Neuropsychological Instruction: A Process Related Approach in Early Reading Skill Development

Proficient and fluent reading ability for all Americans continues to be a highly prioritized, yet under achieved aspiration in current educational institutions. The acquisition of proficient reading fluency and comprehension are, undoubtedly, the most essential priorities in the academic development of school aged children, yet a discouraging number of students continue to struggle with the reading process throughout school aged years. Research has targeted key instructional areas that must be implemented in successful reading curriculum in the early childhood years. Namely, phonological awareness, phonics instruction, reading fluency, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension are core components that must be incorporated into literacy curricula and mastered by students as instruction is occurring in order to drive successful, long term reading outcomes. Advances in neurological research have added to current knowledge regarding how a child’s brain develops proficient reading ability. Neural networks are formed to create language systems, while brain plasticity in the first seven years of life allows for developmental manipulation. Despite these advances in knowledge and research, reading intervention continues to be reactive, and is usually applied after a student has fallen behind age expected benchmarks. There is a need for current research to demonstrate proactive methods to support successful literacy outcomes from the start of formal instruction, thereby thwarting the phenomenon of reading failure, and increasing reading proficiency for more students. Archival data were obtained from a program evaluation utilizing a pre/post test experimental design to measure reading gains for regular education Kindergarten students receiving balanced literacy instruction. The data were further examined to determine if students receiving balanced literacy instruction, in addition to the use of the PAL II Guides for Intervention as a proactive twelve week supplement to regular instruction, would realize greater gains in reading readiness than those students receiving balanced literacy instruction alone. All students (N = 31) who participated in the program evaluation were randomly assigned to one of two groups and received pre and post assessments in pre reading skill development. Findings indicate the use of a quality based, balanced literacy program does result in gains for writing legibility and speed; copying automaticity, legibility, and speed; receptive coding ability; auditory and verbal rhyming of words; phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion; and syllable manipulation. Findings further indicate that the combined use of balanced literacy and the PAL II supplemental intervention yielded significant gains in writing automaticity, legibility and speed; copying automaticity, legibility, and speed; receptive coding; auditory and verbal rhyming of words; phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion; syllabic manipulation; and verbal working memory. In an examination of the amount of measurable growth, those students receiving the PAL II supplement in addition to the balanced literacy program, made more statistically significant incremental gains than the group receiving balanced literacy alone in nine of the thirteen pre-reading skill variables. Medium effect sizes were noted for the balanced literacy plus intervention group over the balanced literacy group for writing automaticity, writing legibility, and copying automaticity. Large effect sizes were noted for the balanced literacy plus intervention group over the balanced literacy group for copying legibility, receptive coding, rhyming, syllables, phonemes, and verbal working memory. A small effect size was noted in writing speed but no effect size was noted for copying speed. These findings lend support to current research that emphasizes the importance of developing successful pre-reading skill acquisition in the early childhood years via the proactive use of quality instruction and supplemental intervention. Research further denotes the importance of early instruction while critical neural development is occurring in young learner’s language systems. Results from this study support this finding, and can be utilized as a proactive strategy to enhance learning for all students at the beginning of formal school instruction. By doing so, more young students are likely to develop improved mastery of the skills needed to become successful future readers, and fewer students will be left to struggle with reading skill development throughout school aged years

Characterizing the overlap between SLI and dyslexia in Chinese: The role of phonology and beyond

This study examined the overlap of dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) in Cantonese-Chinese-speaking children. Thirty children with a prior diagnosis of SLI and 9 normal controls, aged between 6;0 and 11;3, participated. The children with SLI were tested for language impairment and dyslexia. Seven retained a diagnosis of SLI but were dyslexia-free (SLI-only), 13 received a comorbid diagnosis of dyslexia (SLI-D), and SLI had become history (SLI-H) in the other 10 children with no co-morbid diagnoses of dyslexia. The SLI-only group did worse on textual comprehension, but better on left-right reversal (an orthographic skill), than the SLI-D group. The SLI-only and the SLI-D group shared the same range of cognitive deficits relative to age norms and showed no difference in phonological processing. The SLI-D group did worse than the normal group on phonological representation, and both the SLI-only and the SLI-D group had difficulties with morphological awareness. © 2010 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.postprin

CUCHILD: A Large-Scale Cantonese Corpus of Child Speech for Phonology and Articulation Assessment

This paper describes the design and development of CUCHILD, a large-scale Cantonese corpus of child speech. The corpus contains spoken words collected from 1,986 child speakers aged from 3 to 6 years old. The speech materials include 130 words of 1 to 4 syllables in length. The speakers cover both typically developing (TD) children and children with speech disorder. The intended use of the corpus is to support scientific and clinical research, as well as technology development related to child speech assessment. The design of the corpus, including selection of words, participants recruitment, data acquisition process, and data pre-processing are described in detail. The results of acoustical analysis are presented to illustrate the properties of child speech. Potential applications of the corpus in automatic speech recognition, phonological error detection and speaker diarization are also discussed.Comment: Accepted to INTERSPEECH 2020, Shanghai, Chin

Decline and fall:a biological, developmental, and psycholinguistic account of deliberative language processes and ageing

Background: This paper reviews the role of deliberative processes in language: those language processes that require central resources, in contrast to the automatic processes of lexicalisation, word retrieval, and parsing. 10 Aims: We describe types of deliberative processing, and show how these processes underpin high-level processes that feature strongly in language. We focus on metalin- guistic processing, strategic processing, inhibition, and planning. We relate them to frontal-lobe function and the development of the fronto-striate loop. We then focus on the role of deliberative processes in normal and pathological development and ageing, 15 and show how these processes are particularly susceptible to deterioration with age. In particular, many of the commonly observed language impairments encountered in ageing result from a decline in deliberative processing skills rather than in automatic language processes. Main Contribution: We argue that central processing plays a larger and more important 20 role in language processing and acquisition than is often credited. Conclusions: Deliberative language processes permeate language use across the lifespan. They are particularly prone to age-related loss. We conclude by discussing implications for therapy

The structure of preliteracy competence in children aged five to seven years

Children´s early literacy development is a key contributor to later literacy skills and overall academic achievement. We have developed a set of tests that assesses preliteracy competence based on well-established foreign and Slovenian instruments or tools. A sample of 307 children aged from five to seven years were tested. A high Cronbach alpha coefficient (alpha = 0.87) indicates that the design instrument is an internally reliable instrument. This paper showcases and describes the differences in the development of preliteracy competence in different age group. The results show that children between 5 and 7 show the greatest development of the abilities to discern the initial sound, to analyse the sound, to notice the removal of sounds or syllables from a meaningless word, and to recall words on a given phoneme. Exploratory factor analysis with oblimin rotation revealed that preliteracy competence is best understood as a four-dimensional construct among children aged five to seven years. The first dimension is defined by higher-level phonological awareness, verbal memory, and rapid automatic naming, so it is metaphonology. The second factor, named perceptual language structure, expresses macro-linguistic structure (syllable, rhymes) and discrimination of words that sound similar. The third factor, named vocabulary, is saturated mostly by syllable analysis, vocabulary and word comprehension. The fourth factor is visual processing and capturing, which enable storage and refreshing of non-verbal information and the discrimination of symbols. The differences in development of preliteracy competency indicate intervention in the following areas: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, visual processing (discrimination and short-term memory) and vocabulary knowledge