David L. Share

Phonological recoding and reading acquisition.

Phonological recoding is commonly viewed as a back-up mechanism when word identification using the visual pathway fails. A second more important role for phonological recoding is as a self-teaching mechanism by which the child learns to identify words visually. Although phonological recoding may play a minor role in skilled adult reading, it plays a critical role in helping the child become a skilled reader. This article reviews the evidence relevant to these issues. The first section examines evidence on the role of phonological recoding in the development of word identification skills and reading comprehension. The next section reviews evidence showing that children with reading disabilities often have deficits in basic phonological processing skills. The third section deals with the nature of the reading problem in such children which, it is argued, is consistent with the proposed developmental analysis of the importance of phonological recoding in learning to read. The article concludes with a discussion of the teaching implications of these conclusions.

Evidence for Superior Orthographic Skills in Dyslexics

The purpose of this study was to assess the development of both phonological and orthographic skills in normally achieving and dyslexic readers The subjects were 257 dyslexic and 342 normally achieving readers, matched at eight reading levels They were administered the Woodcock (1987) Word Attack Subtest, a measure of phonological skills requiring the reading of pseudowords, and an orthographic awareness task designed to measure awareness of the properties of English words and the probable sequences and positions of letters within words The dyslexics had significantly higher scores than the normally achieving readers on the orthographic awareness task However, the normally achieving readers had significantly higher scores on the Word Attack Subtest Therefore, the difficulties with phonological processing and the increased orthographic awareness of the dyslexics may indicate a reading strategy that relies more on the visual than the phonological features of words

Orthographic Learning during Reading: Examining the Role of Self-Teaching.

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition. The degree of orthographic learning was assessed with three converging tasks: homophonic choice, spelling, and target naming. Each of the tasks indicated that orthographic learning had taken place because processing of target homophones (e.g., yait) was superior to that of their homophonic controls (e.g., yate). Consistent with the self-teaching hypothesis, we obtained a substantial correlation (r=.52) between orthographic learning and the number of target homophones correctly decoded during story reading. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that neither RAN tasks nor general cognitive ability predicted variance in orthographic learning once the number of target homophones correctly decoded during story reading had been partialed out. In contrast, a measure of orthographic knowledge predicted variance in orthographic learning once the number of targets correctly decoded had been partialed. The development of orthographic knowledge appears to be not entirely parasitic on decoding ability. (c) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

Attention Deficit Disorder-Hyperactivity and Academic Failure: Which Comes First and What Should Be Treated?

Evidence on the relationship between attention deficit disorder-hyperactivity (ADDH) and learning difficulties is reviewed in the light of: (1) the degree of overlap between the two disorders, (2) possible causal directions between the two, and (3) the appropriate focus of treatment. The evidence suggests a substantial overlap in prevalence between the two types of disorder and that there is no qualitatively distinct pattern of cognitive deficits associated with each disorder. Furthermore, what longitudinal data there are suggest that learning difficulties lead to ADDH rather than the reverse. Finally, the appropriate focus of treatment would seem to be the learning difficulties of the child with ADDH. The authors recommend more longitudinal research on the relationship between ADDH and learning difficulties, particularly in terms of the potential behavioral effects of treating learning difficulties.

Word recognition and basic cognitive processes among reading-disabled and normal readers in Arabic

This study investigated word identification inArabic and basic cognitive processes inreading-disabled (RD) and normal readers of thesame chronological age, and in younger normalreaders at the same reading level. The studyfocused on the word identification processes ofphonological decoding and orthographicprocessing and the cognitive processes ofsyntactic and morphological awareness, workingmemory, and visual processing. RD children werecompared with normal readers on a battery oftests developed in Arabic on the basis of thoseavailable in English and Hebrew. The presentresults revealed deficiencies among the RD childrenin phonological decoding, in contrast torelative strengths in orthographic processing. These data were consistent with English-languagefindings. The analysis of basiccognitive processes indicated significantdeficiencies in morphology, working memory, andsyntactic and visual processing, with the mostsevere deficiencies observed for phonologicalawareness. The results are discussed in lightof international RD findings and the nature ofArabic orthography.

Temporal Processing and Reading Disability.

The present investigation examined thehypothesis that early auditory temporalprocessing deficits cause later specificreading disability by impairing phonologicalprocessing (Farmer & Klein 1995; Tallal1980, 1984). Temporal processing ability atschool entry was examined using TallalsRepetition Test in a large unselected sample ofover 500 children followed over subsequentyears. Although our data confirmed the presenceof certain non-speech auditory processingdeficits in children later classified asspecific reading-disabled, many findings wereclearly at odds with a causal interpretation ofthis relationship. (1) Reading-disabled (RD)children were impaired at school entry on thesubtest with long interstimulus intervals(ISIs) but not the critical short-ISIsubtest. (2) RD children were not inferior toreading-age (RA) controls. (3) A subgroup of RDchildren with evidence of temporal deficitswere no less proficient on later phonologicalor reading measures than RD children with noevidence of early temporal impairment. (4)Although there was a reliable concurrentcorrelation between temporal deficits andphonological awareness at school entry(suggesting a possible common causeexplanation), early temporal deficits did notpredict later phonological impairment,pseudoword processing difficulties, or specificreading disability. On the other hand, earlytemporal deficits did predict later oralreceptive vocabulary and reading comprehensionweaknesses. These findings suggest thatauditory temporal deficits in dyslexics may beassociated with the same dysphasic-typesymptoms observed by Tallal and her colleaguesin specific language-impaired populations, butdo not cause the core phonological deficitsthat characterize dyslexic groups.

Orthographic learning, phonological recoding, and self-teaching.

Publisher Summary A good deal has been learned about the basic parameters of orthographic learning, but many researchers in this field have observed that less is known about how this learning comes about. The orthographic learning function needs to be systematically mapped for both normal and disabled readers. Most studies to date have understandably used a small number of selected points on the learning curve, and although more exposures tend to elicit stronger outcomes, only a comprehensive mapping effort can determine whether orthographic learning adheres to the standard power function common to a wide variety of skill learning.

Cognitive antecedents of early reading ability: A test of the modularity hypothesis.

This study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive antecedents of word recognition are uniquely domain-specific and unrelated to higher-order domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis was evaluated in a longitudinal study of 349 Hebrew-speaking children (mean age: 6.0 years) who were tested on a battery of domain-specific (phonological awareness, phonological memory, visual-orthographic processing, and early literacy) and domain-general tasks (general intelligence, higher-order reasoning, and language) at the end of kindergarten. Word recognition and reading comprehension were assessed at the end of Grade 1. Whereas the kindergarten domain-specific measures accounted for significant and substantial variance in word recognition (33%), the domain-general measures explained only 5% of the variance. Furthermore, the contribution of domain-specific variables to word recognition remained unaltered even after controlling for all domain-general and higher-order language tasks. Reading comprehension, in contrast, was predicted by both print-specific skills (51%) and domain-general abilities (44%). These findings strongly support the notion of word recognition modularity in a well-encapsulated orthography.

IQ and Reading Progress: A Test of the Capacity Notion of IQ

Concepts such as developmental reading disorder and dyslexia have been used to refer to children whose actual reading achievement is substantially below that predicted by performance on IQ tests. Such diagnostic concepts assume that IQ sets a limit on either the level of achievement or the rate of progress of which a child is capable. This assumption was investigated in a longitudinal study of an unselected cohort of 741 children whose reading achievement was assessed at ages 7, 9, 11, and 13 years. Findings on rates of progress and levels of achievement clearly indicate that IQ does not set a limit on reading progress, even in extreme low IQ children. Thus, the use of IQ tests to determine achievement potential in reading appears unwarranted.

Orthographic Learning during Oral and Silent Reading.

This study examined orthographic learning in oral and silent reading conditions. Dutch third graders read, either aloud or silently, short texts containing novel target (pseudo) words. The acquisition of new word-specific orthographic knowledge was assessed several days later by comparing target spellings with homophonic spellings in tasks requiring orthographic choice, spelling, and naming. It was predicted that orthographic learning would be evident in both oral and silent conditions but stronger in the oral condition. As expected, orthographic learning was evident in both oral and silent conditions. This finding suggests that support for the self-teaching hypothesis of orthographic learning obtained in studies of unassisted oral reading can be generalized to the more common form of independent reading: silent reading. In addition, the results on the naming task provided some evidence for stronger orthographic learning during oral reading, but the two spelling tasks did not.