a consistent predictor of reading and spelling: it was most highly related to reading pseudowords and spelling real words; but it was not so highly related to spelling pseudowords, apparently because the processing demands of the task for the young children in the study were extremely high. Given the importance of verbal working memory for the completion of phonological awareness, reading and spelling tasks, in particular for spelling pseudowords, the findings are interpreted as providing some support for a theoretical position which posits that both phonological awareness and verbal working memory contribute to the early stages of literacy acquisition. Whilst the findings suggest some support for a general underlying phonological ability, there is also evidence that, as children learn to read and write, verbal working memory and phonological awareness become more differentiated.
111 citations
TL;DR: The authors showed that children with dyslexia performed significantly worse even than their reading age controls on sound categorization and phoneme deletion tasks, and that the dyslexic children performed worse than their normal peers.
Abstract: Three groups of children with dyslexia, with mean age 8, 13 and 17 years, together with three groups of normally achieving children matched for age and IQ with the dyslexic groups, undertook tests of sound categorization and phoneme deletion. The design allowed comparison not only across chronological age but also across reading age. The children with dyslexia performed significantly worse even than their reading age controls on both tasks. Indeed, overall performance of the 17 year old children with dyslexia was closest, but inferior, to that of the 8 year old controls. Since the sound categorization task was designed to minimize working memory load, the results extend previous findings on the phonological awareness deficits in dyslexia by dissociating the deficit from memory load and by showing that it persists at least into late adolescence.
91 citations
TL;DR: This article investigated the processes that deaf school children use for spelling and found that deaf children use phoneme-grapheme knowledge to learn to spell regular, morphological and opaque words.
Abstract: This study investigated the processes that deaf school children use for spelling. Hearing and deaf spellers of two age groups spelled three types of words differing in orthographic transparency (Regular, Morphological and Opaque words). In all groups, words that could be spelled on the basis of phoneme-grapheme knowledge (Regular words) were easier than words that could be spelled only on the basis of lexical orthographic information (Opaque words). Words in which spelling can be derived from morphological information were easier than Opaque words for older deaf and hearing subjects but not for younger subjects. In deaf children, use of phoneme-grapheme knowledge seems to develop with age, but only in those individuals who had intelligible speech. The presence of systematic misspellings indicates that the hearing-impaired youngsters rely upon inaccurate speech representations they derived mainly form lip-reading. The findings thus suggest that deaf subjects's spelling is based on an exploitation of the linguistic regularities represented in the French alphabetic orthography, but that this exploitation is limited by the vagueness of their representations of oral language. These findings are discussed in the light of current developmental models of spelling acquisition.
88 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigated the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography and found that the co-occurrence of spatial and phonological confusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurred without the other.
Abstract: Growth of word reading skills was examined in first and second year Italian school children by analysis of the pattern of reading errors. The study was designed to investigate the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography. The selection of reading material was tailored to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. The results showed that, in Italian as in English, spatially-related errors (such as confusingb andd) constituted a minor proportion of the total errors. Errors on vowel and consonant letters that are not spatially confusable accounted for the greater proportion of the total. Moreover, the co-occurrence of spatial and phonological confusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurred without the other. Vowel position in the syllable had no systematic effect on errors. In beginning readers of Italian, consonant errors outnumbered vowel errors by a wide margin; the reverse pattern was found in previous studies on English-speaking children at the same level of schooling. It is proposed that differences between Italian and English in the phonological structure of the lexicon and in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences account in large part for the differences in quantity and distribution of the errors.
58 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the development of reading and spelling procedures in Portuguese speaking children from 1st to 4th grade and discuss whether the developmental models of Frith, Seymour and Stuart & Coltheart may account for this development.
Abstract: This paper describes the development of reading and spelling procedures in Portuguese speaking children from 1st to 4th grade and discusses whether the developmental models of Frith, Seymour and Stuart & Coltheart may account for this development. This study is based on reaction time and error measurements of the reading and spelling of isolated words and pseudowords. The words varied in frequency, length and spelling-to-sound-regularity and the non-words varied only in length and spelling-to-sound regularity. The results indicated that the children tested did not pass through a logographic stage and that their reading and spelling initially involved a non-lexical process which from the beginning was influenced by a developing lexical process (that became progressively more important as development progressed), suggesting the use of overlapping processes. This finding contradicts Frith's strictly sequential theory but not Seymour's model, which allows for concurrent development of processes. Despite the fact that the present data do not fit into the definition of Seymour's orthographic stage, there were indications of a shift from the alphabetic to the orthographic stage and also that the process of lexicalization occurs more rapidly in reading than in spelling. Another finding was that the dual-process reading/spelling model, developed in English, can be extended to Portuguese.
52 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigated the role of phonological mediation in the development of reading and spelling skills in French first graders, and concluded that phonological mediators played a major role at the beginning of reading/spell acquisition.
Abstract: This study was aimed at investigating the development of reading and spelling skills in French. First graders were tested twice (in February and in June). Phonological mediation was expected to play a major role at the beginning of reading and spelling acquisition, and thus a regularity effect was predicted. Under the assumption that alphabetical processing is primarily sequential, i.e. letter by letter, a complexity effect was predicted as well. In other words, subjects would read and spell words containing one-letter graphemes more accurately than words containing multi-letter graphemes. Further, processing was assumed to be strictly alphabetical at the beginning of acquisition, no frequency effect was expected. Overall, the role of phonological mediation is confirmed. A complexity effect testifying to sequential alphabetic processing was observed for spelling but not for reading. The hypothesis of a strict reliance on alphabetical processing is not confirmed since a frequency effect was observed in both reading and spelling. These findings are discussed in the light of the Frith, Morton, and Seymour models.
TL;DR: In this article, the development of word reading and word spelling was examined in French speaking children initially instructed either by a phonic or a whole-word method, and the results showed that in both curricula, reading and spelling acquisition can be characterized by a parallel increase in the use of sub-lexical correspondences and in the reliance on word-specific information.
Abstract: The development of word reading and word spelling was examined in French speaking children initially instructed either by a phonic or a whole-word method. Second, fourth and sixth graders were administered to reading and spelling tests in which grapho-phonological regularity, frequency, length and lexicality were manipulated. The results showed that in both curricula, reading and spelling acquisition can be characterized by a parallel increase in the use of sub-lexical correspondences and in the reliance on word-specific information. Contrary to a simple view of lexical development according to which the use of analytical knowledge and the use of word-specific knowledge correspond to two different cognitive processes that develop independently from each other, whole-word children did not appear to rely more on whole-word knowledge. On the contrary, and paradoxically, grade 2 whole-word children tended to use analytical correspondences to a greater extent than their peers. In later development, reading matched phonic and whole-word groups did not differ from each other. It is argued that the results support the hypothesis that the acquisition of sub-lexical correspondences constitutes a necessary step in the acquisition of reading and spelling. We conclude that the analytic comparison of different curricula provides a naturalistic tool for the study of the dynamics of development.
TL;DR: The authors examined in the biscriptal Japanese orthography if phonological processing may accompany accurate and rapid visual recognition of single kanji characters according to their semantic or phonetic constituent elements, and high and low-frequency katakana words.
Abstract: The study examined in the biscriptal Japanese orthography if phonological processing may accompany accurate and rapid visual recognition of single kanji characters according to their semantic or phonetic constituent elements, and high- and low-frequency katakana words. The subjects consisted of 108 grades 4, 5, and 6 Japanese children dichotomized into skilled and less skilled readers. The concurrent articulation interference paradigm was used while the subjects were making the lexicality decisions. The results suggest that visual-phonetic recoding may be possible in accessing difficult kanji characters with phonetic elements; and that phonological processing may vary according to the frequency of the katakana words. Further, younger children and less skilled readers are less efficient in their maintenance of the phonological code in processing the kanji and kana lexical items.
TL;DR: In this paper, several phonemic awareness measures were administered to two children with hyperlexia and one child with above average word identification skills who started to read words at a very early age.
Abstract: Children with hyperlexia who learn to read spontaneously before the age of five are impaired in reading and listening comprehension but have been found to have word recognition skills well above their measured cognitive and linguistic abilities. Even though many reports have been published about these children, to date, only one study has investigated whether children with hyperlexia also have strong phonemic awareness skill. In the present study, several phonemic awareness measures were administered to two children with hyperlexia and one child with above average word identification skills who started to read words at a very early age. The results show that all three childrens' levels of phonemic awareness were low and not commensurate with their word reading skill. Wide inter- and intra-individual variations were found on all of the phonemic awareness measures. These findings pose a number of questions for researchers investigating the condition of hyperlexia.
TL;DR: The first Danish study of adult reading skills as mentioned in this paper found that three percent of the participants were found to have severe functional reading difficulties and a further 9 percent to have moderate difficulties, and the rate of poor readers was about four times higher among persons with low income than among others.
Abstract: In this first Danish study of adult reading skills, 1124 adults between 18 and 67 years of age participated in an interview about reading habits and skills, and 445 were tested individually at home using six common texts. Great care was taken to ascertain that subjects were representative of the whole adult population and that the texts covered most types of everyday reading. Three percent of the participants were found to have severe functional reading difficulties and a further 9 percent to have moderate difficulties. Regression analyses found several unique predictors of reading difficulties: age (adults over 45 years reading more poorly than younger adults), limited basic education, no vocational training nor higher education, and a small amount of reading needed at work. The rate of poor readers was about four times higher among persons with low income than among others. Men and women read equally well although men tended to rate themselves lower as readers than women did. Methodological issues and some educational implications are discussed.
TL;DR: The use and development of analogical processes in learning to read in Spanish are presented in this paper, where the results show that children of 6 years old show analogical effects in reading pseudowords and that the magnitude of this effect is the same as with 10 years old children.
Abstract: The use and development of analogical processes in learning to read in Spanish are presented. In the first experiment, the results show that children of 6 years old show analogical effects in reading pseudowords and that the magnitude of this effect is the same as with 10 years old children. However, it is found that children of 10 years old make many lexicalizations when reading pseudowords (about 50% of the items). In experiment 2 this finding is further analyzed. The results show that 9 years old children make more lexicalizations than adult control subjects do. It is suggested that the development of analogical procedures is a fast process (6 years old children already have done it), but that the precise control of lexical information over perceptual one is a later process.
TL;DR: The most important cognitive models of alphabetic literacy acquisition, like those proposed by Uta Frith and Philip Seymour (cf. Frith 1985, and Seymour & Elder 1986), are presented as models of the way alphabetic orthographies in general are learned even though they are inspired by the study of the acquisition of a single orthography, needless to specify it, the English one.
Abstract: The most important cognitive models of alphabetic literacy acquisition, like those proposed by Uta Frith and Philip Seymour (cf. Frith 1985, and Seymour & Elder 1986), are presented as models of the way alphabetic orthographies in general are learned even though they are inspired by the study of the acquisition of a single orthography, needless to specify it, the English one. Indeed, it is not the fault of scholars working in English-speaking countries if the cognitive psycholinguistics of the written language has been much less pushed on in the other countries. However, everybody admits that it is important to check how and to what extent the orthographic peculiarities of alphabetic languages influence the course of literacy acquisition. Why could or should orthography-related differences in literacy acquisition arise? English presents a relatively opaque system: there are many alternatives to spell phonemes and many ways of sounding out graphemes, and, in addition, many of the correspondences cannot be predicted from contextdependent graphophonological rules. Other languages present a much higher degree of orthographic transparency, either in one conversion direction (from spelling to sound or from sound to spelling) or in both directions. Literacy onset in languages having a highly transparent orthography might exhibit a much more precocious and systematic use of phonological decoding than is the case in English. Besides, some characteristics of the spoken language, like complexity of the syllabic structure (for example, clusters of two and three consonants at the onset and offset of the syllable) and number of vowels, might also influence the acquisition of the corresponding written language. English presents both a high number of vowels and of complex syllabic structures. These two characteristics of the language might not encourage or facilitate the resort to phonological transcoding in reading and writing. Compared to English, access to phonological transcoding might thus be easier for languages having either a small number of vowels or relatively simple phonological structures or both. Recently, Wimmer & Goswami (1994) compared reading acquisition in English and German. In German, the mapping between graphemes and phonemes is largely consistent. The results of this study suggest a much more
TL;DR: In this article, a psychoeducational battery was used to diagnose dyslexia in adults with a three generation family history of dyslexias and a strong personal history of reading/spelling problems, and the results showed that males were disproportionately represented in the dyslexic sample although they exhibited a more severe profile of reading impairment relative to females.
Abstract: Thirty seven adults with a three generation family history of dyslexia and a strong personal history of reading/spelling problems were administered a psychoeducational battery to confirm the diagnosis of dyslexia. Males were not disproportionately represented in the dyslexic sample although they exhibited a more severe profile of reading impairment relative to females. Severity of dyslexia is discussed as a possible mechanism of the reported higher prevalence of dyslexia among males.
TL;DR: For example, this paper found that adolescents previously diagnosed as dyslexic/reading disabled had markedly lower IQ scores on the newly standardized Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) than on the earlier administered WISC-R. The adolescents did not show a significant decline in standard scores from the Wide Range Achievement Test (Level I to Level II).
Abstract: Adolescents (n=43) previously diagnosed as dyslexic/reading disabled had markedly lower IQ scores on the newly standardized Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) than on the earlier administered WISC-R. The declines for Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs were 10, 12, and 11 points, respectively, which were twice as great as in a subset of the standardization sample given both versions of the WISC. The adolescents did not show a significant decline in standard scores from the Wide Range Achievement Test (Level I to Level II). However, only two subjects had current reading and spelling standard scores above the 25th percentile. The impact of lower WISC-III IQs on guidelines for classification of students as learning disabled is discussed.
TL;DR: In this paper, the relationship between anagram solving and reading aloud proficiency was studied in Italian and French 6th grade children, and a statistically significant relation was found in Italian, but the link was not so direct in French.
Abstract: The relationship between anagram solving and reading aloud proficiency was studied in Italian and French 6th grade children. Whereas a statistically significant relation was found in Italian, the link was not so direct in French. French children's ability in solving anagram problems seemed to benefit from their capacity in recognising written word-forms (lexical decision) and using the direct lexicat reading route. Statistical properties concerning texical entries appeared to be in an intermediate stage of computation. It is thus concluded that anagram solving may highlight some developmental stages and processing strategies in the acquisition and elaboration of written language.
TL;DR: This article found that poor readers not only have phonological processing problems, but also have difficulties at the orthographic processing level when comparing the singular and plural of nouns, particularly when pseudowords were presented.
Abstract: In two reading level design experiments, matched groups of normal and poor readers were compared with regard to their use of phonological and orthographic information. Experiment 1 used a semantic decision task similar to the task described in the study of Jarvella & Snodgrass (1974). Experiment 1 was aimed to assess the way normal and poor readers, matched on reading level, automatically process phonological and orthographic incongruencies when comparing the singular and plural of nouns. Experiment 2 investigated the automatized processing of uppercase-lowercase letter incongruencies in a same-different task using words and pseudowords. It assessed the role of letter feature cues involved in the initial identification process. Experiment 1 demonstrated that poor readers needed more time for evaluating phonologically incongruent word pairs. No independent effect of orthographic incongruency was found. Experiment 2 showed that, if compared with reading age matched normals, poor readers had more problems with evaluating uppercase-lowercase incongruencies. This orthographic processing problem was particularly prominent when pseudowords were presented. It is concluded that poor readers not only have phonological processing problems, but also have difficulties at the orthographic processing level.