H860 Reading Difficulties

Week 2The Development of Reading

(Difficulties)

Today’s session

1. The rocky road to reading2. Discussion of intervention

presentations3. Break4. Early literacy development5. Memo briefing

Recap from last week

• General reading difficulties have many causes• The signature of specific reading difficulties is

that they are ‘unexpected’• The most readily identifiable SRD is dyslexia, a

specific difficulty with phonological processing

• Caveat: labels are products of culture and time

• For a child to learn to read, a lot of precursors have to be in place…

• Thus, our understanding of intervention should not just start at the school years

Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia

• Prospective study of over 200 Finnish children from birth

• Half were at familial risk for dyslexia

1st year of life…

• ERP recordings in the first week of life and 6 months differed between at-risk and non-risk babies

• Newborn responses to /ga/ syllable related to poorer receptive language across groups at 2.5 years. Similar trend at 5 years.

• Newborn responses in the left hemisphere predicted poorer reading skills at 6.5 years, and poorer reading accuracy and fluency, as well as poorer spelling skills, at 7 years

• At-risk children with overall slow motor development had asmaller vocabulary and used shorter sentences than children in all other subgroups

2 year olds…

• Maximum sentence length at 2 years lower in at-risk group

• Accuracy of speech sound articulation at 2.5 years predicts early reading acquisition

• Control mothers produce more symbolic play and language in interactions with their children

• Mothers' child-directed symbolic language contributed toward the comprehension skills of at-risk 14- and 18-month-olds. This association was absent in the control group until 30 months.

At-risk late talkers

3 years and beyond…

• At-risk group have lower expressive language scores at 3.5. By 5 years both expressive and receptive language scores are lower

• At-risk group have lower phonological awareness

• Phonological awareness, letter knowledge and RAN predict future reading from 3.5 years

Lyytinen et al. (2006)

Pause

• If asked to give advice to the parents of an at-risk 3.5 year old, what would you say/what information would you want to obtain from them?

Early risk screens

• TOPEL, Test of Preschool Early Literacy http://www.proedinc.com/customer/productView.aspx?ID=4020

• ALL Assessment of Language & Literacy

http://harcourtassessment.com/haiweb/cultures/en-us/productdetail.htm?pid=015-8074-742

Self-promotion time

Katie Overy, 2003

• Rhythm-based music training 3 x 20 minute sessions, for 15 weeks

• Improved children's phonological and spelling skills…

• However, the causal pathway from rhythm skills to phonology and reading is not yet understood.

Music and Literacy

Measuring Beat Sensitivity

Dyslexia CA RL

PNAS, 2002

Measuring Beat Sensitivity

• What is the neural profile for beat processing in children?

• Does this vary in children with dyslexia?

• If yes, what is the developmental trajectory:

difference, delay or a more complex picture?

Neural bases of beat processing

Strong beat

Weak beat

Literacy Instruction Begins

• The ‘basic’ task – learning the associations between the sounds and words of your language and the symbol system of your language

Treiman and Kessler

• Writing maps spoken language through units of meaning (morphosyntax) and/or sound (phonology)

• Logographic systems use meaning units – e.g. Chinese languages鼠 - rat

Logographic systems

• Zoo

‘move’ ‘thing’ ‘garden’

Chinese writer must master 2,000-3,000 logograms to have a good dictionary

Phonological systems

• The invariance issue – ‘tomato’• Syllabaries• Segmental systems – e.g. Spanish, English

• Fewer symbols – easier to learn!• But, finer cuts make symbol decisions harder:

‘sweet girl’

Phonological systems

• Intonation not represented – implications for fluency?

• Mixtures possible:– Past tense ‘ed’– Plurals

• Dealing with our pasts…/w/ in wrist, /x/ - gh, /k/ in knightVowel merger in N. America – lawn/lot

Word Reading

Ways to read a word…

1. jone2. greak3. disland4. nepot5. dalf6. heact7. bacht8. souquet9. nuitar10. beights

Ways to read a word…

1. Decoding, e.g. c-a-t /k//æ//t/2. Pronouncing common spelling patterns as

chunks e.g. –ight, ing3. Retrieving words from memory (sight word

reading) e.g. none, yacht4. By analogy e.g. yellow fellow5. By predicting words from context

Frith’s stage model

1. Logographic

2. Alphabetic

3. Orthographic

Spelling is driver

Reading is driver

Profile of Word Reading (i)

Sleep sleep Beautiful d.k.

After after Watch wach

Woman woeman Early eerlee

Summer summer Twilight twilliggit

Chair chair Certain curtane

Because becoss Dwarf dwarf

Profile of Word Reading (ii)

Sleep slip Beautiful bell

After after Watch witch

Woman winning Early Ella

Summer simmer Twilight twit

Chair car Certain kernin

Because becky Dwarf doff

Profile of Word Reading (iii)

Sleep sleepy Beautiful beauty

After after Watch witch

Woman women Early earlier

Summer summer Twilight twilights

Chair chair Certain certainly

Because because Dwarf d.k.

Memos…