How language affects children’s use of derivational morphology in visual word and pseudoword processing:evidence from a cross-language study

Developing readers have been shown to rely on morphemes in visual word recognition across several naming, lexical decision and priming experiments. However, the impact of morphology in reading is not consistent across studies with differing results emerging not only between but also within writing systems. Here, we report a cross-language experiment involving the English and French languages, which aims to compare directly the impact of morphology in word recognition in the two languages. Monolingual French-speaking and English-speaking children matched for grade level (Part 1) and for age (Part 2) participated in the study. Two lexical decision tasks (one in French, one in English) featured words and pseudowords with exactly the same structure in each language. The presence of a root (R+) and a suffix ending (S+) was manipulated orthogonally, leading to four possible combinations in words (R+S+: e.g. postal; R+S-: e.g. turnip; R-S+: e.g. rascal; and R-S-: e.g. bishop) and in pseudowords (R+S+: e.g. pondal; R+S-: e.g. curlip; R-S+: e.g. vosnal; and R-S-: e.g. hethop). Results indicate that the presence of morphemes facilitates children’s recognition of words and impedes their ability to reject pseudowords in both languages. Nevertheless, effects extend across accuracy and latencies in French but are restricted to accuracy in English, suggesting a higher degree of morphological processing efficiency in French. We argue that the inconsistencies found between languages emphasise the need for developmental models of word recognition to integrate a morpheme level whose elaboration is tuned by the productivity and transparency of the derivational system

Cognitive impairments in developmental dyslexia

The nature of cognitive impairments in developmental dyslexia was investigated in two studies. The issue of heterogeneity was addressed and an attempt was made to identify cognitive processes which might feature in a dimensional model of reading ability. The first study examined the hypothesis that developmental dyslexics are delayed in their general perceptual development. Phonological, visual and tactile segmentation skills were assessed together with nonword naming ability. As a group, the dyslexics were only impaired for reading age at phoneme deletion and nonword naming. However, individual variation was present within the dyslexic group. Individuals exhibiting severe impairments were identified in tests of rhyme judgement, auditory organisation and visual segmentation. The perceptual delay hypothesis received only limited confirmation. The dyslexic group was impaired at the most analytical level of phonological segmentation, but not at more holistic levels. Visual and phonological segmentation skills showed some association, but were dissociated from performance in the tactile modality. The second study further explored these findings using a new sample. This dyslexic group also suffered nonword naming impairments for reading age. However, like their reading age controls, they showed a processing advantage for onset and rime units in a phonological deletion task but not in an orthographic lexical decision task. The efficacy of long-term memory representations was assessed. Individuals within the dyslexic group displayed a very deviant performance in a repetition memory task, and the group as a whole was impaired at recognising words to which they had been repeatedly exposed. It was concluded that the difficulties experienced by individual dyslexic children were varied, and that less frequent problems were likely to be overlooked by assessing impairment in developmental dyslexia in terms of group performance. Further investigation of how visual and memory processes relate to reading development would be a worthwhile addition to the extensive work linking phonological processing with reading achievement

Working with a young people’s advisory panel to conduct educational research:Young people’s perspectives and researcher reflections

Participatory Action Research (PAR) with young people aims to centre their knowledge and experience in research which is meaningful to them. In recent years, there has been an increase in PAR approaches within education, yet there is still a need for greater methodological insight into this approach. In this project, which explored adolescents’ reading motivation and engagement, a young people's advisory panel was convened to ensure the perspectives and experiences of young people were central to the project. The panel consisted of 6 young people (13–15-years-old) from 3 geographically dispersed schools in Scotland. The panel worked with researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee and a national literacy organisation across one academic year to plan and design the project, carry out data collection, and support interpretation the findings. In this article, young peoples’ perspectives on their role and adult perspectives on the methodological approach of working with a young people's advisory panel on a reading research project are explored. Discussion of the benefits (e.g., challenging systems of power and privilege, producing outcomes which are more relevant to pupils), limitations (e.g., truly disrupting hierarchies of power), and considerations (e.g., planning participatory projects, including diverse and representative voices, and ‘bounded empowerment’) for researchers interested in convening youth advisory panels for educational research are provided to contribute towards the growing interest in PAR approaches in educational research