Reading 1 Flashcards
specific reading disability vs general reading backwardness
SRD = reading difficulty despite at least average cognitive ability and educational opportunity
defined as 2 years below reading level expected for age and IQ
GRB = difficulty in many cognitive tasks
SRD related to
- sex: 77% SRD clinical referrals male, 54% boys with general reading problem
- family history of reading and language difficulties
- higher concordance rate for monozygotic than dizygotic twins
- family size and birth order
- mother’ reading to children and mother’s education
- ->both biological and environmental
Genetic contributions to reading development
Genetic influences: MZ twins more similar than DZ twins
Environmental influences: high similarity between DZ twins
Byrne et al (2009): Cross-national study of 615 twin pairs from preschool to Grade 2
• Strong genetic contribution to all measures in all countries: MZ>DZ
• Stronger environmental contribution in Scandinavia, where schooling starts later, and higher in US than OZ – more variable schooling in US?
➔ Genetic and environmental contributions
what causes specific reading disability
NON-COGNITIVE FACTORS
e.g. Motivation, Attitude to reading at home, Practice etc
GENERAL COGNITIVE FACTORS
e.g. Attention, Listening comprehension etc
SPECIFIC COGNITIVE FACTORS
e.g. Visual discrimination, Phonemic awareness
BUT the causes of specific reading difficulties must lie in factors specific to reading
Difficult to determine causal factors because poor readers are worse than good readers at many tasks
• good readers have more reading experience
• specific reading disability impairs general educational progress
➔Some of the impairments shown by poor readers may be consequences, not causes, of their reading problems
➔ Need a theory of processes necessary for successful reading to analyse the causes of reading disability
top down vs bottom up theories
top down:
- reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game
- readers use knowledge and context to predict up-coming words with minimal reliance on word decoding
- readers should attend to meaning/function of text not to surface form
- ->functional, whole language, constructivist approach to instruction
bottom up:
- reading requires transcoding written symbols into meanings
- readers must practice and automate the skills required to translate lower levels (features, letters) to higher levels (lexical, semantic)
- must initially attend to low level features to achieve automaticiy
- -> decoding-oriented (phonics) approach to instruction
Top-down view of reading
Efficient reading is a purely visual process
• “Sounding out”/subvocalising during reading is inefficient because it slows down the rate of reading comprehension
Efficient reading is a highly selective and inferential process
• Skilled reading is a “psycholinguistic guessing game”: readers use context and prior knowledge to reduce reliance on bottom-up processing
Learning to read is natural (Osmosis Assumption)
• “Low level” reading skills can be acquired just as spontaneously and easily as spoken language in the right learning environment
Whole Language/constructivist approach to reading instruction
• Meaningful, functional use of language; meaningful texts
• Limited training in isolated letter-sound skills
• First encourage use of semantic, pictorial cues to guess novel words; phonics strategies distract children from meaning
• Select material for reading and spelling on the basis of interest, motivation, functional relevance NOT formal structure
Bottom-up view of reading
the simple view: reading = decoding x comprehension
word decoding: specific to reading, maps written words to phonological lexicon
–> orthographic lexicon
comprehension: common to written and spoken words
- -> semantic knowledge
how is orthographic lexicon bolted on to spoken language system? direct vs indirect access
children already have phonological semantic associations
direct access:
- printed words mapped directly to semantics
- different access routes for written and spoken words
- phonology not important for written word identification
indirect access:
- children must learn to translate orthography into phonology
- requires phonemic awareness
phonological awareness
- the ability to attend to and manipulate the separate sounds in words
- NOT phonological discrimination (can hear cat and bat are different words)
methods to assess:
- phoneme counting: how many sounds in dog
- rhyme recognition: which word rhymes with rat?
- rhyme production: a word that rhymes with rat
- phoneme matching: do these words have same first sound? fish fat
- phoneme deletion: say pat without p
- oddity task: which is the odd one out: deck, neck, fit
only some tasks require phonemic awareness (individual phonemes, smallest units of sound)
Phonological awareness and reading acquisition
Phonological awareness at school entry
– best predictor of success at learning to read (better than IQ) up till grade 2+
– predicts not only decoding but also spelling and comprehension
BUT these are correlational relationships ➔ don’t prove causality
Training children in phonological awareness
– specifically facilitates reading and spelling
– particularly when training connects phonological segments to letters (Bradley & Bryant, 1983)*
– yields benefits that are still evident 6 years later (Byrne et al. 2000)
Bradley & Bryant (1983) study
-Non readers with poor sound categorisation
-40 training sessions over 2 years
Group I: Sound categorisation - Taught about shared phonemes in different
word positions
Group II: As above, but training included plastic letters to physically manipulate
Group III: Conceptual categorisation – same words as I and II but sorted semantically
Group IV: No training
result: group I,II higher levels of performance on reading, spelling, and also in maths
Why is it difficult to acquire phonemic awareness
Spoken language is learned holistically
• phonemes are not invariant units in spoken language
• children use intonational cues to help them identify meaning
• children cannot attend to word “form” ➔ use meaning instead
➔phonemic awareness is unlikely to be acquired through exposure to meaningful spoken language
To acquire phonemic awareness children need
• to become aware of the symbolic status of words (word stands for things, not things themselves)
• to develop sensitivity to the form of words e.g. rhyme
➔initial insights achieved by “playing with” spoken forms of language eg riddles, rhyming
➔exposure to written form of language which “marks” phoneme segments necessary for phonemic awareness eg Sesame Street; letters on the fridge; Ipad games…
➔ Learning to read require skills that were not necessary to learn spoken language
which comes first - phonological awareness or reading?
PA -> reading
- nursery rhyme knowledge at 3 predicts later rhyme detection
- some children acquire phonemic awareness without instruction
- phonological awareness at school entry predicts non-readers’ future reading skill
- strong genetic contribution to phonological processing skill
reading instruction -> PA
- limited development of phonemic awareness in illiterate people
e. g. illiterate portuguese poets can produce poems that rhyme but have no PA - readers of non-alphabetic languages have low phonemic awareness
- many children acquire phonemic awareness during early instruction
- -> reciprocal causation
- exposure to alphabetic orthography is necessary for explicit awareness of phonemes but not for other phonological units
Rhyme sensitivity➔ Exposure to written language ➔ Phonemic awareness
phonemic awareness is a critical predictor of reading
Meta-analysis:
Collated results of 235 studies investigating relationship between reading and phonological skills of:
• Phonemic awareness
• Rhyme awareness
• Verbal short-term memory
Significantly larger difference between ‘dyslexic’ and age-matched controls on phonemic awareness (d=-1.37) than rhyme awareness (d=-0.93) than STM (d=-0.71)*
BUT age-matched controls have more reading experience
➔’Reading-level match design’: compare dyslexic sample with younger children of equivalent reading level*
➔Phonemic awareness (d=-0.57)> Rhyme awareness (d=-0.37)>STM (d=-.09)
➔ Deficits in phonemic awareness specifically impede reading
summary
Separating causes from consequences of Specific Reading Disability to develop effective methods of teaching/remediation requires a theory of reading development
Top-down view: reading a ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’
➔instruction needs to focus on meaning, using context etc
Bottom-up view: reading requires ‘transcoding’ text to spoken words ➔ Systematic ‘Phonics’: encourage extraction
and use of spelling-sound regularities
Evidence
Phonemic awareness: plays a causal role in successful reading acquisition (of English)
• Facilitated by exposure to (alphabetic) writing system
Reading requires cognitive insights that were not necessary to learn to speak and understand speech
• Word-referent awareness ➔ symbolic processing
• Phonemic awareness ➔ alphabetic insight
➔ Why is phonemic awareness important for reading
