Maggie Snowling

Words, nonwords, and phonological processes: Some comments on Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley

Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley (1991) present a reanalysis of some of their earlier data concerned with the relationship between nonword repetition and the development of vocabulary knowledge in young children. In the present article we outline some theoretical differences between ourselves and this group in the interpretation of nonword repetition and discuss how best these differences could be resolved.

Comprehension in “hyperlexic” readers

Mentally retarded children who can read aloud written words better than one would expect from their Mental Age are often called hyperlexic. The reading comprehension thought to be impaired in such children was investigated in four experiments. Mentally retarded advanced decoders, including autistic and nonautistic children, were compared with younger nonretarded children matched for Mental Age and Reading Age. Experiment 1 established that mildly mentally retarded readers could match sentences to pictures as well as could be expected from their verbal ability. This was the same whether they read the sentences or heard them. Experiment 2 demonstrated that only the more able retarded subjects, but not the less able ones, used sentence context in a normal way in order to pronounce homographs. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that these same more able children could extract meaning at both sentence and story level, and their performance was indistinguishable from that of normal controls. Hence, it is doubtful whether these advanced decoders should be called hyperlexic. In contrast, the readers of relatively low verbal ability performed much worse than their normal controls. Although they could be induced under certain conditions to read sentence-by-sentence rather than word-by-word, they did not do so spontaneously. Furthermore, they did not make use of already existing general knowledge in order to answer questions about the stories they had read. The ability to comprehend in terms of large units of meaning seems to be specifically impaired in these low verbal ability fluent readers. We suggest that it is this impairment that marks true hyperlexia. Since there were no differences between autistic and nonautistic readers on any of our tasks, we conclude that hyperlexia is not an autism-specific phenomenon.

Phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia—a developmental analysis

Abstract The present paper presents data from seven developmental dyslexics who exhibit the profile of abilities which can be described as “phonological” dyslexia. Three of the cases, all children, were of low reading age; four cases, one of which was an adult, had reading ages above ten years. Tests of reading, spelling and auditory processing revealed a range of phonological deficits amongst the dyslexics when they were compared with normal readers matched for RA. However, there were individual differences, and some cases were more prototypical than others. Variability within the dyslexic sample highlights difficulties for their classification as phonological dyslexics. It is argued that a more useful approach is to consider their difficulties within a developmental framework in which phonological deficits hinder and may alter the course of literacy development.

Visual Memory Deficits: A Plausible Cause of Developmental Dyslexia? Evidence from a Single Case Study

Abstract This paper presents the case of JAS, a developmental dyslexic who had largely resolved her reading problems as an undergraduate student. However, testing revealed that JAS had subtle reading deficits, having difficulty with low-frequency irregular words and with the comprehension of written homophones. In contrast, her phonological reading strategies were normal. JASs reading deficit was accompanied by serious spelling problems; she showed a marked tendency to spell phonologically, although with reference to some word-specific knowledge. JASs reading and spelling difficulties were accompanied by significant visual memory deficits although phonological processing was relatively good. It is argued that visual memory impairments have prevented JAS from establishing detailed orthographic representations in a lexical system. In the absence of these, the operation of the system for reading is faulty; for spelling, which requires die use of full orthographic cues, there are serious consequences.

SPELLING PERFORMANCE OF CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL VERBAL DYSPRAXIA

The ability of four children with developmental verbal dyspraxia to imitate, spell, read and copy regular single‐syllable words was investigated. The children were found to have more difficulty in spelling and reading these words than a group of children with normal speech who were matched for reading age. It is suggested that ‘dyspraxie’ children are subject to a phonetic spelling deficit which arises because of a difficulty in segmenting words at a speech‐sound level.

Barriers to literacy development in two cases of developmental verbal dyspraxia

Abstract Two cases of children with developmental verbal dyspraxia with dyslexic difficulties are presented. When first tested Michael was 10 years 7 months and Caroline was 11 years of age. At this time, their reading errors were primarily visual in nature and they were unable to read nonwords. Spelling was predominantly nonphonetic. Investigation of their auditory processing and segmentation skills showed pervasive deficits in the auditory modality. At follow-up 4 years later, although some progress had been made, the pattern of errors was similar. It is argued that their problems with phonological processing militated against the successful development of segmentation and blending skills and phonological reading and spelling strategies and that their limited literacy development consisted of the accumulation of word-specific knowledge.

Developmental changes in word recognition: An information-processing account

Two experiments examining developmental changes in the use of context in single word reading are reported. The first experiment investigated how effectively children can access conceptual knowledge and use this to help their word recognition. The results indicated that young readers can on demand direct their attention to semantic information, and this allows them to reap a relatively greater benefit from context than older more skilful readers. The second experiment attempted to clarify the way such use of contextual information might help in the specific case when a child attempts to decode a new word for the first time. Skilled and unskilled readers pronounced pseudohomophonic nonwords faster when they were primed by a semantic context, and the context effect was greater for unskilled readers. The nonwords graphemic similarity to a lexical item was also important. In general, the results were consistent with Stanovichs (1980) interactive-compensatory model of reading, and they suggest that in learning to read, several already existing stores of information (e.g. auditory, visual and conceptual) are integrated in order to achieve a solution to the word recognition problem.

Word recognition in developmental dyslexia: A connectionist interpretation

We present a study of the accuracy, consistency, and speed of word naming in a dyslexic boy, JM, who has severe impairments in the ability to use sub-lexical, phonological reading strategies. For words that he can recognise, JMs naming latencies do not differ from those of control subjects matched for reading age, and he is generally consistent from one occasion to the next. He can also match printed homophones with their definitions–-a skill that requires access to well-specified orthographic representations. The data are interpreted as evidence for the creation of efficient recognition devices for words within JMs sight vocabulary. However, he shows a continuing inability to use phonological decoding strategies to deal with words that he cannot recognize by sight. Overall we argue our results pose problems for stage models of reading development, and that they may best be interpreted within a connectionist framework of the development of word recognition skills.

Training Phoneme Blending Skills in Children with Down Syndrome.

This article reports the evaluation of a 6-week programme of teaching designed to support the development of phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome (DS). Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver the intervention to individual children in daily 10 –15-minute sessions, within a broader context of reading and language instruction. Ten children with Down syndrome (aged 6 years 11 months to 10 years 6 months) took part in the study; assessments of reading and phonological skills were completed at baseline, after an 8-week control period, and after 6-weeks of intervention. Children made significantly greater gains in phoneme blending skills and single word reading during the intervention period than in the control period. Thus, children with Down syndrome can make gains in blending skills, which may generalize to wider literacy skills, following targeted training over relatively short periods.

The ‘automatic’ use of context in children's reading

The present investigation examined developmental changes in the “automatic” use of context in single word recognition. A modified Stroop procedure was used in which children were asked to name the color of the ink of target words. The target was preceded either by a semantically related or by an unrelated word. Results suggested that, in contrast to “attentional” context effects (Pring and Snowling 1986), the older readers showed significantly more influence from the semantic context than the younger, less-proficient readers. The results are discussed with reference to the connections between a novice reading system and a childs rapidly growing semantic memory system.