Differences In Reading Fluency Research Articles

Attentional modulation of neural sound tracking in children with and without dyslexia.

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech perception difficulties in noisy environments in dyslexic readers are also suggestive of the putative contribution of auditory attention to reading development. To date, it is unclear whether non-speech selective attention and its underlying neural mechanisms are impaired in children with dyslexia and to which extent these deficits relate to individual reading and speech perception abilities in suboptimal listening conditions. In this EEG study, we assessed non-speech sustained auditory selective attention in 106 7-to-12-year-old children with and without dyslexia. Children attended to one of two tone streams, detecting occasional sequence repeats in the attended stream, and performed a speech-in-speech perception task. Results show that when children directed their attention to one stream, inter-trial-phase-coherence at the attended rate increased in fronto-central sites; this, in turn, was associated with better target detection. Behavioural and neural indices of attention did not systematically differ as a function of dyslexia diagnosis. However, behavioural indices of attention did explain individual differences in reading fluency and speech-in-speech perception abilities: both these skills were impaired in dyslexic readers. Taken together, our results show that children with dyslexia do not show group-level auditory attention deficits but these deficits may represent a risk for developing reading impairments and problems with speech perception in complex acoustic environments. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Non-speech sustained auditory selective attention modulates EEG phase coherence in children with/without dyslexia Children with dyslexia show difficulties in speech-in-speech perception Attention relates to dyslexic readers' speech-in-speech perception and reading skills Dyslexia diagnosis is not linked to behavioural/EEG indices of auditory attention.

Cognitive Correlates of Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Aged Children.

Previous studies have showed that reading fluency is strongly associated with cognitive skills, including rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, and so on. However, these studies are largely based on alphabetic languages, and it remains unclear which cognitive factors contribute to the development of reading fluency in logographic Chinese, a language in which the graphic forms map onto morphemes (meaning) rather than phonemes. In Study 1, we tested 179 Chinese children aged 6 to 9 on a set of cognitive tasks as well as for word reading accuracy and sentence reading fluency. The results showed that rapid naming, writing fluency, and phonological awareness significantly predicted reading fluency in both beginning and intermediate readers. In addition, while the contribution of rapid naming and writing fluency increased with grades, the effect of phonological awareness decreased. In Study 2, we examined the role of visual crowding in reading fluency in a subgroup of 86 children and found that visual crowding accounted for the unique variance of individual differences in reading fluency. The findings reflect both universal and language-specific cognitive correlates of reading fluency and provide important implications for potentially effective treatment for individuals suffering from Chinese reading disabilities, particularly in terms of reading fluency.

Post-treatment reading development in children with dyslexia: the challenge remains.

The goal of this study was to examine the post-treatment development of word and pseudoword accuracy and fluency and its cognitive and linguistic predictors in Dutch children with dyslexia compared with typical readers in the upper primary grades. Word and pseudoword reading accuracy and fluency were assessed at the start and end of grade 5 and at the end of grade 6. Phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and visual attention span were assessed at the start of grade 5. Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that children with dyslexia were less accurate than typical readers and showed very little improvements in accuracy over time. They were also less fluent and showed less growth in reading fluency than typical readers. The children with dyslexia did improve more in word reading fluency than in pseudoword reading fluency over time. Visual attention span and phonological awareness predicted reading accuracy development in typical readers, while rapid naming predicted individual differences in reading fluency in children with dyslexia. It can be concluded that in the upper grades, children with dyslexia not only struggled with fluent reading, but they also still struggled with accurate reading in a relatively transparent orthography like Dutch, even after they had received a reading intervention to remediate their reading difficulties.

The repeated name penalty effect in children's natural reading: Evidence from eye tracking.

We report data from an eye tracking experiment on the repeated name penalty effect in 9-year-old children and young adults. The repeated name penalty effect is informative for the study of children's reading because it allows conclusions about children's ability to direct attention to discourse-level processing cues during reading. We presented children and adults simple three-sentence stories with a single referent, which was referred to by an anaphor-either a pronoun or a repeated name-downstream in the text. The anaphor was either near or far from the antecedent. We found a repeated name penalty effect in early processing for children as well as adults, suggesting that beginning readers are already susceptible to discourse-level expectations of anaphora during reading. Furthermore, children's reading was more influenced by the distance of anaphor and antecedent than adults', which we attribute to differences in reading fluency and the resulting cognitive load during reading.

Why do boys and girls perform differently on PISA Reading in Finland? The effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour, leisure reading and homework activity

The present study examined gender gap in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Reading and mediators of the gender gap in a Finnish sample (n = 1,309). We examined whether the gender gap in PISA Reading performance can be understood via the effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour (mastery orientation and task‐avoidant behaviour) or the amount of time spent with leisure reading and homework. Girls outperformed boys in all measures except for achievement behaviour. The models explaining PISA Reading were not different: For boys and girls, reading fluency, mastery orientation, leisure book reading and homework explained the variance in PISA Reading scores. The gender effect on PISA Reading was, however, for the most part mediated by differences in reading fluency. These findings suggest that while mastery orientation, homework activity and leisure book reading are concurrent predictors of PISA Reading over and above reading fluency, they do not explain gender difference.

Effects of Culturally Relevant Materials on the Reading Performance of Second-Grade African Americans with Reading/Special Education Risk

The use of culturally relevant material for urban students with special education/reading risk is frequently promoted in the literature; however, the empirical evidence appears limited. This study included eight African American urban second-grade students who scored within the at-risk range on the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency measure. The students read culturally relevant and non-culturally relevant passages to assess differences in reading fluency, comprehension, and passage likeability. Results from an alternating treatment design and the Wilcoxon test indicated that students were more fluent on passages that were culturally relevant. Comprehension and passage likability assessments favored the culturally relevant passages but were not statistically significant. Findings are discussed relative to the beneficial effects of culturally relevant materials for culturally diverse populations.

Reduced neural integration of letters and speech sounds in dyslexic children scales with individual differences in reading fluency.

The acquisition of letter-speech sound associations is one of the basic requirements for fluent reading acquisition and its failure may contribute to reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Here we investigated event-related potential (ERP) measures of letter-speech sound integration in 9-year-old typical and dyslexic readers and specifically test their relation to individual differences in reading fluency. We employed an audiovisual oddball paradigm in typical readers (n = 20), dysfluent (n = 18) and severely dysfluent (n = 18) dyslexic children. In one auditory and two audiovisual conditions the Dutch spoken vowels/a/and/o/were presented as standard and deviant stimuli. In audiovisual blocks, the letter ‘a’ was presented either simultaneously (AV0), or 200 ms before (AV200) vowel sound onset. Across the three children groups, vowel deviancy in auditory blocks elicited comparable mismatch negativity (MMN) and late negativity (LN) responses. In typical readers, both audiovisual conditions (AV0 and AV200) led to enhanced MMN and LN amplitudes. In both dyslexic groups, the audiovisual LN effects were mildly reduced. Most interestingly, individual differences in reading fluency were correlated with MMN latency in the AV0 condition. A further analysis revealed that this effect was driven by a short-lived MMN effect encompassing only the N1 window in severely dysfluent dyslexics versus a longer MMN effect encompassing both the N1 and P2 windows in the other two groups. Our results confirm and extend previous findings in dyslexic children by demonstrating a deficient pattern of letter-speech sound integration depending on the level of reading dysfluency. These findings underscore the importance of considering individual differences across the entire spectrum of reading skills in addition to group differences between typical and dyslexic readers.

Connected Text Reading and Differences in Text Reading Fluency in Adult Readers

The process of connected text reading has received very little attention in contemporary cognitive psychology. This lack of attention is in parts due to a research tradition that emphasizes the role of basic lexical constituents, which can be studied in isolated words or sentences. However, this lack of attention is in parts also due to the lack of statistical analysis techniques, which accommodate interdependent time series. In this study, we investigate text reading performance with traditional and nonlinear analysis techniques and show how outcomes from multiple analyses can used to create a more detailed picture of the process of text reading. Specifically, we investigate reading performance of groups of literate adult readers that differ in reading fluency during a self-paced text reading task. Our results indicate that classical metrics of reading (such as word frequency) do not capture text reading very well, and that classical measures of reading fluency (such as average reading time) distinguish relatively poorly between participant groups. Nonlinear analyses of distribution tails and reading time fluctuations provide more fine-grained information about the reading process and reading fluency.

The Effectiveness of DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency for Predicting Reading Comprehension of High- and Low-Income Students

Correlations and sequential analyses between performance on Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills–Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) and reading achievement on the Stanford Achievement Test–Tenth Edition (SAT-10) during 2003–2004 were examined for high- and low-income children. Participants were 215 third graders, 112 above and 103 below proficiency benchmarks for DORF. For below benchmark students, DORF scores strongly predicted SAT-10 comprehension. For above benchmark students (a) DORF scores predicted comprehension for high- but not low-income students; (b) statistically significant differences in reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary existed between high- and low-income students; (c) reading vocabulary equally predicted comprehension for students of differing economic backgrounds; and (d) reading fluency did not predict comprehension for low-income students beyond what was accounted for by vocabulary.

A Pilot Study of a Kindergarten Summer School Reading Program in High-Poverty Urban Schools

Abstract This pilot study examined an implementation of a kindergarten summer school reading program in 4 high-poverty urban schools. The program targeted both basic reading skills and oral language development. Students were randomly assigned to a treatment group (n = 25) or a typical practice comparison group (n = 28) within each school; however, randomization was compromised due to school circumstances, resulting in a quasi-experimental design. Instruction was delivered by the schools' regular teachers during 20 full-day summer school sessions. Each day treatment group students received large-group listening comprehension and vocabulary lessons anchored in storybook reading, along with small-group lessons focused on basic reading skills and listening comprehension. The intervention was associated with improved outcomes for treatment group students in word reading and listening comprehension with mixed results for phonemic awareness and no significant between-group differences in reading fluency or voca...

Dyslexic and nondyslexic reading fluency: Rapid automatized naming and the importance of continuous lists

Rapid automatized naming (RAN; Denckla & Rudel, 1976) tasks are consistent predictors of fluency that also discriminate between dyslexic and nondyslexic reading groups. The component processes of RAN that are responsible for its relationship with reading ability remain underspecified, however. We report a study on dyslexic and nondyslexic adult groups that experimentally manipulated RAN formats to elucidate how different components of RAN differentially influence dyslexic and nondyslexic performance. The dyslexic group showed a pervasive deficit in rapid access of individually presented items. Additionally, they showed a significant impairment when multiple items were presented, whereas nondyslexic readers showed marginal facilitation for this format. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to reading-group differences in reading fluency.

The component skills underlying reading fluency in adolescent readers: a latent variable analysis

This study investigated the component skills underlying reading fluency in a heterogeneous sample of 527 eighth grade students. Based on a hypothetical measurement model and successive testing of nested models, structural equation modeling revealed that naming speed, decoding, and language were uniquely associated with reading fluency. These findings suggest that the ability to access and retrieve phonological information from long-term storage is the most important factor in explaining individual differences in reading fluency among adolescent readers. The ability to process meaning and decode novel words was smaller but reliable contributors to reading fluency in adolescent readers.

The causes and consequences of differences in reading fluency

(1991). The causes and consequences of differences in reading fluency. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 30, Fluency in Oral Reading, pp. 176-184.