Mikko Aro

Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies.

Several previous studies have suggested that basic decoding skills may develop less effectively in English than in some other European orthographies. The origins of this effect in the early (foundation) phase of reading acquisition are investigated through assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple nonword reading in English and 12 other orthographies. The results confirm that children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English. The effects appear not to be attributable to differences in age of starting or letter knowledge. It is argued that fundamental linguistic differences in syllabic complexity and orthographic depth are responsible. Syllabic complexity selectively affects decoding, whereas orthographic depth affects both word reading and nonword reading. The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow as in the shallow orthographies. It is hypothesized that the deeper orthographies induce the implementation of a dual (logographic + alphabetic) foundation which takes more than twice as long to establish as the single foundation required for the learning of a shallow orthography.

Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The results highlight the need for a revision of English-based characterizations of reading development. The present study is an extension of Wimmer and Goswami’s (1994) comparative study of reading development in young English and German children. The main finding of Wimmer and Goswami was that 7-, 8-, and 9-year old English children had substantially more difficulties in a pseudoword reading task than German children did. Landerl’s (2000) replication supported Wimmer and Goswami’s (1994) findings: in comparison to English children, young German readers in first and second grade displayed a distinct advantage in their ability to read pseudowords with a high degree of accuracy. Another recent replication with a comparison of Spanish and Portuguese children was reported by Defior, Martos, and Cary (2002). Their results show that the pseudoword reading accuracy of Spanish and Portuguese children is relatively similar to the performance of German children and much better than that reported for English children in the aforementioned studies.

Heterogeneity in adult dyslexic readers: Relating processing skills to the speed and accuracy of oral text reading ∗

Subgroups of Finnish dyslexic adults (N = 84)displaying, relative to each other, a distinctivecombination of accuracy and speed of oral text readingwere compared in phonological and orthographicprocessing, verbal short-term memory and readinghabits. Inaccurate phonological decoding appeared todetermine the number of errors made in text reading,while inability to utilize effectively rapid lexicalaccess of words manifested as slow text reading speed.Phonological and orthographic word recognitionprocesses were less tightly integrated among dyslexicthan normal readers. Our results indicate thatadvanced orthographic processing skills might help anumber of the dyslexic readers to compensate for theirserious phonological deficits. The subgroups alsodiffered from each other in reading habits. Arelatively fast reading speed, even with numerouserrors, appears to be more rewarding in everydayreading than a slower but more accurate readingstyle.

Brain Responses to Changes in Speech Sound Durations Differ Between Infants With and Without Familial Risk for Dyslexia

A specific learning disability, developmental dyslexia, is a language-based disorder that is shown to be strongly familial. Therefore, infants born to families with a history of the disorder are at an elevated risk for the disorder. However, little is known of the potential early markers of dyslexia. Here we report differences between 6-month-old infants with and without high risk of familial dyslexia in brain electrical activation generated by changes in the temporal structure of speech sounds, a critical cueing feature in speech. We measured event-related brain responses to consonant duration changes embedded in ata pseudowords applying an oddball paradigm, in which pseudoword tokens with varying /t/ duration were presented as frequent standard (80%) or as rare deviant stimuli (each 10%) with an interval of 610 msec between the stimuli. The infants at risk differ from control infants in both their initial responsiveness to sounds per se and in their change-detection responses dependent on the stimulus context. These results show that infants at risk due to a familial background of reading problems process auditory temporal cues of speech sounds differently from infants without such a risk even before they learn to speak.

Developmental Links of Very Early Phonological and Language Skills to Second Grade Reading Outcomes: Strong to Accuracy but Only Minor to Fluency

The authors examined second grade reading accuracy and fluency and their associations via letter knowledge to phonological and language predictors assessed at 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 years in children in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. Structural equation modeling showed that a developmentally highly stable factor (early phonological and language processing [EPLP]) behind key dyslexia predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, vocabulary, and pseudoword repetition) could already be identified at 3.5 years. EPLP was significantly associated with reading and spelling accuracy and by age with letter knowledge. However, EPLP had only a minor link with reading fluency, which was additionally explained by early letter knowledge. The results show that reading accuracy is well predicted by early phonological and language skills. Variation in fluent reading skills is not well explained by early skills, suggesting factors other than phonological core skills. Future research is suggested to explore the factors behind the development of fast and accurate decoding skills.

In Search of the Core Features of Dyslexia: Observations Concerning Dyslexia in the Highly Orthographically Regular Finnish Language

A goal of many researchers in recent years has been to explore the core feature(s) of dyslexia. Three methods that could be used for this purpose are as follows. One method is to examine and specify in detail the cognitive/reading deficits still present in adulthood and thus to identify deficit(s) instead of a delay. The second method is to use crosslinguistic comparisons (see Jackson, Hu, & Ju, Vol. I, 1994; Assink & Kattenberg, Vol. I, 1994; Wolf, Pfeil, Lotz, & Biddle, Vol. I, 1994). Any real core feature of dyslexia should be present universally independent of the language and language-specific experience among those who have received adequate training in reading. The third method is to try to study dyslexia prospectively by following the developmental route(s) leading to its appearance. A serious search for precursor(s) can be made in a prospective study only if one is able to identify with sufficient success a group of children at an early age who will later become dyslexic. Children being born in families with multiple dyslexic members comprise such a group. If dyslexia is a lifelong difficulty as is generally argued (Catts, 1989; Kamhi, 1992) and about half or more of the dyslexics have a familial background of dyslexia (Hallgren, 1950; Zerbin-Rudin, 1967; DeFries & Gillis, 1991; Lubs, Rabin, Feldman, Jallad, Kusch, & Gross-Glenn, 1993), this strategy should identify a sizeable number of developmental dyslexics as Scarborough (e.g., 1990) has recently successfully shown.

Performance of Zambian Children on the NEPSY: A Pilot Study

Forty-five literate schoolchildren aged 9 (n = 25) and 11 (n = 20) from urban Zambia were given core and expanded tests on the NEPSY and their performance was scored according to age-equivalent norms for U.S. children. This study indicates that in urban, literate Zambian children, the NEPSY is relatively insensitive to language and cultural influences that often compromise the applicability of Western tests in the developing world. No consistent improvement in the standard scores was found as a function of educational experience. Comparison against the U.S. normative average revealed that both age groups were poorer in the domains of language and attention and executive functions, whereas their performance was better in the visuospatial processing domain. It is concluded that the NEPSY in its present form may be clinically useful, but its results should still be treated with caution, taking into account cultural, language, and personal demographic information. More studies, with divergent and larger samples of varying age ranges are required. It seems that the NEPSY could serve as the initial step in the development of neuropsychological practices in Zambia.

Training reading fluency: is it important to practice reading aloud and is generalization possible?

Outcomes of three different types of computerized training in sub-lexical items (word-initial consonant clusters) on reading speed for 39 German-speaking poor readers in Grades 2 and 3 were evaluated. A phonological–orthographic association group, a reading aloud group, and a combined group were compared in performance with an untrained control group. During short-term training, the intervention groups showed higher gains than the control group in reading speed of the trained sub-lexical items and of the words containing the trained segments. No differences were found between the intervention groups. In the development of pseudoword reading, the groups did not show differential improvements. The generalization effect to pseudoword reading was similar, whether the pseudowords contained the trained segment as a syllable or as a non-syllabic letter string. The gains induced by training were specific to the materials used in training and did not induce gains in general reading speed.

Rapid serial naming: Relations between different stimuli and neuropsychological factors

We report two studies on rapid serial naming (RSN). Study 1 addressed the relations among RSN tasks comprising different stimuli. Separate components for RSN of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric stimuli, as well as for tasks in which the stimuli alternated between categories were identified. In Study 2, phonological skills, processing speed, motor dexterity, and verbal fluency were found to explain RSN performance. The studies indicate: (1) that RSN tasks vary in their properties according to the stimuli used and according to the way the tasks are arranged, and (2) that RSN tasks are multi-componented.

Training reading fluency among poor readers of German: many ways to the goal

Outcomes of two training programs aimed at improving reading speed for 39 German-speaking poor readers in grades 2 and 4 were evaluated. During a 6-week training period, a specific target for children in a computer group was to improve reading of word-initial consonant clusters by practice in associating an orthographic unit with a corresponding phonological unit. Children in a paired reading group read books with an adult tutor. The results showed that, in reading words in which the computer-trained sublexical items were included, both groups exhibited similar improvement. A post hoc analysis suggested that computer training was associated with better reading skills with respect to the trained sublexical items; however, this improvement did not show large generalization effects to the words with the sublexical items. The paired reading group showed a more rapid gain in global word reading fluency than the computer group. Neither of the groups improved their pseudoword reading.