Basic Auditory Processing Skills and Phonological Awareness in Low-IQ Readers and Typically Developing Controls (original) (raw)
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Child Development
Phonological difficulties characterize children with developmental dyslexia across languages, but whether impaired auditory processing underlies these phonological difficulties is debated. Here the causal question is addressed by exploring whether individual differences in sensory processing predict the development of phonological awareness in 86 English-speaking lower-and middle-class children aged 8 years in 2005 who had dyslexia, or were age-matched typically developing children, some with exceptional reading/high IQ. The predictive relations between auditory processing and phonological development are robust for this sample even when phonological awareness at Time 1 (the autoregressor) is controlled. High reading/IQ does not much impact these relations. The data suggest that basic sensory abilities are significant longitudinal predictors of growth in phonological awareness in children. We thank Nichola Daily and Lisa Barnes for their assistance with data entry, and the children, families, and schools participating in this research for their help and support. This research was funded by the Medical Research Council, Ref. G0400574. The sponsor played no role in the study design nor in the collection, analysis, interpretation, and writing up of the data. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. All participants and their guardians gave informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the study was approved by the Psychology Research Ethics Committee of the
Developmental Psychology, 1997
Relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading skills were examined in a longitudinal correlational study of 216 children. Phonological processing abilities, word-level reading skills, and vocabulary were assessed annually from kindergarten through 4th grade, as the children developed from beginning to skilled readers. Individual differences in phonological awareness were related to subsequent individual differences in word-level reading for every time period examined. Individual differences in serial naming and vocabulary were related to subsequent individual differences in word-level reading initially, but these relations faded with development. Individual differences in letter-name knowledge were related to subsequent individual differences in phonological awareness and serial naming, but there were no relations between individual differences in wordlevel reading and any subsequent phonological processing ability.
Development of young readers' phonological processing abilities
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1993
In a cross-sectional study of 184 kindergarten and 2nd grade students, confirmatory factor analysis of a battery of phonological and control tasks were used to compare alternative models of young readers' phonological processing abilities. We found evidence for 5 distinct but correlated phonological processing abilities. Latent phonological processing abilities were more highly correlated with general cognitive ability than previous reports would suggest, although they accounted for variance in word recognition independent of general cognitive ability. The results of this study, coupled with those of a previous study of prereaders, suggest that phonological abilities are best conceptualized as relatively stable and coherent individual difference attributes, as opposed to relatively unstable measures of reading-related knowledge. Phonological processing refers to the use of phonological information, especially the sound structure of one's oral language, in processing written and oral information (Jorm & Share, 1983; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). When nonreading preschool children are given phonological processing tasks, such as the task of blending together speech segments that have been presented in isolation, their performance is remarkably predictive of how well they will read several years later (
Research in …, 2011
Developmental dyslexia is characterized by severe reading and spelling difficulties that are persistent and resistant to the usual didactic measures and remedial efforts. It is well established that a major cause of these problems lies in poorly specified phonological representations. Many individuals with dyslexia also present impairments in auditory temporal processing and speech perception, but it remains debated whether these more basic perceptual impairments play a role in causing the reading problem. Longitudinal studies may help clarifying this issue by assessing preschool children before they receive reading instruction and by following them up through literacy development. The current longitudinal study shows impairments in auditory frequency modulation (FM) detection, speech perception and phonological awareness in kindergarten and in grade 1 in children who receive a dyslexia diagnosis in grade 3. FM sensitivity and speech-in-noise perception in kindergarten uniquely contribute to growth in reading ability, even after controlling for letter knowledge and phonological awareness. These findings indicate that impairments in auditory processing and speech perception are not merely an epiphenomenon of reading failure. Although no specific directional relations were observed between auditory processing, speech perception and phonological awareness, the highly significant concurrent and predictive correlations between all these variables suggest a reciprocal association and corroborate the evidence for the auditory deficit theory of dyslexia.
Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers: Auditory Processing or Phonological Coding?
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1997
Poor readers are inferior to normal-reading peers in aspects of speech perception. Two hypotheses have been proposed to account for their deficits: (i) a speech-specific failure in phonological representation, or (ii) a general deficit in auditory "temporal processing", such that they cannot easily perceive the rapid spectral changes of formant transitions at the onset of stop-vowel syllables. To test these hypotheses, two groups of second-grade children (20 "good readers", 20 "poor readers"), matched for age and intelligence, were selected to differ significantly on a fba!-/da! temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, said to be diagnostic of a temporal processing deficit. Three experiments then showed that the groups did not differ in: (i) TOJ when fba! and Ida! were paired with more easily discriminated syllables (fba!-/sa!, Ida!-Ifa/); (ii) discriminating non-speech sine wave analogs ofthe second and third formants of fba! and Ida!; (iii) sensitivity to brief transitional cues varying along a synthetic speech continuum. Thus, poor readers' difficulties with /ha!-/da! reflected perceptual confusion between phonetically similar, though phonologically contrastive, syllables rather than difficulty in perceiving rapid spectral changes. The results are consistent with a speechspecific, not a general auditory deficit. Reading is a complex skill and there are many reasons why children may fail. The most firmly established correlate of reading disability is a deficiellcy in skills related to phollological processing. Phollological processing entails the segmental analysis of words for ordinary speaking and listelling, as well as the metaphonological skills required for explicitly analyzing the soulld structure of speech into the phonemic components represented by the alphabet. Many studies have shown poor readers to be significantly illferior to their normal reading peers in "...perceptual discrimination of phonemes, phollological awareness tasks involving the manipulation of phones within words, speed and accuracy in lexical access for picture names, verbal short-term memory, sYIltactic awareness and semantic processing on tasks of listening comprehension" (Olson, 1992, p.896). Many, if not all, of these weaknesses may arise, directly or indirectly, from a deficit in speech perception. Several indepelldent lines of research point to speech perception as a source of subtle, but ramifying deficit in reading-impaired children and adults. The nature and origin of the perceptual deficit have been a matter of debate for over fifteen years. One account sees it as purelylinguistic, specific to speech and closely related to the deficit in verbal working memory, also often observed in poor readers (e.g.,
Auditory Processing and Early Literacy Skills in a Preschool and Kindergarten Population
Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2010
Although the relationship between auditory processing and reading-related skills has been investigated in school-age populations and in prospective studies of infants, understanding of the relationship between these variables in the period immediately preceding formal reading instruction is sparse. In this cross-sectional study, auditory processing, phonological awareness, early literacy skills, and general ability were assessed in a mixed sample of 88 three- to six-year-old children both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Results from both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses suggest the importance of early auditory rise time sensitivity in developing phonological awareness skills, especially in the development of rhyme awareness.
Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2010
Limited research exists concerning the literacy skills of children with intellectual disabilities. Recent research conducted with this population suggests that phonological awareness is related to reading performance by these individuals and that they can benefit from phonemic literacy instruction. The limited corpus of research documenting the literacy skills of children with intellectual disabilities mainly has been conducted with very small samples of children with Down syndrome. Data reported here are part of a larger ongoing project with children who have mild intellectual disabilities resulting from various etiological factors that examines the impact of two reading programs on both early developing reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness, word decoding) and the development of fluency and comprehension skills. 1.1. The relationship between phonological awareness and reading performance by children with intellectual disabilities Children with a range of intellectual disabilities have been taught to read primarily through sight words since it has been assumed that individuals with intellectual difficulties cannot benefit from phonemic instruction because of their limited cognitive skills and associated language difficulties (e.g., Browder & Xin, 1998). Evidence for this assumption comes from an early study by Cossu, Rossini, and Marshall (1993). They reported that 10 children with Down syndrome, whose mean age
Scientific Studies of Reading, 2014
In this study word reading (WR) fluency was used to dichotomously classify 1,598 Dutch children at different cutoffs, indicating (very) poor or (very) good reading performance. Analysis of variance and receiver operating characteristics were used to investigate the effects of rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in predicting group membership. The highest predictive values were found for the combination of RAN and PA, particularly for the poorest readers. Furthermore, results indicate that with the severity of impairment, WR is more dominated by deficient PA, which is interpreted as an enduring problem with sublexical processing. Another main result is that with the increase of reading skill, the contribution of PA diminishes, whereas the contribution of RAN remains fairly constant for the whole reading fluency continuum. These results warrant the conclusion that whereas PA hallmarks reading disability, RAN appears to be the default predictor for above-average or excellent reading proficiency.
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2001
Phonological skills, language ability, and literacy scores were compared for four groups : 19 children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNH), 20 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 20 controls matched on chronological age to the SNH group (CA), and 15 controls matched on receptive vocabulary level to a subset of the SLI group (CB). In common with the SLI group, mean scores of children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were significantly poorer on tests of phonological short-term memory, phonological discrimination, and phonological awareness than CA controls. No differences between group means were observed in SNH and CA control groups on vocabulary, digit and sentence recall, sentence comprehension, and literacy scores. However, there was considerable individual variation within the SNH group. Nearly 50 % of the SNH group showed phonological impairment associated with poorer expressive and receptive vocabulary and higher hearing thresholds than remaining children without phonological impairment. Nonword repetition deficits were observed in SNH subgroups with and without phonological impairment and were of a similar magnitude to those observed in children with SLI. Indeed, poorer repetition in children with SLI could only be differentiated from children with SNH on phonologically complex nonwords. Overall, findings suggested major problems in nonword repetition and phonological impairment occurred without clinically significant deficits in wider language and literacy abilities in children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Implications for theories of SLI are discussed.