Reading Acquisition (reading + acquisition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Visual spatial attention and speech segmentation are both impaired in preschoolers at familial risk for developmental dyslexia

DYSLEXIA, Issue 3 2010
Andrea Facoetti
Abstract Phonological skills are foundational of reading acquisition and impaired phonological processing is widely assumed to characterize dyslexic individuals. However, reading by phonological decoding also requires rapid selection of sublexical orthographic units through serial attentional orienting, and recent studies have shown that visual spatial attention is impaired in dyslexic children. Our study investigated these different neurocognitive dysfunctions, before reading acquisition, in a sample of preschoolers including children with (N=20) and without (N=67) familial risk for developmental dyslexia. Children were tested on phonological skills, rapid automatized naming, and visual spatial attention. At-risk children presented deficits in both visual spatial attention and syllabic segmentation at the group level. Moreover, the combination of visual spatial attention and syllabic segmentation scores was more reliable than either single measure for the identification of at-risk children. These findings suggest that both visuo-attentional and perisylvian-auditory dysfunctions might adversely affect reading acquisition, and may offer a new approach for early identification and remediation of developmental dyslexia. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Implications of articulatory awareness in learning literacy in english as a second language

DYSLEXIA, Issue 2 2004
Jun Yamada
Abstract The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby suggesting that poor articulatory awareness is not unique to dyslexia but rather to reading difficulty in general, and (2) There was a weak but significant positive correlation between articulatory awareness and English reading ability. Implications are that while articulatory awareness may not function only in dyslexia, it is embedded in a complex information-processing network involving reading acquisition. Specifically, a revised Articulatory Awareness Deficit Hypothesis is formulated, which states that poor articulatory awareness is part of articulation difficulty associated with poor phonological awareness that in turn tends to underlie dyslexia and reading difficulty. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


What is orthographic processing skill and how does it relate to word identification in reading?

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 4 2006
Jennifer S. Burt
The role of orthographic processing skill (OPS) in reading has aroused the interest of many developmental researchers. Despite observations by Vellutino that current measures of OPS primarily are indicators of reading (and spelling) achievement, OPS commonly is distinguished from both reading achievement and phonological skills. An analysis of the reading literature indicates that there is no theory in which OPS meaningfully plays a role as an independent skill or causal factor in reading acquisition. Rather, OPS indexes fluent word identification and spelling knowledge, and there is no evidence to refute the hypothesis that its development relies heavily on phonological processes. Results of correlational studies and reader group comparisons (a) cannot inform about on-line processes and (b) may be parsimoniously explained in terms of phonological skills, reading experience, unmeasured language abilities and methodological factors, without implying that OPS is an aetiologically separable skill. Future research would profit from the investigation in experimental studies of the nature and development of orthographic representations. [source]


Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades?

THE JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY AND ALLIED DISCIPLINES, Issue 1 2004
Frank R. Vellutino
We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability (,dyslexia') over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such difficulties. The evidence suggests that inadequate facility in word identification due, in most cases, to more basic deficits in alphabetic coding is the basic cause of difficulties in learning to read. We next discuss hypothesized deficiencies in reading-related cognitive abilities as underlying causes of deficiencies in component reading skills. The evidence in these areas suggests that, in most cases, phonological skills deficiencies associated with phonological coding deficits are the probable causes of the disorder rather than visual, semantic, or syntactic deficits, although reading difficulties in some children may be associated with general language deficits. Hypothesized deficits in general learning abilities (e.g., attention, association learning, cross-modal transfer etc.) and low-level sensory deficits have weak validity as causal factors in specific reading disability. These inferences are, by and large, supported by research evaluating the biological foundations of dyslexia. Finally, evidence is presented in support of the idea that many poor readers are impaired because of inadequate instruction or other experiential factors. This does not mean that biological factors are not relevant, because the brain and environment interact to produce the neural networks that support reading acquisition. We conclude with a discussion of the clinical implications of the research findings, focusing on the need for enhanced instruction. [source]