Children's Decoding Research Articles

The unique contribution of reading motivation to reading comprehension increases from Grades 2 to 4 in Chinese children

BackgroundTo better understand the intricate science of reading development, both cognitive and affective factors must be taken into consideration. This developmental study aims to enrich the literature by exploring how reading motivation – an affective factor – contributes to reading comprehension in Chinese elementary schoolers, beyond well‐accepted cognitive‐based reading skills, such as decoding and vocabulary.MethodsWe used a cross‐sectional design with 420 native Mandarin‐Chinese‐speaking students (Grade 2: N = 95; Grade 3: N = 216; Grade 4: N = 109), with age‐appropriate materials to measure their decoding skills, vocabulary knowledge, reading motivation, and reading comprehension. Three sets of hierarchical regression analyses were run for the three grade samples to examine the unique contributions of reading motivation to reading comprehension while controlling children's demographic profiles, such as age and gender, and two cognitive‐based reading skills.ResultsWe replicated previous findings: children's decoding and vocabulary are robust predictors of reading achievement across Grades 2 to 4. Importantly, reading motivation contributed uniquely to reading comprehension in all three grades and explained an increasing amount of the variances in reading comprehension from Grades 2 to 4. Intrinsic reading motivation was critical in Grade 3, while extrinsic reading motivation became important in Grade 4.ConclusionsTaken together, our findings reveal the complexity of reading development and advance the existing cognitive‐based reading theories by including affective dimensions.

The reading-attention relationship: Variations in working memory network activity during single word decoding in children with and without dyslexia

This study utilized a neuroimaging task to assess working memory (WM) network recruitment during single word reading. Associations between WM and reading comprehension skills are well documented. Several converging models suggest WM may also contribute to foundational reading skills, but few studies have assessed this contribution directly. Two groups of children (77 developmental dyslexia (DD), 22 controls) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task to identify activation of a priori defined regions of the WM network. fMRI trials consisted of familiar word, pseudoword, and false font stimuli within a 1-back oddball task to assess how activation in the WM network differs in response to stimuli that can respectively be processed using word recognition, phonological decoding, or non-word strategies. Results showed children with DD recruited WM regions bilaterally in response to all stimulus types, whereas control children recruited left-lateralized WM regions during the pseudoword condition only. Group-level comparisons revealed activation differences in the defined WM network regions for false font and familiar word, but not pseudoword conditions. This effect was driven by increased activity in participants with DD in right hemisphere frontal, parietal, and motor regions despite poorer task performance. Findings suggest the WM network may contribute to inefficient decoding and word recognition strategies in children with DD.

“We Can Draw and Think About It Ourselves”: Putting Culture and Race in Phonics Reading Research

ABSTRACTYoung children of Color from minoritized communities can co‐author decodable stories using phonics skills they have been taught, their lived experiences, and home languages, including nondominant English languages, to develop decoding skills using student‐generated decodable readers. While traditional and curricular decodable readers are used during phonics instruction to support children's decoding development, they are written in White Mainstream English and may include diverse characters with experiences more familiar to the White dominant group of American society. Because there is a population of readers experiencing a gap between their identities and phonics instruction, there is an urgent need for their experiences to be improved. Building on my experiences as a primary grades teacher and researcher, I discuss a quantitative and qualitative study conducted in an urban second grade classroom where children of Color and I put culture and race into phonics instruction. Culturally relevant education and the language experience approach were used to advance children's decoding development using their funds of knowledge and existing language experiences which are often a part of their racial identities. By combining these approaches with co‐authorship, children of Color from minoritized communities were placed at the center of phonics instruction to receive more equitable educational opportunities while advancing their decoding skills as co‐authors of their decodable stories.

The role of letter knowledge acquisition ability on children's decoding and word identification: Evidence from an artificial orthography

BackgroundLetter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter‐sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial orthography learning paradigm to explore whether the rate of letter learning modulates children's reading and word identification skills.MethodsIn an initial training phase, 8‐year‐old Spanish children (N = 30) learned nine artificial letters and their corresponding sounds (two vowels and six consonants). The letter learning rate was set according to the number of attempts needed to name at least seven letters (i.e., 80% correct). These ranged from 1 to 4. In a second training phase, children visualized words made up of the trained letters while listening to their pronunciations. Some words included a context‐dependent syllable (i.e., leading to grapheme‐to‐phoneme inconsistency), and others had an inconsistent syllable (i.e., phoneme‐to‐grapheme inconsistency). The post‐test consisted of a reading aloud task and an orthographic‐choice task in which the target word was presented with a distractor equal to the target except for the substitution of a letter.ResultsChildren showed a high accuracy rate in the post‐test tasks, regardless of whether words contained context‐dependent or inconsistent syllables. Critically, the letter learning rate predicted both reading aloud and identification accuracy of words in the artificial orthography.ConclusionsWe provide evidence for the vital role of letter knowledge acquisition ability in children's decoding and word identification skills. Training children on this ability facilitates serial letter‐sound mapping and word identification skills. Artificial orthography paradigms are optimal for exploring children's potential to achieve specific literacy skills.

Creativity and its relationship with intelligence and reading skills in children: an exploratory study

Creativity, intelligence, and reading skills such as phonological awareness and decoding in reading can be critical to academic success, especially during childhood. Thus, this study aimed to characterize creativity, intelligence, phonological awareness, and reading decoding and verify possible relationships between creativity and these skills. The sample consisted of 75 children divided between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades of municipal public schools in the Brazilian context. The results indicated the gradual evolution of creativity, intelligence, phonological awareness, and reading decoding in children from the 1st to the 3rd year, especially for the performance of the 3rd year. Correlations between creativity with intelligence and reading skills were also evidenced for all three classes, with the 3rd year with stronger correlations, which are promising results for these relationships. The study of creativity is still a recent field for empirical investigations and deserves future investigations for a better understanding of these constructs in this population.

Neural decoding of emotional prosody in voice-sensitive auditory cortex predicts social communication abilities in children.

During social interactions, speakers signal information about their emotional state through their voice, which is known as emotional prosody. Little is known regarding the precise brain systems underlying emotional prosody decoding in children and whether accurate neural decoding of these vocal cues is linked to social skills. Here, we address critical gaps in the developmental literature by investigating neural representations of prosody and their links to behavior in children. Multivariate pattern analysis revealed that representations in the bilateral middle and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) divisions of voice-sensitive auditory cortex decode emotional prosody information in children. Crucially, emotional prosody decoding in middle STS was correlated with standardized measures of social communication abilities; more accurate decoding of prosody stimuli in the STS was predictive of greater social communication abilities in children. Moreover, social communication abilities were specifically related to decoding sadness, highlighting the importance of tuning in to negative emotional vocal cues for strengthening social responsiveness and functioning. Findings bridge an important theoretical gap by showing that the ability of the voice-sensitive cortex to detect emotional cues in speech is predictive of a child's social skills, including the ability to relate and interact with others.

Action Video Games Enhance Attentional Control and Phonological Decoding in Children with Developmental Dyslexia.

Reading acquisition is extremely difficult for about 5% of children because they are affected by a heritable neurobiological disorder called developmental dyslexia (DD). Intervention studies can be used to investigate the causal role of neurocognitive deficits in DD. Recently, it has been proposed that action video games (AVGs)—enhancing attentional control—could improve perception and working memory as well as reading skills. In a partial crossover intervention study, we investigated the effect of AVG and non-AVG training on attentional control using a conjunction visual search task in children with DD. We also measured the non-alphanumeric rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological decoding and word reading before and after AVG and non-AVG training. After both video game training sessions no effect was found in non-alphanumeric RAN and in word reading performance. However, after only 12 h of AVG training the attentional control was improved (i.e., the set-size slopes were flatter in visual search) and phonological decoding speed was accelerated. Crucially, attentional control and phonological decoding speed were increased only in DD children whose video game score was highly efficient after the AVG training. We demonstrated that only an efficient AVG training induces a plasticity of the fronto-parietal attentional control linked to a selective phonological decoding improvement in children with DD.

Semantic and Phonological Decoding in Children’s Orthographic Learning in Chinese

ABSTRACT In this study, we investigated if children build a print-to-meaning connection via the semantic radical – a mechanism we call semantic decoding – and its interaction with phonological decoding in orthographic learning of Chinese compound characters. Ninety-two Grade 4 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 16 pseudocharacters and were then exposed to their written forms in short stories. Half of the characters contained semantic radicals related to the taught meaning; the other half were unrelated. Half of the children learned the pseudocharacters’ regular pronunciations; the other half learned the irregular pronunciations. There was better orthographic learning of regular than irregular pseudocharacters across measures of spelling and orthographic choice. However, the effect of semantic decoding was not as unequivocal. The findings indicate that in Chinese, decoding via phonetic radicals underpins orthographic learning. Whereas, the effect of semantic decoding might depend more on the linguistic features of the radicals and the learning environments.

Grammatical Comprehension in Italian Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Language deficits represent one of the most relevant factors that determine the clinical phenotype of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The main aim of the research was to study the grammatical comprehension of children with ASD. A sample of 70 well-diagnosed children (60 boys and 10 girls; aged 4.9–8 years) were prospectively recruited. The results showed that language comprehension is the most impaired language domain in ASD. These findings have important clinical implications, since the persistence of grammatical receptive deficits may have a negative impact on social, adaptive and learning achievements. As for the grammatical profiles, persistent difficulties were found during the school-age years in morphological and syntactic decoding in children with relatively preserved cognitive and expressive language skills. These data and the lack of a statistically significant correlation between the severity of ASD symptoms and language skills are in line with the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) perspective that considers the socio-communication disorder as a nuclear feature of ASD and the language disorder as a specifier of the diagnosis and not as a secondary symptom anymore. The presence of receptive difficulties in school-age ASD children with relatively preserved non-verbal cognitive abilities provides important hints to establish rehabilitative treatments.

Kindergarten Impacts of a Preschool Language-Focused Intervention

Many preschool language-focused interventions attempt to boost language and literacy skills in young children at risk in these areas of development, though the long-term effects of such interventions are not well-established. This study investigated kindergarten language and reading skills, specifically the subcomponents of vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension, for children exposed to the language-focused intervention Learning Language and Loving It (LLLI; Weitzman & Greenberg, 2002) during preschool. End of kindergarten skills were examined, comparing children whose teachers implemented LLLI (n = 25) or business-as-usual (BAU) instruction (n = 24). Hierarchical linear modeling results showed the LLLI intervention to have significant effects on children's decoding and reading comprehension in kindergarten for children who had high levels of language skill at preschool, as compared to their counterparts in the BAU condition. Study findings therefore indicate that preschool language-focused interventions may primarily benefit children with higher skill levels. This suggests the need to explore avenues for addressing the needs of children with relatively low language skills during preschool and the eventual transition to reading.

Decoding skills in children with language impairment: contributions of phonological processing and classroom experiences.

Children with language impairment (LI) often demonstrate difficulties with word decoding. Research suggests that child-level (i.e., phonological processing) and environmental-level (i.e., classroom quality) factors both contribute to decoding skills in typically developing children. The present study examined the extent to which these same factors influence the decoding skills of children with LI, and the extent to which classroom quality moderates the relationship between phonological processing and decoding. Kindergarten and first-grade children with LI (n = 198) were assessed on measures of phonological processing and decoding twice throughout the academic year. Live classroom observations were conducted to assess classroom quality with respect to emotional support and instructional support. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that of the 3 phonological processing variables included, only phonological awareness significantly predicted spring decoding outcomes when controlling for children's age and previous decoding ability. One aspect of classroom quality (emotional support) was also predictive of decoding, but there was no significant interaction between classroom quality and phonological processing. This study provides further evidence that phonological awareness is an important skill to assess in children with LI and that high-quality classroom environments can be positively associated with children's decoding outcomes.

Segmental and suprasegmental properties in nonword repetition – An explorative study of the associations with nonword decoding in children with normal hearing and children with bilateral cochlear implants

This study explored nonword repetition (NWR) and nonword decoding in normal-hearing (NH) children and in children with bilateral cochlear implants (CI). Participants were 11 children, with CI, 5:0–7:11 years (M = 6.5 years), and 11 NH children, individually age-matched to the children with CI. This study fills an important gap in research, since it thoroughly describes detailed aspects of NWR and nonword decoding and their possible associations. All children were assessed after having practiced with a computer-assisted reading intervention with a phonics approach during four weeks. Results showed that NH children outperformed children with CI on the majority of aspects of NWR. The analysis of syllable number in NWR revealed that children with CI made more syllable omissions than did the NH children, and predominantly in prestressed positions. In addition, the consonant cluster analysis in NWR showed significantly more consonant omissions and substitutions in children with CI suggesting that reaching fine-grained levels of phonological processing was particularly difficult for these children. No significant difference was found for nonword-decoding accuracy between the groups, as measured by whole words correct and phonemes correct, but differences were observed regarding error patterns. In children with CI phoneme, deletions occurred significantly more often than in children with NH. The correlation analysis revealed that the ability to repeat consonant clusters in NWR had the strongest associations to nonword decoding in both groups. The absence of as frequent significant associations between NWR and nonword decoding in children with CI compared to children with NH suggest that these children partly use other decoding strategies to compensate for less precise phonological knowledge, for example, lexicalizations in nonword decoding, specifically, making a real word of a nonword.

Parental writing support and preschoolers’ early literacy, language, and fine motor skills

The current study examines the nature and variability of parents’ aid to preschoolers in the context of a shared writing task, as well as the relations between this support and children's literacy, vocabulary, and fine motor skills. In total, 135 preschool children (72 girls) and their parents (primarily mothers) in an ethnically diverse, middle-income community were observed while writing a semi-structured invitation for a pretend birthday party together. Children's phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, word decoding, vocabulary, and fine motor skills were also assessed. Results revealed that parents provided variable, but generally low-level, support for children's approximation of sound-symbol correspondence in their writing (i.e., graphophonemic support), as well as for their production of letter forms (i.e., print support). Parents frequently accepted errors rather than asking for corrections (i.e., demand for precision). Further analysis of the parent–child dyads (n=103) who wrote the child's name on the invitation showed that parents provided higher graphophonemic, but not print, support when writing the child's name than other words. Overall parental graphophonemic support was positively linked to children's decoding and fine motor skills, whereas print support and demand for precision were not related to any of the child outcomes. In sum, this study indicates that while parental support for preschoolers’ writing may be minimal, it is uniquely linked to key literacy-related outcomes in preschool.

Longitudinal Relations Between Parental Writing Support and Preschoolers' Language and Literacy Skills.

Parental writing support was examined over time and in relation to children's language and literacy skills. Seventy-seven parents and their preschoolers were videotaped writing an invitation together twice during one year. Parental writing support was coded at the level of the letter to document parents' graphophonemic support (letter-sound correspondence), print support (letter formation), and demand for precision (expectation for correcting writing errors). Parents primarily relied on only a couple print (i.e., parent writing the letter alone) and graphophonemic (i.e., saying the word as a whole, dictating letters as children write) strategies. Graphophonemic and print support in preschool predicted children's decoding skills, and graphophonemic support also predicted children's future phonological awareness. Neither type of support predicted children's vocabulary scores. Demand for precision occurred infrequently and was unrelated to children's outcomes. Findings demonstrate the importance of parental writing support for augmenting children's literacy skills.

Effects of Targeted Reading Instruction on Phonological Awareness and Phonic Decoding in Children with Down Syndrome

This research evaluated the effectiveness of reading instruction targeting oral reading and phonological awareness for children with Down syndrome (affecting chromosome 21). The participants were 7 children ranging in age from 2 years, 11 months to 10 years, 8 months. Each child acted as his/her own control, with assessments of language, cognition, phonological awareness, word and short-passage comprehension, and oral reading ability conducted on four occasions (initially, preintervention, postintervention and delayed postintervention) over approximately a 12-month period. The intervention was conducted over 10 weekly sessions and involved individual instruction. The postintervention assessment results provided evidence that phonic reading instruction was generally effective in improving reading skills and phonological awareness of children with Down syndrome.

Family Involvement and Educator Outreach in Head Start: Nature, Extent, and Contributions to Early Literacy Skills

Abstract The Head Start program endeavors to provide preschoolers with high-quality learning opportunities, in part through fostering family involvement. This exploratory study addressed the paucity of empirical research regarding the nature of educator outreach and family involvement in Head Start and their contributions to children's development of the academic and social foundations of literacy. Participants included 3,100 children and families enrolled in the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) study, their classroom teachers (n = 286), and their center directors (n = 222). Findings revealed that families regularly engaged in the learning and schooling of their children and that Head Start educators regularly reached out to families. Family involvement and educator outreach were selectively associated with children's decoding, vocabulary, and positive approaches to learning. This study clarifies how families and teachers bridge the home-school gap in Head Start preschool programs an...

Role of gender and linguistic diversity in word decoding development

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of gender and linguistic diversity in the growth of Dutch word decoding skills throughout elementary school for a representative sample of children living in the Netherlands. Following a longitudinal design, the children's decoding abilities for (1) regular CVC words, (2) complex monosyllabic words with consonant clusters in prevocalic and postvocalic position, and (3) polysyllabic words were assessed on two occasions during every grade. The results showed substantial growth across grade for all of the word decoding measures. Growth curve analyses showed a quadratic rather than a linear growth curve to optimally model the children's word decoding development. Small but significant effects of gender and linguistic diversity were observed: Girls generally did better than boys — mainly on the regular CVC word patterns. And children learning to read in Dutch as a first language generally did better than children learning to read Dutch as a second language — mainly on polysyllabic words. From a structural point of view, the development of word decoding in the different subgroups turned out to be highly comparable. Irrespective of gender and linguistic diversity, the three measures of word decoding strongly intercorrelated but also showed some unique variance. Moreover, a high degree of autoregression applied to the children's word decoding development over the school grades.

Connaissance du nom et du son des lettres, habiletés métaphonémiques et capacités de décodage en grande section de maternelle

This study examined the specific implication of letter-name knowledge in reading acquisition on 5-year-old kindergarten children. Several studies underlined the importance of both phonological and orthographic skills (letters and grapho-phonological associations’ knowledge developed during reading acquisition). So, we focused on the link between those different early abilities and on their links with reading acquisition during school year. Thus, at the beginning and at the end of the year, we proposed to 40 children metaphonemic tasks (phoneme identification in initial and final position in the words), letter-sound and letter-name knowledge tasks (naming and identification) and a pseudo-words decoding task. In addition, to access letter-name knowledge, two types of measurements were proposed: an accuracy measure and a speed one. Mean number of correct responses and reaction times were collected by children and analysed too. Results show that letter-name knowledge could play a part in metaphonemic abilities development and in letter-sound associations’ discovery and acquisition, at the beginning of the year. Thanks to those skills improvement, letter-name knowledge could have an indirect impact on later children's decoding skills. Furthermore, the direct link, already observed at the beginning of the year, between letter-name knowledge and decoding skills still exists in April. At last, analyses on letter-name knowledge access time show that the more children name an important number of letters, the more they do it quickly. These results could mean that a certain level of letter-name knowledge have to be reach before children could use this knowledge automatically. All together, results confirm the importance of good letter-name knowledge in the first stages of reading acquisition. We also suggest taking into account some clues of letter-name knowledge's automatic use to better understand reading acquisition processes.

Cerebral laterality for phonemic and prosodic cue decoding in children with autism

This study examined the cerebral functional lateralization, from a phonological perspective, in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children (TDC). With near infrared spectroscopy, we measured auditory evoked-responses in the temporal areas to phonemic and prosodic contrasts in word contexts. The results of TDC showed stronger left-dominant and right-dominant responses to phonemic and prosodic differences, respectively. Furthermore, although ASD children displayed similar tendencies, the functional asymmetry for phonemic changes was relatively weak, suggesting less-specialized left-brain functions. The typical asymmetry for the prosodic condition was further discussed in terms of acoustic-physical perceptual ability of ASD children. The study revealed differential neural recruitment in decoding phonetic cues between ASD children and TDC and verified the applicability of near infrared spectroscopy as a suitable neuroimaging method for children with developmental disorders.

Computer Speech-Based Remediation for Reading Disabilities: The Size of Spelling-to-Sound Unit in a Transparent Orthography

This study was designed to assess the effects of four reading-training procedures for children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography, with the aim of examining the effects of different spelling-to-sound units in computer speech-based reading. We selected a sample of 83 Spanish children aged between 7 years 1 month and 10 years 6 months (M = 105.2, SD = 7.8) whose pseudoword reading performance was below the 25th percentile and IQ > 90. The participants were randomly assigned to five groups: (a) the whole-word training group (WW) (n = 17), (b) the syllable training group (S)(n = 16), (c) the onset-rime training group (OR) (n = 17), (d) the phoneme training group (P) (n = 15), and (e) the untrained control group (n = 18). Children were pre- and post-tested in word recognition, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, and orthographic and phonological tasks. The results indicate that experimental groups who participated in the phoneme and syllable conditions improved their word recognition in comparison with the control group. In addition, dyslexics who participated in the phoneme, syllable, and onset-rime conditions made a greater number of requests during computer-based word reading under conditions that required extensive phonological computation (low frequency words and long words). Reading time, however, was greater for long words in the phoneme group during computer-based reading. These results suggest the importance of training phonological processes in improving word decoding in children with dyslexia who learn in a consistent orthography.