Pirjo Kulju

Early signs of dyslexia from the speech and language processing of children

The Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia project (JLD) has followed the development of 200 children from birth until 10 years of age. Half the children are from families in which at least one of the parents has dyslexia, thus the child has a high risk of becoming dyslexic, and half have no such risk. Here the main findings of four studies in linguistics from the JLD project are reviewed. The speech processing skills were studied in 6, 18, 24 and 30-month-old children. The findings show that early signs of dyslexia can be detected in speech processing both phonologically and morphosyntactically. These precursors can be seen in perception or production of duration, in the prosody and phonotactics of word production attempts and word structures, as well as in the complexity of morphosyntactic features of expressions. This information can be useful in practice to provide early and appropriate assistance for those children who most likely will face difficulties in learning to read and write at school.

Multilayered word structure model for assessing spelling of Finnish children in shallow orthography

This study explores Finnish childrens word-level spelling by applying a linguistically based multilayered word structure model for assessing spelling performance. The model contributes to the analytical qualitative assessment approach in order to identify childrens spelling performance for enhancing writing skills. The children (N = 105) participated in two dictation assessments at the end of their first and second grades. The results indicate that long consonants and consonant sequences are the most problematic structures in both the first and second grades. The less-advanced spellers were significantly weaker than others also in coding the overall syllable number, heavy unstressed syllables and long vowels in the first grade. In the second grade, they still had more difficulties in spelling heavy unstressed syllables and long quantities of vowels and consonants. The multilayered word structure model seems to give more information about the quality of spelling than error-based holistic analyses. The model is applicable for other shallow orthographies as well.