John R. Beech

The prelingually deaf young reader: A case of reliance on direct lexical access?

A comparison was made between prelingually deaf and hearing children matched on reading age (between 7:0 and 7:11 years) in order to examine possible differences in reading performance. The deaf children all had a severe or profound hearing loss and were receiving special education in either a school or a unit for the deaf. The experimental tasks used a lexical decision task involving the reading of single words. The employment of phonology in reading was investigated by comparing reading performance on regular and irregular words and by comparing reading of homophonic versus non-homophonic nonwords. Both tasks revealed that hearing participants were much more affected by regularity and homophony, suggesting a much greater reliance on assembled phonological recoding. These results are discussed in terms of deaf readers relying on lexical access for reading print.

Lexical and Nonlexical Routes A Comparison Between Normally Achieving and Poor Readers

This study investigated qualitative differences in poor readers relative to normally achieving readers of the same reading level. Thirty-eight 9-year-old poor readers and forty 7- and 8-year-old reading-age-matched normally achieving readers from the United Kingdom were matched in phonemic processing and then given tests of memory span and visual discrimination of letterlike characters, were required to read different word types (regular, exception, and pseudoword), and were asked to complete a homophonic pseudoword test. The poor readers were worse at reading pseudowords compared to the controls, but this difference was unrelated to phonemic length or number of letters, or to the ease of producing analogies for the pseudowords. The results suggest that although there are no differences with reading-age controls in phonological processing, poor readers have worse grapheme-phoneme conversion skills and greater reluctance to relinquish the lexical route when appropriate. The results also showed that poor readers were slightly better at visual discrimination but had poorer memory spans.

Attitudes Toward Health Risks and Sunbathing Behavior

Sunbathing confers the benefits of looking and feeling good but presents the long-term risk of skin cancer. In a disguised experiment exploring attitudes toward sunbathing by British adults, participants were asked to rate their willingness to take a hypothetical new drug (with different levels of risk) that would make them look and feel good. One aspect of the resulting risk profiles was significantly related to a positive attitude to open-air sunbathing but not to sunbed use, possibly because it was erroneously thought that using a sunbed is not risky. The well-established finding that women are more cautious was confirmed; the risk function for men was curvilinear, in contrast to women, who were willing to increase their risk linearly over their lifetime.

Training letter-to-sound connections: The efficacy of tracing

There is evidence that training letter-to-sound connections can be important for future reading development. The present study involved training letter-sound connections for two groups of prereaders equivalent in their IQ, knowledge of letters and age, to examine the importance of tracing letters in order to learn such connections. All children were trained individually. Each 15-minute training session was divided into three parts. In one 5-minute part of each session, the “Letter” group pronounced a letter shown on a computer and traced it on the screen with a pen, while the “Shape” group traced non-letter shapes. In the second 5-minute part, the Shape group named letters and watched them being traced while the other group watched the program tracing non-letter shapes. Thus both groups experienced the same letter-sound training and tracing activity, but only the Letter group experienced both in conjunction with each other. In the final 5-minute session both training groups received training in phonemic awareness training for 5 minutes. It was found that both groups improved significantly on a letter-to-sound test relative to a control group not receiving such training. However, only the Shape group significantly improved in a sound-to-letter test. It is concluded that tracing vertically on a computer screen does not appear to be advantageous for teaching letter-sound connections for this age range and can even be a distraction for learning sound-letter connections.

Grounds for Reconciliation : Some Preliminary Thoughts on Cognition and Action

Publisher Summary One of the major issues to emerge from recent perspectives on the nature of attention, memory and motor control, concerns the way in which cognitive processes interact with the motor system to produce planned coordinated action. Tasks vary in the amount of cognitive processing they require, and, within tasks, the stage of skill acquisition affect the nature of the processing that is undertaken. Adams has recently pointed out that theories of action have given little consideration to the ways in which perception and action are linked, and that little systematic knowledge of the relationship between language and action is present. The amount of control that can be exerted on lower-level motor processes by higher level cognitive processes should be of central concern in any account of the acquisition of skilled movement. This issue has been taken up by the action systems theorists. Their view, which has resulted from the influence of Bernstein, and the ecological approach of Turvey, Kugler, and collaborators, is that the acquisition of skilled movement occurs when movement structures are constrained to behave in a manner appropriate for the attainment of a particular goal. More specifically, ensembles of motor units (muscles, joints, etc.) are constrained to act as functional units or coordinative structures, thereby reducing the degrees of freedom that apply to the control of a given task, and provide the basic organization of movement.

USING A DICTIONARY: ITS INFLUENCE ON CHILDREN'S READING, SPELLING, AND PHONOLOGY

The developing use of a dictionary has the potential to provide self-teaching opportunities to improve reading, spelling and general phonological skills. Childrens dictionary use was examined in two studies to find out patterns of use, skill and frequency of use and the relationships between these and reading, spelling and phonological development. In the first study 39 poor readers were compared with two groups of average readers, one consisting of 39 younger average readers of the same reading age and the other group of 31 average readers matched by age. In the second study 241 children (7–11 years) were divided on the basis of being above or below 9 years in age to examine developmental change. In both studies levels of non-verbal IQ were controlled between groups. Tests of reading vocabulary, spelling, non-word reading and speed and accuracy in looking up words in a dictionary were given. Examining dictionary skills in poor readers showed that they were significantly slower and less accurate in looking up words in a dictionary than their age peers who were average readers. Patterns of dictionary use varied with age with younger readers being three times more likely to give first preference to using a dictionary to look up spellings, whereas older reader expressed a preference that was much more evenly divided between checking spelling and looking up for meaning. Poor readers were much closer to their age peers in pattern of use. Self-rated frequency of dictionary use correlated significantly with spelling skill only in the younger readers. Persuading younger children to use a dictionary more could develop their spelling skills, possibly by encouraging them to be more proactive.

Young Readers' Strategic Approaches to Reading Unfamiliar Words in Text

Children reported the strategies they used when identifying unfamiliar words while reading. Study 1 compared 39 poor readers (M age = 10 years, 7 months) with 2 groups of average readers, one of the same reading age (N = 39; M age = 8 years, 5 months) and the other (N = 31) matched on chronological age. Study 2 included 241 children aged 7 to 11 years divided into 2 age groups. Most children reported using an explicit phonological strategy when having difficulty reading, but many poorer readers do not have alternative strategies readily available apart from seeking help.

Effects of caffeine on functional asymmetry in a posner letter-recognition task

A Posner task was used to investigate whether caffeine, in common with other drugs, has an asymmetric effect on cerebral functioning. Subjects consumed decaffeinated coffee either with or without added caffeine at 2 mg/kg body weight. They were then required to identify letter-pairs as the same or different. Same was defined as two identical letters irrespective of case (AA, Aa); different was defined as two different letters irrespective of case (AB, Ab). Main effects of stimulus type were found for both accuracy and speed of response. In the noncaffeine condition pattern-matching was faster by the right hemisphere and phonologic matching was faster by the left hemisphere. These results replicate much previous work, but under caffeine, a previously unreported reversal in the balance of hemispheric processing efficiency was found. An explanation is offered in terms of the disruption of the normal, optimum, rate of cerebral processing for each hemisphere.

Parents' attitudes and the reading performance of their children.

A group of 60 children were given tests in reading performance, intelligence and personality while their parents were tested on personality, attitudes towards reading, and the frequency and duration of listening to their children reading. Factor analysis yielded two factors related to parental attitudes towards reading and their activities with their children as measured overtly and covertly, but these were not linked to the reading performance of the children. Instead, reading performance was linked to a morality variable in both the children and their parents. This suggested that there was a tendency for the poor readers and their parents to “fake good.” This might account for the lack of association between reading performance and parental attitudes and activity in reading.

A curvilinear relationship between hair loss and mental rotation and neuroticism : a possible influence of sustained dihydrotestosterone production

Hairline measurements and ratings of fathers hair loss were used in a multiple regression to predict hair loss in 181 males. This was hypothesised to measure the effects of cumulative dihydrotestosterone (DHT) on hairline. Participants were also given a test of mental rotation, and rated their own anger and neuroticism. They were then divided into five groups according to level of hair loss. Significant effects were found for mental rotation and neuroticism. Mental rotation was an inverted-U function of the extent of hair loss, indicating a curvilinear relationship between DHT and spatial cognition. Neuroticism also demonstrated an inverted U relationship, but this function was less clear visually and statistically. The self-rated measures of anger were not affected by DHT. One implication of the effect of mental rotation as a function of hair loss is that long-term high or low levels of DHT could impair spatial cognition in men.