Dyslexia In Grade Research Articles

인지처리 및 언어 기술에 기반한 난독증 하위유형 탐색: 잠재프로파일분석을 중심으로

This study classified Korean dyslexia into subtypes based on cognitive processing and language skills and examined the relationships between the strengths and weaknesses of the classified subtypes and reading achievement. The study participants were 206 children with dyslexia in grades 1-3 of an elementary school. The following variables were measured to classify dyslexia into subtypes: phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid naming, phonological memory, sentence memory, receptive vocabulary, and listening comprehension skills. Furthermore, the groups were compared in three reading achievement variables: word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. The latent profile analysis identified four subtypes of dyslexia, including the “overall defect group” with overall difficulty in cognitive processing and language skills; “processing speed dominant group” showing strength in letter knowledge and rapid naming; “working memory dominant group” showing strength in phonological and sentence memory abilities; and “receptive language dominant group” with receptive vocabulary and listening comprehension abilities. The comparison of reading achievement between groups revealed that the “overall defect group” was characterized as having lower word reading and reading fluency than the other three groups, whereas the “receptive language dominant group” had strengths in reading comprehension. This is the first study in Korea in which an empirical and exploratory attempt has been made to classify dyslexia into subtypes beyond the limits of the theoretical framework. Moreover, the study results promoted an understanding of the heterogeneity of dyslexia through the strengths and weaknesses of subtypes based on cognitive processing and language skills and had implications for intervention.

Comparing the Effectiveness of Two Kinds of Reading Interventions on Reading Outcomes in Third to Fifth Grade Farsi Speaker Students with Dyslexia: An Exploratory Study.

This research marks the exploration into comparing the effectiveness of two reading interventions in improving reading outcomes for third to fifth-grade Farsi-speaking students with dyslexia. In this randomized control trial study, twenty students in Tehran were randomly assigned to a multi-component group and a comprehension-based intervention group, each receiving 36 sessions of 45 minutes. The effectiveness of the interventions was evaluated using adjusted mean differences with a one-way ANCOVA. The results revealed the comprehension-based intervention's superior effect size across most outcomes, except for the letters string. The effect size was large for word reading 0.93 (CI -0.002 to 1.85), medium for phoneme deletion 0.67 (CI -0.23 to 1.5), small for text comprehension 0.25 (CI -0.62 to 1.13), and trivial for both rhyme identification 0.1 (-0.77 to 0.98) and non-word reading 0.11 (CI -0.76 to 0.98). The multi-component intervention had a greater effect size on letters string than the other intervention, although it was small -0.21 (CI -1.09 to 0.66). The study concluded that comprehension-based intervention was more effective for Farsi-speaking students with dyslexia in grades 3-5, emphasizing the need for diverse intervention approaches to address their specific needs.

Dyslexia assessment in Amharic

ABSTRACT This exploratory study aimed at developing a dyslexia assessment tool in the Amharic language and to collect initial reliability and validity data on the tool designed to identify dyslexia in Grade 3. The developed battery consists of 10 tests. Data were collected from 121 Amharic-speaking children, aged 9 -12 years. Evidence of construct validity was obtained through factor analyses. Results showed that letter-naming was the most significant predictor of word-level literacy (WLL) skills in Amharic, followed by word-reading measures. Factor analysis revealed four factors: phonological-naming and decoding, comprehension, verbal short-term memory, and orthographic processing. In Amharic, which uses an alphasyllabary writing system, letter-naming is not only a vital WLL skill but also serves as a necessary foundational prerequisite for the acquisition of other WLL skills. The findings substantiate the account that even if the underlying cognitive factor responsible for dyslexia is similar among humans, its manifestations vary across languages and orthographies.

Examining fidelity reporting within studies of foundational reading interventions for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia.

Early access to evidence-based reading intervention improves outcomes for students with or at risk for reading difficulties. Additionally, teacher implementation of reading interventions plays a key role in the efficacy of reading interventions. Previous research suggests the influence of intervention implementation fidelity on student language and literacy outcomes is more significant for lower-performing students and students with disabilities, such as dyslexia. However, recent syntheses have suggested that less than half of reading intervention studies report treatment fidelity data. This meta-analysis examined fidelity reporting within reading intervention studies for students with or at risk for dyslexia in Grades K-5. We aimed to record the frequency and extent of fidelity reporting, explore associations between study or intervention features and fidelity reporting, and compare mean intervention effect sizes for studies reporting fidelity and those that did not. A total of 51 studies were included. Results indicated that 75% of studies reported fidelity data. Studies reporting fidelity primarily focused on adherence and dosage data with little to no information reported for other dimensions of fidelity (i.e., quality, responsiveness, differentiation). Suggestions for improving reporting of treatment fidelity data are discussed.

Phonological Awareness, Rapid Naming, and Nonword Repetition Abilities in Children with Dyslexia in Grade 1 to 6

Objectives: This study examined phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and nonword repetition abilities in children with dyslexia and typically developing children in grade 1 to 6. To examine the phonological processing abilities according to reading developmental stage, participants were divided into two groups: grade 1-2 and grade 3-6. Methods: A total of 78 children with dyslexia and typically developing children in grade 1-2 and 3-6 participated. All participants had no problems in nonverbal cognition and receptive vocabulary. Children with dyslexia had to score a standard score of 85 or less, and among the typically developing children those with a standard score of 90 or higher on the word decoding test of the standardized reading test were selected. Phonological processing abilities were tested using the phonological awareness, rapid naming, and nonword repetition tasks. Results: Children with dyslexia showed lower performance in phonological awareness, RAN, and nonword repetition tasks compared to typically developing children. In addition, it was found that all phonological processing abilities improved as the grade increased. There was an interaction effect on only nonword repetition, with no difference between children with dyslexia and typically developing children in grade 3-6. Conclusion: Even in Hangul, a transparent orthography, children with dyslexia had problems in all three phonological processing abilities. The effect size was the largest on the RAN between the two reading groups, so children with dyslexia were likely to have most difficulty on RAN. Finally, vocabulary ability in children with dyslexia would influence nonword repetition abilities.

The Relationship between Phonological Awareness and Reading Fluency for Elementary Second and Third Grade Dyslexic Students

This study explored the relationship between phonological awareness and reading fluency in students with dyslexia in grades 2 and 3. A related purpose was to examine the differences between males and females in their phonological awareness and reading fluency skills. The sample consisted of 41 students (21 boys and 20 girls), aged between 8 and 9 years. The study tools included the phonological awareness test and the reading fluency test. The results of the study showed that there was a significant correlation (r = .44) between the male/female students’ scores on the test of phonological awareness and their reading fluency test scores. Simple linear regression analysis showed that students’ scores on the test of phonological awareness predicted their scores on the test of reading fluency (β = .44, p ˂ .003). The independent-samples t test showed no significant differences between dyslexic male and female students on the phonological awareness and reading fluency tests. The study recommended the necessity of conducting experimental studies to develop phonological awareness and reading fluency skills for students with dyslexia.

Spelling in developmental dyslexia in Chinese: Evidence of deficits in statistical learning and over-reliance on phonology

ABSTRACT This study employed a multi-dimensional (i.e., orthographic, phonological, and semantic) and bi-level (i.e., character and radical) approach to analyze the character writing of 120 Hong Kong Chinese children with developmental dyslexia in Grades 2–5 and 120 typically developing age-matched controls. Relative to their typically developing peers, children with dyslexia were less sensitive to the positional and functional consistencies of sublexical radicals and exhibited prolonged use of phonology at the character level as grade-level advanced. Furthermore, the children with dyslexia relatively relied more on phonology at the radical level than younger, reading level-matched children. These results indicate the effects of implicit statistical learning on the development of Chinese character writing skills and suggest that the prolonged use and overreliance on phonology in character writing by Chinese children with dyslexia may reflect their difficulties in implicit statistical learning.

Morphological processing influences on dyslexia in Greek-speaking children.

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and noun-adjective inflections). The noun-adjective inflection task assessed children's ability to produce the plural of articles, adjectives, and nouns in the context of a sentence. The verb inflection task required children to change the tense of the verb in a sentence. Furthermore, phonological awareness and oral receptive vocabulary were assessed. Greek-speaking children with dyslexia faced difficulties in both inflectional tasks and in receptive vocabulary. They appeared to have greater difficulty in elicitation of non-past tense from past tense. Binary logistic regression targeted at understanding whether dyslexia can be predicted based on phonological and non-phonological oral language skills revealed that phonological awareness had a significant effect on distinguishing dyslexics from typically developing readers. Overall, our findings lead us to suggest that in an alphabetic language with a shallow orthographic system and rich morphology, children with dyslexia appear to have impaired inflectional morphological awareness and impaired vocabulary in comparison to their peers. Moreover, these results suggest the significance of teaching morphological skills in improving reading skills. However, further research is needed to substantiate these findings.

Distinct effects of visual and auditory temporal processing training on reading and reading-related abilities in Chinese children with dyslexia.

This study aimed to examine the effects of temporal processing training on the reading abilities of Chinese children with dyslexia. In total, 69 Chinese children with dyslexia in grades three through six were recruited in Taiwan. The children were divided into the following three equal groups: (1) auditory temporal processing training group, (2) visual temporal processing training group, and (3) control group with no specific training. The participants in both training groups received instruction with identical durations (30-40min), intensities (12 times in total), and frequencies (three to four times per week). The participants in the control group were asked to independently surf some specified websites using devices similar to those used by the two experimental groups for an identical duration, intensity, and frequency. Our results indicated that the two groups who received temporal processing training exhibited significant correlations among Chinese character reading, rapid naming, and corresponding reading-related abilities, while visual temporal processing served as a significant predictor of Chinese character reading ability even if all background data, reading-related abilities, and auditory temporal processing were introduced first. Additionally, significant interactions were found between the Groups and Tested sessions in all the measures, except for phonological awareness, confirming the distinct effects of different temporal processing on most measures involved in this study. Further simple main effects revealed that only those who received the visual temporal processing training gained benefits in the corresponding reading-related ability (i.e., orthographic knowledge) and far-transfer to Chinese character reading.

From the Editors

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one –Baltasar Gracián This final issue of Topics in Language Disorders for 2018 addresses a critical foundational skill for writing proficiency—spelling. Issue editors Annemie Desoete and Christel Van Vreckem invited authors to address spelling development and skills in alphabetic orthographies that vary considerably in their transparency: (a) German—a moderately transparent orthography that is heavily inflected and preserves morphological information in word spellings; (b) Dutch—a somewhat more transparent orthography with some irregularities in word spellings; and (c) Italian—a highly transparent, or regular, orthography. The issue begins with Kargl and Landerl's (2018) large-scale descriptive study of German spelling skills in typically developing students across Grades 4–7. As expected, these older students performed quite well when spelling regular words that could be encoded by relying just on phonological knowledge, and both phonological spelling skill and morphological awareness performance predicted overall spelling accuracy. Perhaps, most importantly, morphological awareness uniquely contributed to predicting overall spelling accuracy beyond phonological spelling skill, highlighting the importance of morphological knowledge in German with its dense inflectional system and strong preservation of morphemic units in the orthography. Given the notable importance of morphological awareness in German, the authors describe a computer-aided spelling intervention called MORPHEUS that focuses on morpheme-level spelling and present related efficacy studies using the intervention program. Then, Van Vreckem and Desoete (2018) present data that show the differentiation of spelling skills in Dutch-speaking children in Grades 2–6 with and without dyslexia. Examining spelling performance in children with dyslexia is quite appropriate, given the fact that beginning of year word reading skill is robustly related to spelling achievement (e.g., Foorman et al., 2006), spelling abilities predict later reading success (Berninger, Abbott, Abbott, Graham, & Richards, 2002; Treiman, 1998), and, more generally, reading and spelling skills are reciprocally related (e.g., Conrad, 2008; Ehri, 2000). Van Vreckem and Desoete employ a unique spelling assessment to highlight phonological, orthographic (e.g., rule-based), morphological, etymological, and combined spelling skills. Their descriptive research portrays children with dyslexia in these grades to be generally 2 years behind their peers without dyslexia. Moreover, the younger children with dyslexia struggled even with basic phonologically derived spelling words, as well as the more demanding skills associated with the other Dutch spelling patterns. In addition, children with dyslexia struggled with spelling both real words and pseudowords, and the authors suggest the use of pseudowords in spelling assessment as a means of helping differentiate children with and without dyslexia. Finally, Arfé, Cona, and Merella (2018) present an intervention study to address the spelling problems of Italian children with dyslexia in Grades 2–4. Their experimental intervention modeled the implicit synchronized auditory–phonological and visual–orthographic mappings for spelling Italian words. What is perhaps most interesting in the line of work Arfé et al. are pursuing is that children with dyslexia can benefit from instruction that is not explicit in the traditional sense (i.e., context-sensitive spelling rules and phoneme–grapheme correspondences are not explained to students as part of instruction). Of course, the transparent nature of the Italian orthography may render such explicitness as relatively less important than when intervening on behalf of children with dyslexia in more opaque orthographies such as English. Nevertheless, the possibility of helping students implicitly recognize statistical regularities in the associations of sounds with letters through modeling those associations is exciting because English orthography is rather irregular, with hundreds of associations that cannot all be explicitly taught, and thus much spelling knowledge must be acquired through implicit means (e.g., Arciuli, 2018). We think this issue sheds light on the complexity of spelling skills across languages and language systems, and the particular spelling difficulties experienced by children with dyslexia. There are some key assumptions relayed in this set of articles that readers should consider in their own work with children. First, spelling proficiency relies on diverse knowledge sources and varied aspects of language, and these must be considered when evaluating spelling performance and progress and designing instruction. Second and relatedly, in languages in which morphological information is preserved in word spellings, morphological awareness and knowledge should be incorporated into the teaching milieu. Third, degree of orthographic transparency plays an important role in facilitating or hindering spelling development, but all alphabetic orthographies have some consistent phoneme-to-grapheme mappings that teachers and interventionists should reinforce. Finally, implicit and explicit learning processes are likely involved in spelling acquisition, so spelling instruction and intervention should probably reinforce both of these processes. —Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD Editor-in-Chief —Gary A. Troia, PhD Associate Editor

The Impact of Morphological Awareness on Word Reading and Dictation in Chinese Early Adolescent Readers With and Without Dyslexia.

This study investigated the role of morphological awareness in understanding Chinese word reading and dictation among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers in Hong Kong as well as the cognitive-linguistic profile of early adolescent readers with dyslexia. Fifty-four readers with dyslexia in Grades 5 and 6 were compared with 54 chronological age-matched (CA) typical readers on the following measures of cognitive-linguistic and literacy skills: morphological awareness, phonological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, vocabulary knowledge, verbal short-term memory (STM), Chinese word reading, and dictation (or spelling). The results indicated that early adolescent readers with dyslexia performed less well than the typical readers on all cognitive-linguistic and literacy measures except the phonological measures. Both groups' scores showed substantial correlations between morphological awareness and Chinese word reading and dictation. Visual-orthographic knowledge and rapid naming were also associated with dictation in early adolescent readers with and without dyslexia, respectively. Moderated multiple regression analyses further revealed that morphological awareness and rapid naming explained unique variance in word reading and dictation for the readers with dyslexia and typical readers separately after controlling readers' age and group effect. These results highlight the potential importance of morphological awareness and rapid naming in Chinese word reading and writing in Chinese early adolescents' literacy development and impairment.

Late-Emerging and Resolving Dyslexia: A Follow-Up Study from Age 3 to 14.

This study focuses on the stability of dyslexia status from Grade 2 to Grade 8 in four groups: (a) no dyslexia in either grade (no-dyslexia, n = 127); (b) no dyslexia in Grade 2 but dyslexia in Grade 8 (late-emerging, n = 18); (c) dyslexia in Grade 2 but not in Grade 8 (resolving, n = 15); and (d) dyslexia in both grades (persistent-dyslexia, n = 22). We examined group differences from age 3.5 to age 14 in (a) reading, vocabulary, phonology, letter knowledge, rapid naming, IQ, verbal memory; (b) familial and environmental risk and supportive factors; and (c) parental skills in reading, phonology, rapid naming, verbal memory, and vocabulary. Our findings showed group differences both in reading and cognitive skills of children as well as their parents. Parental education, book-reading frequency, and children's IQ, however, did not differentiate the groups. The children in the persistent-dyslexia group exhibited widespread language and cognitive deficits across development. Those in the resolving group had problems in language and cognitive skills only prior to school entry. In the late-emerging group, children showed clearly compromised rapid naming. Additionally, their parents had the most severe difficulties in rapid naming, a finding that suggests strong genetic liability. The findings show instability in the diagnosis of dyslexia. The members of the late-emerging group did not have a distinct early cognitive profile, so late-emerging dyslexia appears difficult to predict. Indeed, these children are at risk of not being identified and not receiving required support. This study suggests the need for continued monitoring of children's progress in literacy after the early school years.

Literacy skill development of children with familial risk for dyslexia through grades 2, 3, and 8.

This study followed the development of reading speed, reading accuracy, and spelling in transparent Finnish orthography in children through Grades 2, 3, and 8. We compared 2 groups of children with familial risk for dyslexia—1 group with dyslexia (Dys_FR, n = 35) and 1 group without (NoDys_FR, n = 66) in Grade 2—with a group of children without familial risk for dyslexia (controls, n = 72). The Dys_FR group showed persistent deficiency, especially in reading speed, and, to a minor extent, in reading and spelling accuracy. The Dys_FR children, contrary to the other 2 groups, relied heavily on letter-by-letter decoding in Grades 2 and 3. In children not fulfilling the criteria for dyslexia in Grade 2, the familial risk did not substantially affect the subsequent development of literacy skills.

The Effect of Parents’ Literacy Skills and Children’s Preliteracy Skills on the Risk of Dyslexia

The combination of investigating child and family characteristics sheds light on the constellation of risk factors that can ultimately lead to dyslexia. This family-risk study examines plausible preschool risk factors and their specificity. Participants (N = 196, 42 % girls) included familial risk (FR) children with and without dyslexia in Grade 3 and controls. First, we found impairments in phonological awareness, rapid naming, and letter knowledge in FR kindergartners with later dyslexia, and mild phonological-awareness deficits in FR kindergartners without subsequent dyslexia. These skills were better predictors of reading than arithmetic, except for rapid naming. Second, the literacy environment at home was comparable among groups. Third, having a dyslexic parent and literacy abilities of the non-dyslexic parent related to offspring risk of dyslexia. Parental literacy abilities might be viewed as indicators of offspring’s liability for literacy difficulties, since parents provide offspring with genetic and environmental endowment. We propose an intergenerational multiple deficit model in which both parents confer cognitive risks.

Teaching children with dyslexia to spell in a reading-writers’ workshop

To identify effective treatment for both the spelling and word decoding problems in dyslexia, 24 students with dyslexia in grades 4 to 9 were randomly assigned to treatments A (n=12) or B (n=12) in an after-school reading-writers' workshop at the university (thirty 1-h sessions twice a week over 5 months). First, both groups received step 1 treatment of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (gpc) for oral reading. At step 2, treatment A received gpc training for both oral reading and spelling, and treatment B received gpc training for oral reading and phonological awareness. At step 3, treatment A received orthographic spelling strategy and rapid accelerated reading program (RAP) training, and treatment B continued step 2 training. At step 4, treatment A received morphological strategies and RAP training, and treatment B received orthographic spelling strategy training. Each treatment also had the same integrated reading-writing activities, which many school assignments require. Both groups improved significantly in automatic letter writing, spelling real words, compositional fluency, and oral reading (decoding) rate. Treatment A significantly outperformed treatment B in decoding rate after step 3 orthographic training, which in turn uniquely predicted spelling real words. Letter processing rate increased during step 3 RAP training and correlated significantly with two silent reading fluency measures. Adding orthographic strategies with "working memory in mind" to phonics helps students with dyslexia spell and read English words.

Original Articles

The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine whether or not children with learning disabilities, specifically children with dyslexia, were more creative than non-learning disabled children of the same age. Torrance's Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) were administered to a group of 36 children with dyslexia in Grades four to seven, all attending the same remedial school. The scores obtained on the TTCT from the children with dyslexia were then compared to those of the normative sample for the TTCT. Results indicated that the children with dyslexia in all Grades were significantly better than the norm group at generating a large quantity of ideas. The children with dyslexia in Grade six also produced significantly more original responses than the non-learning disabled sample. It was concluded that the children with dyslexia within the current study may have higher than average ability on certain dimensions of creativity, and that these abilities could be drawn on when educating such children.

Evidence That Dyslexia May Represent the Lower Tail of a Normal Distribution of Reading Ability

Dyslexia is now widely believed to be a biologically based disorder that is distinct from other, less specific reading problems. According to this view, reading ability is considered to follow a bimodal distribution, with dyslexia as the lower mode. We hypothesized that, instead, reading ability follows a normal distribution, with dyslexia at the lower end of the continuum. We used data from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, a sample survey of 414 Connecticut children who entered kindergarten in 1983 and were followed as a longitudinal cohort. Dyslexia was defined in terms of a discrepancy score, which represents the difference between actual reading achievement and achievement predicted on the basis of measures of intelligence. Data were available from intelligence tests administered in grades 1, 3, and 5 and achievement tests administered yearly in grades 1 through 6. For each child there were 108 possible discrepancy scores ([3 x 3 years] x [2 x 6 years]) based on combinations of the ability scores (full-scale, verbal, and performance IQ) in each of three years and two achievement scores (reading and mathematics) in each of six years. We demonstrated that each of the discrepancy scores followed a univariate normal distribution and that the interrelation of two different discrepancy scores followed a bivariate normal distribution. At most, only 9 of 108 discrepancy scores (8.3 percent) and 171 of 3402 pairs of discrepancy scores (5.0 percent) were significantly different (at the 5 percent level) from the expected scores--well within the expected values for data with univariate and bivariate normal distributions, respectively. We also examined the stability of dyslexia over time. The normal-distribution model predicted (and the data indicated) that only 7 of the 25 children (28 percent) classified as having dyslexia in grade 1 would also be classified as having dyslexia in grade 3. Reading difficulties, including dyslexia, occur as part of a continuum that also includes normal reading ability. Dyslexia is not an all-or-none phenomenon, but like hypertension, occurs in degrees. The variability inherent in the diagnosis of dyslexia can be both quantified and predicted with use of the normal-distribution model.