Spoken word classification in children and adults

Purpose: Preschool children often have difficulties in word classification, despite good speech perception and production. Some researchers suggest they represent words using phonetic features rather than phonemes. We examine whether there is a progression from feature based to phoneme based processing across age groups, and whether responses are consistent across tasks and stimuli. Method: In Study 1, 120 3 to 5 year old children completed three tasks assessing use of phonetic features in classification, with an additional 58 older children completing one of the three tasks. In Study 2, all of the children, together with an additional adult sample, completed a nonword learning task. Results: In all four tasks, children classified words sharing phonemes as similar. In addition, children regarded words as similar if they shared manner of articulation, particularly word-finally. Adults also showed this sensitivity to manner, but across the tasks there was a pattern of increasing use of phonemic information with age. Conclusions: Children tend to classify words as similar if they share phonemes or share manner of articulation word finally. Use of phonemic information becomes more common with age. These findings are in line with the theory that phonological representations become more detailed in the preschool years

Age and schooling effects on early literacy and phoneme awareness

Previous research on age and schooling effects is largely restricted to studies of children who begin formal schooling from the age of 6 and the measures of phoneme awareness used have typically lacked sensitivity for beginning readers. Our study addresses these issues by testing children aged 4-6 (first two years of formal schooling in the UK) on a sensitive dynamic measure of phoneme awareness and tests of early literacy. There were significant effects of both age and schooling on dynamic and static measures of phoneme awareness, word reading, spelling and letter-name knowledge but no significant age × time interactions. This indicates that older children within this age group generally outperform their younger classmates (although they do not make faster progress), and that this advantage is developed prior to the start of school

Sex and discipline differences in empathising, systemising and autistic symptomatology : evidence from a student population

Baron-Cohenʹs (2002) theory of autism suggests that deficits in theory of mind and weak central coherence in autism can be explained as features of an ‘extreme male brain’ in which empathising is weak and systemising is strong. The two studies presented investigate this theory by examining the relationships between theory of mind, central coherence, empathising, systemising and autistic-like symptomatology in a sample of undergraduates. Study 1 used 48 undergraduates in four equal groups of male and female science and humanities students. Consistent with the theory, there were sex differences in the expected directions on all tasks in the first study. Differences according to discipline were found only on the Block Design task. Individuals with the ‘male brain’ profile also tended to show higher levels of autistic symptomatology. There was no evidence of a link between empathising and social skills on one hand and systemising and central coherence on the other. In the second study, performance on the Mechanical Reasoning and the Social Skills Inventory tasks was compared with performance on the Baron‐Cohen Empathising and Systemising Quotients in a sub‐sample of 20 students from Study 1. Moderately significant correlations were found between the Systemising Quotient and the Mechanical Reasoning task and between the Empathising Quotient and the Social Skills Inventory. Findings are largely consistent with the distinction between empathising and systemising but raise some questions concerning the tasks used to measure these abilities

Speech and language difficulties in children with and without a family history of dyslexia

Comorbidity between SLI and dyslexia is well documented. Researchers have variously argued that dyslexia is a separate disorder from SLI, or that children with dyslexia show a subset of the difficulties shown in SLI. This study examines these hypotheses by assessing whether family history of dyslexia and speech and language difficulties are separable risk factors for literacy difficulties. Forty-six children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) and 36 children receiving speech therapy (SLT) were compared to 128 typically developing children. A substantial number (41.3%) of the children with FRD had received SLT. The nature of their difficulties did not differ in severity or form from those shown by the other children in SLT. However, both SLT and FRD were independent risk factors in predicting reading difficulties both concurrently and 6 months later. It is argued that the results are best explained in terms of Pennington's (2006) multiple deficits model

Early predictors of phonological and morphological awareness and the link with reading : evidence from children with different patterns of early deficit

This study examines the contribution of early phonological processing (PP) and language skills on later phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), as well as the links among PA, MA, and reading. Children 4–6 years of age with poor PP at the start of school showed weaker PA and MA 3 years later (age 7–9), regardless of their language skills. PA and phonological and morphological strategies predict reading accuracy, whereas MA predicts reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that children with poor early PP are more at risk of developing deficits in MA and PA than children with poor language. They also suggest that there is a direct link between PA and reading accuracy and between MA and reading comprehension that cannot be accounted for by strategy use at the word level

The development of phonological awareness in pre-school children

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Variability in auditory processing performance is associated with reading difficulties rather than with history of otitis media

The nature and cause of auditory processing deficits in dyslexic individuals have been debated for decades. Auditory processing deficits were argued to be the first step in a causal chain of difficulties, leading to difficulties in speech perception and thereby phonological processing and literacy difficulties. More recently, it has been argued that auditory processing difficulties may not be causally related to language and literacy difficulties. This study compares two groups who have phonological processing impairments for different reasons: dyslexia and a history of otitis media (OM). We compared their discrimination thresholds and response variability to chronological age- and reading age-matched controls, across three auditory processing tasks: frequency discrimination, rise-time discrimination and speech perception. Dyslexic children showed raised frequency discrimination thresholds in comparison with age-matched controls but did not differ from reading age-matched controls or individuals with a history of OM. There were no group differences on speech perception or rise-time tasks. For the dyslexic children, there was an association between phonological awareness and frequency discrimination response variability, but no association with thresholds. These findings are not consistent with a ‘causal chain’ explanation but could be accounted for within a multiple deficits view of literacy difficulties

An assessment of anxiety levels in dyslexic students in higher education

Background: It has long been hypothesized that children with learning disabilities, including dyslexia, may be highly vulnerable to emotional consequences such as anxiety. However, research has centred on school aged children. Aims: The present study aimed to clarify these findings with dyslexic students in higher education. Samples: 16 students with dyslexia were compared to 16 students with no history of learning difficulties. Methods: Students were asked to complete a verbal questionnaire concerning trait anxiety levels. They were then told that they would be given a timed reading test and their state anxiety levels were measured using the State‐Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1983). Finally their reading was assessed using the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Torgesen, Wagner & Rashotte, 1999). Results: Dyslexic students showed slower reading speeds than controls. They also had higher levels of state anxiety and elevated levels of academic and social, but not appearance anxiety. Conclusions: Dyslexic students in higher education show anxiety levels that are well above what is shown by students without learning difficulties. This anxiety is not limited to academic tasks but extends to many social situations. It is proposed that assessment of emotional well‐being should form part of the assessment of need for dyslexic students entering higher education

Separating the influences of prereading skills on early word and nonword reading

The essential first step for a beginning reader is to learn to match printed forms to phonological representations. For a new word, this is an effortful process where each grapheme must be translated individually (serial decoding). The role of phonological awareness in developing a decoding strategy is well known. We examined whether beginning readers recruit different skills depending on the nature of the words being read (familiar words vs. nonwords). Print knowledge, phoneme and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological short-term memory (STM), nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, auditory skills, and visual attention were measured in 392 prereaders 4 and 5 years of age. Word and nonword reading were measured 9 months later. We used structural equation modeling to examine the skills–reading relationship and modeled correlations between our two reading outcomes and among all prereading skills. We found that a broad range of skills were associated with reading outcomes: early print knowledge, phonological STM, phoneme awareness and RAN. Whereas all of these skills were directly predictive of nonword reading, early print knowledge was the only direct predictor of word reading. Our findings suggest that beginning readers draw most heavily on their existing print knowledge to read familiar words