Rapid automatized naming skills of children with intellectual disability

Catherine Martinet,Anne-Françoise de Chambrier,Rachel Sermier Dessemontet,Michel Fayol

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06944

Abstract

BackgroundA deficit in Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), acknowledged to be linked to dyslexia, has rarely been investigated as a potential explanation of the reading difficulties that children with intellectual disability (ID) often face. The existing studies mainly focused on adolescent or adults with ID matched to typically developing (TD) children on verbal mental age, or used a single RAN task. AimsThe aim of this study was to compare the RAN pattern and skills of children with ID and low reading skills to the ones of TD children with matched reading skills. Method30 children with mild to moderate ID with mixed etiology (M = 9.4 years-old) were pair-matched to 30 TD children (M = 4.3 years-old) on phonological awareness- and reading-level. They were all administered color, object, finger, and vowel RAN tasks. Outcomes and resultsResults showed that children with ID had more domain-specific RAN skills and were largely slower in most of the RAN tasks than their younger TD peers. Conclusions and implicationsThis suggests that a deficit in RAN should be added to the explanations of their frequent reading difficulties, which might open new remediation possibilities.

Highlights

In the past decades, the processes underlying reading acquisition have been amply studied among typically developing (TD) children and among children facing learning disabilities
This study examined the Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) skills of 6to 12-year-old individuals with intellectual disability (ID) with very low reading skills on four RAN tasks relative to the ones of TD children matched on PAand reading-level, which has not yet been done
When RAN skills were investigated among children with ID with a comparison group of TD children, this was only done through a single RAN task, preventing the study of the RAN developmental pattern

Summary

Introduction

The processes underlying reading acquisition have been amply studied among typically developing (TD) children and among children facing learning disabilities. A deficit in Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), acknowledged to be linked to dyslexia, has rarely been investigated as a potential explanation of the reading difficulties that children with intellectual disability (ID) often face. Method: 30 children with mild to moderate ID with mixed etiology (M 1⁄4 9.4 years-old) were pair-matched to 30 TD children (M 1⁄4 4.3 years-old) on phonological awareness- and reading-level. They were all administered color, object, finger, and vowel RAN tasks. Conclusions and implications: This suggests that a deficit in RAN should be added to the explanations of their frequent reading difficulties, which might open new remediation possibilities

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion