Brian Byrne

Evaluation of a program to teach phonemic awareness to young children: A 1-year follow-up.

A follow-up of a study evaluating a program to teach young children about phonemic structure is reported. In the original study (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991 a), preschoolers were trained with the program for 12 weeks and gained in phonemic awareness and knowledge of the alphabetic principle as compared with a control group. The children were retested at the end of kindergarten on phonemic awareness, word identification, decoding, and spelling. Children who entered school with advanced levels of phonemic awareness scored significantly higher on each of the measures. Alphabetic knowledge predicted literacy development, but phonemic awareness accounted for significant additional variance in decoding and spelling. Verbal intelligence did not influence reading and spelling performance

Effects of Preschool Phoneme Identity Training after Six Years: Outcome Level Distinguished from Rate of Response.

Grade 5 children who had been trained in phoneme identity 6 years earlier in preschool were superior to untrained controls on irregular word reading; on a composite list of nonwords, regular words, and irregular words; and on a separate nonword test. Some of the trained children had become poor readers by Grade 5. These poor readers had made slow progress in achieving phonemic awareness in preschool even though they were eventually successful. In general, the rate at which trained children achieved phonemic awareness in preschool accounted for variance in school literacy progress in addition to that accounted for by the actual level of phonemic awareness achieved. Preschool instruction in phonemic structure had modest but detectable effects on later reading skill, but children who were slow to achieve phonemic awareness tended to be hampered in later reading growth.

Acquiring the Alphabetic Principle: A Case for Teaching Recognition of Phoneme Identity.

Studied how two components of phonemic awareness recognition of phenomene identity across words and recognition of phonemic segmentation within words, influence acquisition of the alphabetic principle in preliterate children

Assessment and Early Instruction of Preschool Children at Risk for Reading Disability.

Preschool children at familial risk for reading disability were assessed on cognitive and linguistic variables and compared with preschoolers without familial risk. Risk children displayed performance profiles resembling those of older children with reading disability. Each group received intensive instruction in phonemic awareness and structured book reading. Instructed risk children made somewhat smaller gains than the nonrisk and required more teaching sessions to reach criterion. Rhyme and phoneme awareness predicted instruction outcome levels, and vocabulary and verbal short-term memory predicted number of teaching sessions to criterion. In kindergarten, the nonrisk group outperformed the risk group on reading and spelling, although the risk group reached grade-appropriate levels. At-risk children can be helped by appropriate preschool instruction, but they require more sustained teaching than nonrisk preschoolers.

Semantic and phonetic memory codes in beginning readers

In two experiments a group (N=15) of poor beginning readers and of good readers (N=15) were auditorily presented with continuous item lists. The children were asked to indicate whether each item had occurred previously in the list. In Experiment 1, using real words, later items were related either semantically or as rhymes to earlier ones. False positives to each item type were taken as indices of memory coding and showed that good readers encoded both semantic and surface aspects of items. In contrast, poor readers made a large number of meaning-based confusions (saying “old” tohouse whenhome had been presented earlier) but almost none based on rhyme (home/comb confusions). In a second experiment, with phonetically legal nonwords as items, poor readers made a significant number of phonetic false positives, although the good reader controls made more. The results are interpreted as confirming that poor readers are relatively insensitive to surface features of language but that this weakness is most marked when sound and meaning are both available as memory codes.

Deficient syntactic control in poor readers: Is a weak phonetic memory code responsible?

Groups of good and poor readers at second-grade level were tested for comprehension of adjectival constructions of the John is eager/easy to please types and of center-embedded relative clause constructions. The poor readers were inferior to good readers in understanding O-type adjectives ( easy ) but not S-type ( eager ). As well, they were poorer at comprehending embedded sentences, but only when the sentences described improbable events, ones which reversed the normal subject/object roles. When either noun could, on pragmatic grounds, assume either role, both groups fared equally well. The results are interpreted as casting doubt on recent assertions that deficient use of a phonetic memory code underlies the syntactic inferiority often seen in poor readers. A more pervasive linguistic immaturity is suggested as being involved.

Autobiographical memory and perceptual learning: a developmental study using picture recognition, naming latency, and perceptual identification.

In this paper, we report four experiments aimed at extending the distinction between recognition memory and perceptual memory introduced by Jacoby and Dallas (1981). In Experiment 1, we show that dissociation of the two types of memory can be demonstrated with pictures as stimuli and with naming latency and recognition scores as responses. The depth-of-processing manipulation affects recognition but not naming, whereas both are influenced by prior exposure. Experiment 2 is a replication of the naming procedure, with a smaller set of stimuli and instructions emphasizing speed. Experiments 3 and 4 extend the paradigm to include children from 5 to 10 years old. Experiment 3 demonstrates the usual effect of depth of processing on recognition, but, in contrast to the adult data of Experiment 1, there is an analogous effect upon subsequent naming latencies. Examination of the data suggests this may be a spurious result. If not, it means either that the two memory types are not independent in children or that the “deep” subjects were implicitly naming during encoding. In Experiment 4, we test perceptual memory directly, replacing naming latency with tachistoscopic recognition. This results only in an effect of prior exposure, and not depth of processing. The results support the idea that perceptual memory is distinguishable from recognition memory, and that it is developmentally stable.

Individual Prediction of Dyslexia by Single Versus Multiple Deficit Models

The overall goals of this study were to test single versus multiple cognitive deficit models of dyslexia (reading disability) at the level of individual cases and to determine the clinical utility of these models for prediction and diagnosis of dyslexia. To accomplish these goals, we tested five cognitive models of dyslexia--two single-deficit models, two multiple-deficit models, and one hybrid model--in two large population-based samples, one cross-sectional (Colorado Learning Disability Research Center) and one longitudinal (International longitudinal Twin Study). The cognitive deficits included in these cognitive models were in phonological awareness, language skill, and processing speed and/or naming speed. To determine whether an individual case fit one of these models, we used two methods: 1) the presence or absence of the predicted cognitive deficits, and 2) whether the individuals level of reading skill best fit the regression equation with the relevant cognitive predictors (i.e., whether their reading skill was proportional to those cognitive predictors.) We found that roughly equal proportions of cases met both tests of model fit for the multiple deficit models (30-36%) and single deficit models (24-28%); hence, the hybrid model provided the best overall fit to the data. The remaining roughly 40% of cases in each sample lacked the deficit or deficits that corresponded with their best-fitting regression model. We discuss the clinical implications of these results for both diagnosis of school-age children and preschool prediction of children at risk for dyslexia.

Longitudinal Twin Study of Early Literacy Development: Preschool and Kindergarten Phases.

We conducted behavior–genetic analyses of kindergarten reading, spelling, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and spoken sentence processing in 172 pairs of monozygotic and 153 pairs of same-sex dizygotic twin kindergarten children sampled in the United States and Australia. We also modeled progress from preschool to kindergarten in literacy-related variables, with larger numbers of twins contributing to the preschool phase. Reading, phonological awareness, and rapid naming at kindergarten showed substantial effects of genes and modest effects of shared environment; spelling was influenced by genes and environment equally; and sentence processing was affected primarily by shared environment. Longitudinal analyses indicated that the same genes affect phonological awareness in preschool and kindergarten but that a new genetic factor comes into play in rapid naming as letters and digits are introduced in kindergarten. At preschool, print knowledge and phonological awareness share one source of genetic influence, which in turn affects reading and spelling in kindergarten. Phonological awareness is subject to a second genetic factor, but only the one it shares with print also influences kindergarten reading and spelling. In contrast to the genetic effects, a single source of shared environment affects preschool print knowledge and phonological awareness and kindergarten reading. The results are discussed in the context of theoretical and practical issues in literacy development.

Phonological awareness in reading‐disabled adults

Abstract Two groups of reading disabled adults, distinguished in terms of degree of reading retardation, were assessed on a variety of surface metalinguistic skills, and compared to able readers. The disabled groups showed deficiencies in; reading non-words, phoneme reversal in simple words, phonetic encoding of spoken words in a continuous recognition task, and serial recall of words. They were no worse than controls in phonetic encoding of non-words in continuous recognition and in the effects of acoustic confusion on serial recall. Overall the results suggest a lack of sensitivity to surface features of language, combined with the potential to focus on sound when item characteristics and task demands invite such focus. The picture of metalinguistic processes in these subjects is very similar to that found in children with reading problems, indicating that reading ability and metalinguistic skills are non-independent over a substantial developmental period.