Cost-effective prediction of reading difficulties.

Auditory temporal processing, reading, and phonological awareness among aging adults

Background. Understanding the factors that influence language recovery in aphasia is important for improving prognosis and treatment. Chronic comprehension impairments in Wernicke’s aphasia (WA) are associated with impairments in auditory and phonological processing, compounded by semantic and executive difficulties. This study investigated whether the recovery of auditory, phonological, semantic, or executive factors underpins the recovery from WA comprehension impairments by charting changes in the neuropsychological profile from the subacute to the chronic phase. Method. This study used a prospective, longitudinal observational design. Twelve WA participants with superior temporal lobe lesions were recruited 2 months post–stroke onset (2 MPO). Language comprehension was measured alongside a neuropsychological profile of auditory, phonological, and semantic processing and phonological short-term memory and nonverbal reasoning at 3 poststroke time points: 2.5, 5, and 9 MPO. Results. Language comprehension displayed a strong and consistent recovery between 2.5 and 9 MPO. Improvements were also seen for slow auditory temporal processing, phonological short-term memory, and semantic processing but not for rapid auditory temporal, spectrotemporal, and phonological processing. Despite their lack of improvement, rapid auditory temporal processing at 2.5 MPO and phonological processing at 5 MPO predicated comprehension outcomes at 9 MPO. Conclusions. These results indicate that recovery of language comprehension in WA can be predicted from fixed auditory processing in the subacute stage. This suggests that speech comprehension recovery in WA results from reorganization of the remaining language comprehension network to enable the residual speech signal to be processed more efficiently, rather than partial recovery of underlying auditory, phonological, or semantic processing abilities.

The aim of this study was to examine if specific skills that are developed during preschool years could predict the reading performance in the first and second grade of primary school. Two hundred and eighty-seven children participated in this longitudinal study. At the kindergarten level, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatised naming, phonological short-term memory, auditory processing, motor skills and oral language were evaluated. Reading performance was evaluated in Grades 1 and 2 of the primary school. Results showed that not only total reading performance, but the accuracy and the fluency of reading as well, are predicted in the first grade of school by the PA and the phonological memory scores during kindergarten. Oral language plays the most important role in the prediction of text comprehension. Total reading performance and fluency of reading in the second grade were predicted by the PA and the phonological memory scores. In this grade, the PA, the phonological memory and the copy of shapes seem to be important for the accuracy of reading. Our results suggest that the utilisation of such early evidence through intervention programmes at the preschool age and during the first school years could contribute to the prevention of possible reading problems in school children.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Dyslexia frequently co-occur. Many studies suggest that children with Dyslexia may also struggle with oral language skills, while those with DLD may also face challenges in word decoding. Both groups of children typically exhibit deficits in phonological processing [phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), verbal short-term memory (VSTM)] and verbal working memory (VWM). Despite the increasing number of comparative studies, few have systematically examined these overlaps in children at the early stages of literacy acquisition, and few studies have systematically assessed all oral language subsystems. This study investigates: (a) differences and similarities among children with DLD, children at Risk of Dyslexia (RfD), and typically developing children (TD) in phonological processing (phonological awareness—implicit and explicit—VSTM, RAN), VWM, oral language, and word decoding; (b) patterns of performance across groups; and (c) correlations between phonological processing and VWM skills with oral language and word decoding. The participants were 45 first graders (Mage = 6.8), equally divided into three groups (DLD, RfD, and TD children). Both special groups (DLD, RfD) performed significantly worse than the TD group across nearly all measurements. DLD children showed pronounced oral language and VSTM deficits, while RfD children primarily struggled with decoding and explicit phonological awareness. Group-specific correlations emerged. The findings are discussed in light of the theoretical models of the relationship between DLD and Dyslexia taking into account the specific developmental stage.

Auditory processing and speech perception in children with specific language impairment: Relations with oral language and literacy skills

This study investigates the linguistic processing and non-linguistic cognitive abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without reading difficulties and examines the relationship between these skills and reading. There were 72 Italian-speaking children: 18 monolingual good readers (MONO-GR, Mage = 10;4), 19 monolingual poor readers (MONO-PR, Mage = 10;3), 21 bilingual good readers (BI-GR, Mage = 10;6), and 16 bilingual poor readers (BI-PR, Mage = 10;6). All bilingual children spoke Italian as their L2. Children completed a battery of standardized Italian reading tests, language-dependent tasks: nonword repetition (NWR), sentence repetition (SR), and phonological awareness (PA), and language-independent tasks: timing anticipation, beat synchronization, inhibition control, auditory reaction time, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Poor readers scored below good readers on the language-dependent tasks, including NWR, PA, and SR. Beat synchronization was the only language-independent task sensitive to reading ability, with poor readers showing greater variability than good readers in tapping to fast rhythms. SR was the only task influenced by language experience as bilinguals underperformed monolinguals on the task. Moreover, there were weak to moderate correlations between performance on some language-dependent tasks (NWR, PA), language-independent tasks (inhibition control, RAN), and reading measures. Performance on the experimental tasks (except for RAN) was not associated with the length of exposure to Italian. The results highlight the potential of NWR, PA, SR, and beat synchronization tasks in identifying the risk of dyslexia in bilingual populations. Future research is needed to validate these findings and to establish the tasks' diagnostic accuracy.

Learning to read transforms lives. Reading contributes to knowledge acquisition, cultural engagement, and success in the school. The unequal distribution of literacy skills in a society is associated with economic and social inequalities as a result, children with a poor foundation in literacy before entering formal schooling are more likely to struggle academically and to drop out of school. For these reasons, there has been an intense scientific interest for decades in understanding how children learn to read. It is well established that in the early stages of reading development, phonological awareness, letter name-sounds knowledge, and the naming speed are three independent longitudinal predictors of children’s later word-reading skills in alphabetic-writing systems. Phonological awareness constitutes the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds of their own language, meanwhile letter knowledge promotes the discovery of systematic relationships between writing and oral language. As early readers develop some level of phonological awareness and some level of letter knowledge, they can recognize written words through phonological recoding processes, in which graphemes are recoded as phonemes and assembled to pronounce words. In addition, rapid naming expresses the speed at which phonological information is accessed from a graphic label. Phonological processing and letter knowledge are powerfully affected by the experience, stimulation, and support that children receive before beginning formal education. Most children acquire these abilities relatively effortlessly during early childhood. However, there is a significant number of children in Latin America who experience difficulties in their pre-literacy skills development. This study examined the cognitive profiles of a total of 50 Uruguayan preschoolers from different socioeconomic backgrounds from two public schools in Montevideo, Uruguay. Twenty-six children from low-income households were compared to peers from middle-income. At the end of the pre-schooling period (time 1) receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter name-sounds knowledge, and object naming speed tests were administered to children. One year later (time 2), word -reading of a subgroup of children was measured. Significant correlations were observed between all predictors at time 1; between predictors at time 1 and word reading at time 2; and between all measured abilities and socioeconomic status. Comparative analysis between children of different socioeconomic status showed that children growing up in poverty contexts performed more poorly than their peers from middle-income families in all the tests. Nonetheless, both groups performed poorly in word reading. Descriptive statistics indicated that, out of a total of 26 words, low SES children correctly read a total of 7 words per minute, and medium SES children a total of 14 words. Finally, regression analyses indicated that phonological awareness contributed 30 % variance in predicting the total score achieved in a reading-word test in children of low-income families, meanwhile letter name knowledge contributed 74 % variance in predicting the total score achieved in a reading-word test in their peers from middle-income families. In general terms, results of pre-reading skills and reading performance seem to indicate that children of different socioeconomic status use different word recognition strategies according to their level of letter-knowledge of and phonological processing. Discussion considers international literature pointing out that children who enter elementary school with limited reading-related skills are unlikely to be able to keep pace with their peers. These findings warn about the importance to elaborate systematic and high-quality educational proposals to try to reduce the gap in reading development for children from low-income families. Developing literacy and language skills before formal schooling sets a child up for success in school and life. Results also suggest the importance of analyzing the variables that affect reading development in populations that are not the majority described. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.5

Introduction: Reading impairment in children with dyslexia stems from either a phonological awareness deficit or a deficit in rapid automatized naming. Both deficits constitute the double deficit hypothesis of dyslexia. The aim of the present study was to assess phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming in a group of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia and to correlate their performance in phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming with reading fluency (accuracy and comprehension) scores. Method: Participants were 23 children with a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and 27 typically-developing children with no other learning difficulties or dyslexia. All children were monolingual speakers of Greek and they were administered a naming speed test, a fluency test, a phonological awareness test and reading accuracy and comprehension tasks. Results: Students with dyslexia scored worse in most phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading fluency measures in comparison to their non-dyslexic peers. In addition, students with dyslexia needed more time to complete the rapid automatized naming tests. Positive correlations were found between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading fluency tests for both groups of students. Specifically, rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness explained 9.3% and 21.8%, respectively, of the variance in the reading fluency of students with dyslexia, while the respective contributions of rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness to the reading fluency for non-dyslexic students were 2% and 9.3%, respectively. Discussion and Conclusion: Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming can be reliable predictors of reading fluency even in orthographically consistent languages (i.e., Greek), offering support to the double deficit hypothesis. In addition, combining phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming tests seems to be a quick and reliable way to early identify children at risk of reading difficulties in the first grades of primary school.

In a longitudinal study, development of word reading fluency and spelling were followed for almost 8 years. In a group of 115 students (65 girls, 50 boys) acquiring the phonologically transparent German orthography, prediction measures (letter knowledge, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and nonverbal IQ) were assessed at the beginning of Grade 1; reading fluency and spelling were tested at the end of Grade 1 as well as in Grades 4 and 8. Reading accuracy was close to ceiling in all reading assessments, such that reading fluency was not heavily influenced by differences in reading accuracy. High stability was observed for word reading fluency development. Of the dysfluent readers in Grade 1, 70% were still poor readers in Grade 8. For spelling, children who at the end of Grade 1 still had problems translating spoken words into phonologically plausible letter sequences developed problems with orthographic spelling later on. The strongest specific predictors were rapid automatized naming for reading fluency and phonological awareness for spelling. Word recognition speed was a relevant and highly stable indicator of reading skills and the only indicator that discriminated reading skill levels in consistent orthographies. Its long-term development was more strongly influenced by early naming speed than by phonological awareness.

Background and ObjectivesA deficit in phonological processing abilities has been hypothesized as a cause of reading deficits among poor readers, but the precise etiology of this deficit is still unknown. Many studies have investigated the relation of auditory processing and speech perception with phonological processing, while the relation between these are not well understood. Thus, the present study was carried out to investigate the relation between these abilities among poor readers.Subjects and MethodsA total of 20 children between 7-12 years of age participated in the study. Among these 10 were typically developing children and 10 were poor readers. Auditory processing, speech perception in noise and phonological processing skills were assessed in both the groups.ResultsAuditory processing was not significantly different between children in both the groups. In contrast, phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory and rapid automatized naming, which reflect phonological processing, and speech perception in noise were found to be significantly affected in poor readers. In addition, the results showed a significant correlation between phonological processing and speech perception in noise.ConclusionsThe present study found a significant relationship between speech perception in noise and phonological processing, while there was no relationship between auditory processing and phonological processing. This finding suggests that poor speech perception among poor readers may be one of the contributing factors for phonological processing deficits, which in turn leads to reading difficulties.

In order to provide effective intervention for children with specific language impairment (SLI), it is crucial that there is an understanding of the underlying deficit in SLI. This study utilized a battery of phonological processing tasks to compare the phonological processing skills of children with SLI to typically-developing peers matched for age or language. The children with SLI had significantly poorer performance than age-matched peers on measures of phonological representations, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonological short-term memory, and one measure of working memory. Of particular significance, the SLI group also demonstrated significantly weaker performance than language-matched peers on one measure of phonological representations, and one measure of working memory. The findings provide some support for a phonological processing account of SLI and highlight the utility of using tasks that draw on a comprehensive model of speech processing to profile and consider children's phonological processing skills in detail.

It is well established that phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks reliably predict children’s developing word reading abilities, across a wide range of languages. However, existing research has not yet demonstrated unequivocally whether RAN and PA are independently and causally linked to reading, nor fully explored the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Most existing research has assessed PA and RAN in children who may already have some reading skill, making direction of influence hard to ascertain. To address this, the current longitudinal research initially assessed RAN and PA in a very young sample of 91 English children (mean age: 3;11; SD = 3.7 months), demonstrated to be non-readers. Children were reassessed on RAN, PA, and word-level reading, 18 months (Time 2) and then a further year later (Time 3). To explore underlying mechanisms, separate measures of reading accuracy and fluency were taken, and reading tasks varied according to the extent to which they required alphabetic decoding and lexical, orthographic knowledge. Path analyses revealed that from Time 1 to Time 2 both RAN and PA predicted word reading, indicating temporal precedence, though there was some degree of reciprocity in these relationships. However, by Time 3, while RAN still predicted accuracy and fluency of reading, PA only predicted reading accuracy. Furthermore, findings suggested that while RAN was robustly related to both alphabetic decoding and lexical, orthographic aspects of reading, PA’s relationship was restricted to alphabetic decoding accuracy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

BackgroundThe relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading has been examined extensively, but there is still a question as to the reason for the relationship. To reduce involvement of alphanumeric and vocabulary knowledge in RAN, and to possibly reduce phonological demands, researchers have suggested using the RAN sizes that have only two items, that is, naming shapes according to two sizes: ‘little’ or ‘big’. However, despite the RAN sizes advantages, as far as we know, this test is not widely used. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether RAN sizes in kindergarten predict reading speed and accuracy toward the end of first grade among Hebrew speaking children.MethodsA total of 113 Hebrew‐speaking children were assessed twice. In preschool, we collected matrix reasoning, phonological awareness and RAN sizes data. In first grade, these data were recollected along with reading data.ResultsKindergarten RAN sizes accounted for 4% of the variance in reading accuracy and 4% of the variance in reading speed. Phonological awareness accounted for 4% of the variance in reading accuracy only. In first grade, RAN sizes explained 19% of the variance in reading speed, with no significant contribution to accuracy. Phonological awareness still explained 4% of the variance in accuracy.ConclusionsThe results from the current study support the claim that RAN is a unique longitudinal predictor of early reading, over and above phonological awareness. Moreover, rapid size naming may be used to test RAN with less reliance on alphanumeric and vocabulary knowledge. Finally, RAN sizes may be used to predict reading speed in Hebrew.HighlightsWhat is already known about this topic Two of the main precursors of word reading ability are phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). RAN of digits and letters is more strongly related to reading than RAN of colours and objects. The relationship between RAN and reading depends on orthographic regularity. What this paper adds RAN in kindergarten predicts speed and accuracy of reading pointed Hebrew in first grade. Among Hebrew‐speaking children, by the end of first grade, PA contributed a significant unique variance to reading accuracy and RAN sizes contributed a significant unique variance to reading speed. Implications for theory, policy or practice RAN sizes can be used when less reliance on alphanumeric and vocabulary knowledge is needed. Among kindergarten and first grade Hebrew‐speaking children, RAN sizes can be used to predict reading speed.

Objectives: This study aimed to examine the phonological processing and reading abilities of elementary school-aged children with and without cleft palate (CP).Methods: The participants were 10 children with CP and 12 typically developing children in the first to the second grades of elementary school. All children with CP in the study were identified with speech and language development problems during preschool age and were recommended speech and language therapy. The performances of phonological processing were measured in terms of phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme awareness), phonological memory (nonword repetition, digit span and backward digit span), and rapid automatized naming. The reading abilities were also measured in terms of decoding, reading fluency and reading comprehension. The correlations among vocabulary, articulation, and phonological processing and reading ability were examined.Results: Children with CP showed significantly lower performances in phonological awareness of syllable level and nonword repetition than typically developing children. Also, significant group differences were seen in all decoding and reading comprehension tasks except reading fluency. The results showed that nonword repetition performances of children with CP were highly correlated with receptive vocabulary and percentage of consonants correct.Conclusion: This study confirmed that school-aged children with CP who showed speech sound disorders in preschool age are likely to have difficulties in phonological processing and reading. Therefore, this study suggested that comprehensive evaluation of phonological processing skills should be performed more actively in preschool children with CP who show speech sound disorders, and intervention should continue to improve reading skills for school age.

Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been shown to be powerful predictors of reading achievement across many languages. However, literature remains unclear: (a) whether RAN is independent of PA, (b) about the specific influences of PA and RAN on reading and spelling, and (c) about the efficacy of a RAN intervention. This study aims to address these issues by means of an intervention design. Precisely, the objectives are (a) to determine whether training one competence involves or not an effect on the other, (b) to examine whether each intervention based on oral abilities (PA vs. RAN) could improve word reading and word spelling performances, and (c) to assess the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention. Thirty-six French-speaking second graders, from two Belgian elementary schools, were divided into two groups, and received either a PA- or a RAN-objects’ intervention. Twenty-five-minute lessons took place at school twice a week over a period of 2 months. Both groups were compared on multiple experimental measures (PA, RAN, word reading, and word spelling), before and immediately after the intervention, and 6 months later. Results showed specific efficacy of the two interventions, with participants trained in one ability outperforming those from the other group on this specific ability at post-test. Moreover, the PA intervention revealed transfer effects on the sub-lexical processes of spelling, while the RAN intervention enhanced word reading speed. Finally, the results demonstrated the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention for the first time. These findings provide a new piece of evidence showing the independence of PA and RAN, each process influencing the acquisition of literacy skills in a different way. The efficacy and the specific transfer effects of both interventions open up new perspectives for prevention and targeted remediation of reading disabilities.