Anne E. Fowler

Cognitive profiles of reading disability: Comparisons of discrepancy and low achievement definitions.

To examine the validity of distinguishing children with reading disabilities according to discrepancy and low-achievement definitions, we obtained four assessments of expected reading achievement and two assessments of actual reading achievement for 199 children, 7.5-9.5 years old. These assessments were used to subdivide the sample into discrepancy and low-achievement definitional groups who were compared on 9 cognitive variables related to reading proficiency. Results did not support the validity of discrepancy versus low achievement definitions. Although differences between children with impaired reading and children without impaired reading were large, differences between those children with impaired reading who met IQ-based discrepancy definitions and those who met low reading achievement definitions were small or not significant

Training Phonological Awareness: A Study with Inner-City Kindergarten Children.

A small-scale, longitudinal, phonological awareness training study with inner-city kindergarten children was conducted in four classrooms. The central goals of the study were the creation and evaluation of a phonological awareness training program and a preliminary look at the consequence of that training on basic phonological processes.Assessment of phonological awareness and basic phonological processes was carried out in the fall of the kindergarten year, and again in the spring following an 18 week training program which incorporated both auditory and articulatory techniques for fostering metaphonological development. Follow-up evaluation of promotion to first grade and of reading achievement took place a year later. The children in the two experimental classes receiving training had significantly greater gains in phonological awareness at the end of kindergarten, were significantly more likely to be promoted to first grade rather than to pre-one, and had a trend toward better reading skills in first grade than did the smaller group of children promoted to first grade from the control classes. In addition, there were some indications that development of phonological awareness was accompanied by changes in the underlying phonological system as well. Here we focus on the rationale and implementation of our training program and discuss the implications of the findings for a potential large-scale study.

The Relation of Utterance Length to Grammatical Complexity in Normal and Language-Disordered Groups.

Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes was examined as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) served as the measure of syntactic and morphological proficiency. For all groups, a strong curvilinear association between measures was found across the MLU range from 1.0 to about 4.5. Correlations were weaker when MLU exceeded 3.0 than during earlier stages of language development, however, confirming previous suggestions that MLU becomes less closely associated with grammatical development as linguistic proficiency increases. For the language-disordered groups, moreover, the curves relating the two measures differed from the curves for the normal preschoolers because MLU frequently overestimated actual IPSyn scores. The results are discussed with respect to the use of MLU in conjunction with other measures of syntactic complexity in the study of atypical language development.

Developmental shifts in the construction of verb meanings

This research focused on when and how the argument structure of verbs becomes fully established. To this end, 60 grade-schoolers were presented with 40 sentences to interpret; 16 of the sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was inconsistent with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g., *the tiger goes the lion). Previous work (Naigles, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1992) indicated that preschoolers faced with ungrammatical sentences will alter the usual meaning of the verbs to fit with the novel frames (so-called Frame Compliance, also referred to as Syntactic Bootstrapping), but adults faced with the same sentences alter the syntax in favor of the usual meaning of the verb (Verb Compliance). Here we sought to document the shift in progress, to determine whether such a change is a general developmental phenomenon, or whether it could be attributed to progress within the linguistic domain in syntax and/or in the verb lexicon. In our findings, grade-school children were still adept at deducing new verb meanings from new syntactic forms; however, this productivity declined in a steady fashion with age, with a corresponding increase in Verb Compliance. Furthermore, the pattern of the decline and increase suggested that some syntactic factors, but lexical factors in particular, exerted significant influence on when and how children shifted away from Frame Compliance.

Grammaticality Judgments and Reading Skill in Grade 2.

Do the language problems associated with reading disability extend to sentence-level knowledge? If so, how should these problems be characterized? In this study, second graders were presented with two different oral syntactic tasks, equivalent in grammatical complexity, but varying in the actual task demands placed upon the reader. In theJudgment task, subjects were asked to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences; in theCorrection task, subjects were asked to remedy violations of grammaticality. Performance on these sentence-level tasks was, in turn, examined in relation to reading scores, memory span, and metaphonological skill. The Judgment task revealed a wide range of ability among second-graders, and scores were systematically affected by the syntactic nature of the violation. However, performance on Judgment was not associated with reading ability or metaphonological skill, and scores were minimally affected by short-term memory factors. Mean scores on the Correction task were comparable to those achieved in the Judgment task and were also systematically affected by syntactic factors. However, performance on Correction was strongly associated with reading ability and metaphonological skill, and was greatly affected by short-term memory factors. These results suggest that reading disability does not reflect problems in basic syntactic knowledge. Instead, sentence-level problems that have been observed in less-skilled readers may be caused by the nonlinguistic processing demands of the syntactic measures typically employed.

The relation between first‐graders’ reading level and vowel production variability and presentation format: A temporal analysis

The purpose of this research is to determine if children with reading difficulties produce vowels with greater variability than children with normal reading ability. The vowels chosen for this study are /ɪ/, /e/, and /ae/, occurring in real and nonsense monosyllabic words. Our past research, examining spectral variability in vowels produced by first grade students as a function of whether they were reading words presented individually in random or blocked format, revealed no systematic effect of presentation format on variability [K. Baker, A. Fowler, and F. Bell‐Berti, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110, 2704 (2001)]. The purpose of this present study is to determine if good and poor readers differ in vowel duration variability. [Work supported by U.S. Dept. of Education, McNair Scholars Program.]

The relation between first‐graders’ reading level and vowel production variability in real and nonsense words: A temporal analysis

The focus of this study is to determine if children who are poor readers produce vowels with greater variability than children with normal reading ability, since earlier research has indicated possible links between phonological difficulty, speech production variation, and reading problems. In continuation of our past research [K. Lydtin, A. Fowler, and F. Bell‐Berti, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110, 2704 (2001)], where we looked at the spectral aspects of vowel production, we will report the results of our study of vowel duration and its variability in poor and good readers. The vowels chosen for this study are /ɪ/, /e/, and /ae/ in real and nonsense words occurring in both blocked and random presentation. [Work supported by U.S. Dept. of Education, McNair Scholars Program.]

The relation between first graders’ reading level and vowel‐production variability and presentation format

The purpose of this research is to determine if children with reading difficulties produce vowels with greater variability than children with normal reading ability. This study examines variability in vowels produced by first grade students as a function of whether they were reading words presented individually in random or blocked format or were naming pictures representing words within a story context. The vowels chosen for this study are /I/, e, and ae, occurring in real monosyllabic words. The specific focus of this research is variability of temporal and spectral aspects of vowel production: vowel duration and F1 and F2 frequency at vowel onset and at 50 ms intervals through the vowel. The results will be compared with spelling ability (a good measure of reading ability for first graders), to determine if good and poor readers differ in vowel production variability. The results will also be examined to determine if mode of presentation (picture or read word) influences production variability. [Work su...

The relation between reading level and vowel production variability in real and nonsense words

Past research has indicated possible links between phonological difficulty, speech production variation, and reading problems. This study examines the relations between spelling ability (a measure of reading ability for first graders), on the one hand, and the variability of vowel production, on the other, of poor and good readers in the first grade. The focus of this study was to examine the variability of vowel formant frequencies in real and nonsense words produced in random order by poor and good readers. The vowels chosen for this study are /ɪ/, /e/, and /ae/, occurring in real words (/bVt/) and nonsense (/bVp/) monosyllabic words. Vowel duration and F1 and F2 frequencies, at vowel onset and at 50‐ms intervals through the vowel, will be compared for the poor and good readers (spellers), to determine if the word‐status of read items affects production variability. [Work supported by U.S. Dept. of Education, McNair Scholars Program.]

Speech perception by less‐skilled readers

In the field of reading disability, the major finding of the last 25 years is that poor readers have difficulty attaining explicit awareness of the phonemic components of language. This insensitivity to the phonemic structure of words makes it correspondingly hard to master an alphabetic writing system representing those phonemes. An important question still under investigation is whether difficulty achieving phonemic awareness is entirely a metacognitive problem or whether it might stem from more basic deficits in perception. Using several paradigms (e.g., categorical perception tasks, speech perception in noise, word repetition), the research on this issue has generally supported two conclusions. First, less‐skilled readers apply similar strategies but do so less efficiently and/or less accurately than better readers. Second, these difficulties are restricted to the linguistic domain: less‐skilled readers perform as well as better readers on nonspeech control tasks. Current work is exploring the associa...