Groups Of Poor Readers Research Articles

Capacidad de lectores competentes y lectores poco hábiles para recordar información de un texto hipermedial e impreso

ResumenLa tecnología digital permite nuevas formas de presentación y organización textual, y está imponiendo una visión distinta de los procesos de lectura y escritura. Un documento hipermedial que contiene palabras escritas, sonidos, imágenes, y videos no se lee de la misma manera que un documento impreso. El propósito de este estudio fue indagar y comparar la capacidad de un grupo de estudiantes, unos considerados lectores competentes y otros lectores poco hábiles, para recordar las ideas principales y los detalles de un texto presentado en formato impreso y en formato hipermedial. Los sujetos fueron 40 niños de sexto grado, entre 11 y 12 años, seleccionados por su rendimiento en una prueba de comprensión lectora. El análisis de los resultados reveló que tanto los lectores competentes como los lectores poco hábiles recordaron más ideas importantes cuando utilizaron el texto hipermedial que cuando leyeron el texto impreso. Con relación al recuerdo de detalles, en el grupo de lectores competentes no hubo diferencias entre los usuarios del texto hipermedial y los usuarios del texto impreso; pero entre los lectores poco hábiles los usuarios del texto hipermedial recordaron más detalles que los lectores del texto impreso.

Does Success in the Reading Recovery Program Depend on Developing Proficiency in Phonological-Processing Skills? A Longitudinal Study in a Whole Language Instructional Context

This longitudinal study examined the relation between the development of phonological-processing skills and the effectiveness of Reading Recovery (RR) in a whole language instructional context. Children independently selected by their schools for RR were compared with groups of poor readers who did not receive RR and with normally developing readers. Results indicated that the RR and poor reader comparison groups had deficiencies in phonological-processing skills during the year preceding their participation in RR, that participation in the program did not eliminate or reduce these deficiencies, and that success in RR and in subsequent reading achievement was closely associated with phonological-processing skills. The RR children showed declines in reading self-concept, in perceptions of ability in reading and spelling, and in general academic self-concept following RR. Teachers of the RR children rated them as having more classroom behavior problems and fewer adaptive functioning behaviors than the normally developing readers.

Cerebellar Tests Differentiate Between Groups of Poor Readers With and Without IQ Discrepancy

A comprehensive test battery, including phonological, speed, motor and cerebellar tasks, was administered to the entire cohort of two schools for children with learning disabilities. Testing was undertaken blind without accessing the psychometric data on the children. Children were then allocated to a discrepancy group on the basis of their IQ, with the majority (n = 29) classified as nondiscrepant (IQ < 90) and a smaller set (n = 7), with IQ of at least 90, classified as discrepant (with dyslexia). Both groups showed significant deficits relative to age-matched controls on almost all the tests. On phonological, speed, and motor tasks, the nondiscrepant group were at least as severely impaired as the discrepant group. By contrast, on the cerebellar tests of postural stability and muscle tone, the nondiscrepant group performed significantly better than the children with dyslexia and close to the level of the controls. The findings indicate that cerebellar tests may prove a valuable method of differentiating between poor readers with and without IQ discrepancy. The findings are interpreted in terms of the cerebellar deficit hypothesis for dyslexia.

A Critique of Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady's "Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers

A 1997 article by Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady claimed that their studies constituted a critical test of two hypotheses concerning students with reading impairment: (a) that they experience speech-specific failure in phonological representation, and (b) they display general deficits in auditory temporal processing. From these studies, the authors concluded that their findings were consistent with the first hypothesis but were not in agreement with the second. A critical analysis of the Mody et al. article leads to the conclusion that it makes no contribution to that debate because (a) the children in the Poor reading group did not meet the accepted reading-impairment criterion of being delayed by at least 1 year in their reading skills, (b) there were severe violations of statistical assumptions, and (c) their conclusions were based on the failure to find significant differences, thus compelling them to accept the null hypothesis as proven, in the absence of any statistical power analysis.

How Does Phonological Awareness Relate to Nonword Reading Skill amongst Poor Readers

This study examined phonological awareness at the level of phonemes and rhyme and related this to nonword naming ability. Poor readers were compared with 11 year old chronological-age controls and 8 year old reading-age controls. The poor reader group was impaired for chronological age in all tasks, and impaired for reading age at nonword naming and phoneme deletion. The poor readers' rhyming skills, however, were commensurate with reading age. Individual variation was observed together with exceptions to the group findings; most poor readers performed within the range of the reading-age controls on the phonological tasks and in nonword naming. Dissociations in phonological skills were evident, including indications that intact awareness of rhyme may not be a prerequisite for the development of phoneme awareness. Furthermore, phoneme awareness correlated significantly with poor readers' word and nonword reading ability, whereas rhyming skill did not. Therefore, phoneme awareness may be more important than rhyming skill in understanding reading disorders.

Selective predictive value of rapid automatized naming in poor readers.

This study considers the differential predictive value of rapid naming tests for various aspects of later reading, where the differential is between nondisabled and poor readers. Two large-N longitudinal samples of students who have been evaluated from third through eighth grades are studied: (a) a randomly accessed, normally distributed group including students with varying degrees of reading ability (N = 154), and (b) a group of poor readers whose single-word reading in third grade is at or below the population 10th percentile (N = 64). Outcomes in fifth and eighth grade were measured in both groups. Single-word reading in both grades was strongly predicted from third-grade rapid naming only within the poor readers, even when IQ, socioeconomic status, and third-grade single-word reading were statistically controlled. Although rapid naming had predictive value within the large, normally distributed group, its predictive power was entirely absent in the average-reading nondisabled students who were between the 10th and 90th percentiles (n = 122). The fact that rapid naming has predictive power only for poor readers but not for average readers is interpreted as suggesting that impaired readers are qualitatively different from the normal-reading population and are not simply the "tail" of a normal distribution of reading ability. It also seems that it is the automaticity of retrieval, not the knowledge of names itself (as in confrontational naming tasks), that gives the predictive power in rapid naming. These data are considered in light of the one- and two-factor theories of the underlying processes involved in reading disability or dyslexia.

Dyslexia/reading difficulty: reassessing the evidence for a developmental model

Summary The exploration of the nature of reading difficulty, particularly dyslexia, began with working hypotheses which rested on two assumptions, neither of which were supported by empirical evidence. These assumptions were that cognition and reading are related (and interdependent) processes and that a specific type of reading difficulty ‐‐ dyslexia ‐‐ characterized a distinct group of poor readers ‐ i.e. those with average and better intellectual ability. In this context, the word ‘dyslexia’ refers (more precisely) to specific developmental dyslexia (SDD), as opposed to ‘acquired’ dyslexia, reading difficulty, which arises as a result of illness or injury. A study by Rutter and Yule challenged both (by then long‐standing) assumptions and proposed that reading difficulty might be seen as a developmental outcome of early language related deficit or delay and environmental factors. This notion has not been adequately explored, mainly because of a continued theoretical bias towards reading/IQ discrepancy models. But a review of both language and reading difficulty substantiates the developmental model and suggests that the developmental perspective is not only pertinent to conceptualizing, understanding and predicting all types of reading difficulty, but that it is long overdue and can offer new insights and explanations. Many of the factors and debates relating to reading difficulty are mirrored in language delay. But rather than conceptualizing all forms of language delay as lying within a unitary developmental model (with reading difficulty as an expression of language impairment), the two can be seen as being related within a complex transactional model with specific early language problems viewed as risk factors for later reading difficulty.

The Impending Demise of the Discrepancy Formula

This article calls into question the validity and utility of classifying poor readers into learning disability (LD) and non-learning disability (non-LD) categories on the basis of the discrepancy between their IQs and reading achievement scores (the Discrepancy Model). This form of classification of poor readers is based on two premises. First, the etiologies of these two forms of reading disabilities are different; therefore, there are qualitative differences in the cognitive makeups of these two groups of poor readers. Second, and consequently, the two categories of poor readers require different kinds of remedial treatment. The present review of research indicates that neither of these two premises is valid. In contrast, many research studies indicate that instructional methods which have disregarded the LD-non-LD distinction and focused their remedial efforts on the cause of the reading problem are generally successful in improving reading achievement. It is suggested that the practice of utilizing the discrepancy formula to classify poor readers into the LD and non-LD categories be abandoned and that a pragmatic approach which identifies the source of the reading problem for all children and focuses remedial efforts on that source be adopted (the Reading Component Model). The impact of the adoption of such a model on the learning disability field is discussed.

A Comparison of the Instructional Backgrounds and Cognitive Profiles of Poor, Average, and Good Readers Who Were Initially Identified as At Risk for Reading Failure

The kindergarten instructional programs of three groups of at-risk children were compared. Children in all groups were judged in kindergarten to be at risk for reading difficulties on the basis of their letter-name knowledge. The groups were partitioned on the basis of their first-grade reading performance (poor, average, and good readers). The results indicate that children in the most successfu1 reader group came from kindergarten classrooms in which more time was spent on phoneme awareness, spelling, and writing activities. The average and poor reader groups did not differ from one another on these characteristics. These latter groups did, however, differ on several measures of cognitive abilities that were administered in kindergarten, including measures of letter-name knowledge and verbal memory. The average reader group did not differ from the good reader group on any of the cognitive measures. The implications of these findings for classroom instruction are discussed.

Subtypes of developmental dyslexia and lexical acquisition

Although much has been learned about the nature and etiology of impairments in sublexical translation skills, less is known about the difficulties of children who are poor at recognising words as whole orthographic units. In the research described here, an attempt was made to look closely at the process these poor readers go through when trying to acquire new lexical information. Groups of poor readers were required to learn the pronunciations of a set of “irregular” nonsense words over a series of training sessions. There was an imperfect correspondence between the orthographic and phonological forms of these items, so grapheme-phoneme conversion rules could not be used (e. g., macht was pronounced “mot”). The results indicated that this learning task distinguishes between poor readers with a specific lexical deficit and those with a different type of reading difficulty. Ways in which this kind of task might usefully be employed in future research in this area are discussed.

Developmental Dyslexia: Past, Present and Future

A discrepancy between reading performance and intelligence is generally held to be a defining characteristic of developmental dyslexia. However, intelligence appears not to be an important factor in distinguishing between the reading performance of different groups of poor readers. Some dyslexia researchers have interpreted this null finding as seriously questioning the existence of dyslexia as a disorder independent of general poor reading. I argue that the anti-discrepancy theorists make three conflations of separate issues: research on the cause of poor reading versus research on the cause of dyslexia; phonological deficit as cause of dyslexia versus symptom of dyslexia; research on the causes of dyslexia versus research on the diagnosis or remediation of dyslexia. Once these issues are teased apart, not only does the apparent dilemma disappear, but a new and fruitful research perspective is suggested. Insights arising from this wider research perspective should transform our understanding of the underlying cause(s) of dyslexia, inform the development of earlier and better methods of screening and remediation and contribute significantly to the understanding of human cognitive development.

Word Recognition and Spelling Processes in Specific Reading Disabled and Garden-variety Poor Readers

This study presents evidence relevant to the distinction between specific reading disability and non-specific or garden-variety reading difficulties. Within the context of a large scale longitudinal study of reading acquisition, regression techniques were used to define psychometrically extreme groups of specific and non-specific poor readers. Poor readers with IQs in the average to above average range and low IQ poor readers matched on age, sex and word recognition were administered a variety of word recognition and spelling measures. No significant differences were found on 25 out of 26 measures. The only statistically reliable difference emerged on the proportion of reading errors in which a real word was substituted for a regular high frequency word (MUST—‘most’). Overall, these data, together with the existing evidence, support the null hypothesis of no qualitative differences between specific and garden-variety poor readers.

Differences in Visuospatial Judgement in Reading-Disabled and Normal Children

Both visual and verbal impairments have been reported in two independent streams of research into the etiology of dyslexia or reading-disability. To address the question of the presence of either abnormality in reading-disabled children, visuospatial and phonological ability were assessed and contrasted in 39 Normal and 26 Reading-disabled children. To assess whether these deficits are unique to dyslexia, scores were also compared to those of a group of 12 Poor Readers ("garden-variety" backward readers with low IQs). The Benton Judgement of Line Orientation Test was used for its simplicity and clinical reliability: Reading-disabled subjects performed significantly worse than Normal readers (but similar to Poor Readers). Reading-disabled subjects performed worse for lines in the left-hemifield compared to Normal subjects and also had a greater tendency to scan the task in reverse order (left-to-right) from the usual right-to-left scanning pattern observed in the Normal group when performing this test. When both verbal and visuospatial variables were combined in a multiple regression analysis, 71% of reading variance could be accounted for. These results suggest that Reading-disabled children not only have poor phonological awareness, but they also show visuospatial deficits. However, poor performance on both these tasks was also observed in the group of Poor Readers, suggesting that these deficits are not unique to children with specific reading disability. The results lend further evidence to the hypothesis that reading disability cannot solely be attributed to left-hemisphere dysfunction resulting in phonological impairment. There are other behavioral deficits, possibly caused by a common mechanism, some of which, like visuospatial ability, can be measured by simple behavioral tests such as the Judgment of Line Orientation Test.

Onset/rime sensitivity and orthographic analogies in normal and poor readers

ABSTRACTThis study was designed to determine whether there was a relationship between the ease with which children make use of orthographic analogies and their progress in learning to read. The results of an experiment using a reading age match design showed that poor readers performed as well as normal readers on orally presented measures of onset/rime sensitivity, but less well on visually/orally presented rhyme tasks. The poor readers also performed less well than the normal readers on a task that measured the children's ability to take advantage of analogical units when reading lists of words: these reading lists contained groups of words that differed according to (1) whether the words containing the common unit were presented contiguously or noncontiguously, and (2) whether the unit constituted the rime portion of the words or was embedded within the rime portion of the words. A follow-up intervention study demonstrated that poor readers who received instruction in the use of orthographic analogies achieved higher reading accuracy scores on subsequent readings than did a matched group of poor readers who received standard remedial instruction in context cue usage.

The use of phonological and orthographic information by normal and poor readers of Dutch

In two reading level design experiments, matched groups of normal and poor readers were compared with regard to their use of phonological and orthographic information. Experiment 1 used a semantic decision task similar to the task described in the study of Jarvella & Snodgrass (1974). Experiment 1 was aimed to assess the way normal and poor readers, matched on reading level, automatically process phonological and orthographic incongruencies when comparing the singular and plural of nouns. Experiment 2 investigated the automatized processing of uppercase-lowercase letter incongruencies in a same-different task using words and pseudowords. It assessed the role of letter feature cues involved in the initial identification process. Experiment 1 demonstrated that poor readers needed more time for evaluating phonologically incongruent word pairs. No independent effect of orthographic incongruency was found. Experiment 2 showed that, if compared with reading age matched normals, poor readers had more problems with evaluating uppercase-lowercase incongruencies. This orthographic processing problem was particularly prominent when pseudowords were presented. It is concluded that poor readers not only have phonological processing problems, but also have difficulties at the orthographic processing level.

EEG power spectra of children with dyslexia, slow learners, and normally reading children with ADD during verbal processing.

EEG power spectra were studied in two poor reader groups (with dyslexia and slow learning) and a normally reading clinic control group (with attention deficit disorder) as the children viewed strings of words and letters (seven categories). The children ranged in age from 7.5 to 12 years; 33 were girls, 86 were boys. Bilateral temporal and parietal sites and four midline sites were used. The major difference between groups was in the low beta band, where the ADD group had greater power at the parietal and midline sites. Also, the slow learner group had marginally greater low beta at the left than right temporal site, with the opposite trend found for the dyslexic and ADD groups. Across groups, power was greater at the right than at the left parietal site in the delta and alpha bands and at the right than at the left temporal site in the low beta band. Stimulus category effects were modest, with some alpha suppression to word strings, relative to letter strings, found in the poor readers. In correlational analyses, the combination of greater low beta and less theta power significantly predicted better reading and spelling. Results indicate that the adequate readers more actively processed the stimuli than did the poor readers.

Learning to Read: The Role of Short-Term Memory and Phonological Skills

This study investigates the relationships between reading, short-term memory and phonological skills, and the mechanisms responsible for the short-term memory differences found between groups of children differing in reading ability. Differences were found between groups of good, average, and poor readers in verbal, but not visual, short-term memory and these differences were well explained in terms of differences in speech rate (an index of rehearsal rate) between the groups. Measures of phonological ability, rhyme awareness and phoneme deletion, also showed strong differences between the different reading ability groups. Regression analyses showed that rhyme awareness, phoneme deletion, and speech rate (but not verbal short-term memory) had independent predictive relationships to reading skill. These findings show that phonological skills do not represent a unitary trait, and that different facets of phonological ability are important in predicting the development of reading skills.

Do dyslexic and other poor readers differ in reading-related cognitive skills?

The rationale for the study was that if dyslexic and garden-variety poor readers differ in reading-related cognitive skills, there is justification for believing dyslexia to be a distinct entity. Subjects were 110 children aged 6 to 10 years, divided into groups of dyslexic poor readers varying in verbal IQ, garden-variety poor readers, and good readers. Findings suggest that there are valid grounds for believing that dyslexia is a separate entity from garden-variety poor reading, and that it is found among children at all verbal IQ levels. Poor phonological awareness and nonword reading, in relation to normal readers, were shared by dyslexic and garden-variety poor readers. Deficits unique to dyslexic poor readers were problems in both automatic visual recognition and phonological recoding of graphic stimuli. The study supports the phonological-core variable-difference model of Stanovich (1988) in that both dyslexic and garden-variety poor readers showed phonological processing deficits, but they were more extensive in dyslexics.

Phenotypic performance profile of children with reading disabilities: A regression-based test of the phonological-core variable-difference model.

In this study, we introduce a new analytic strategy for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates: a regression-based logic that is analogous to the reading-level match design, but one without some of the methodological problems of that design. It provides a unique method for examining whether the reading subskill profiles of poor readers with aptitude/achievement discrepancy differ from those without discrepancy. Children were compared on a varied set of phonological, orthographic, memory, and language processing tasks. The results indicated that cognitive differences between these 2 groups of poor readers all reside outside of the word recognition module

Phonological Processes, Confrontational Naming, and Immediate Memory in Dyslexia

A group of poor readers classified as dyslexic by age/IQ discrepancy criteria (n = 42) were contrasted with two clinic control groups: 56 adequate-for-age readers with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and 21 poor-for-age readers not meeting the IQ discrepancy criterion (slow/borderline group). The children (33 girls, 86 boys) ranged in age from 7.5 years to 12 years. Variables chosen for study included simple and complex phonological processing, speech rate, continuous naming speed, running memory span, serial memory span, and mental addition. Evidence is presented that the two poor reader groups are distinguishable. Unlike the dyslexic group, the slow/borderline group did not differ from the ADD group on three key measures: simple auditory phonological sensitivity, continuous naming speed, and running memory span. Stepwise regression to predict word list reading level showed that once age and verbal IQ were removed (51% of variance), these three key measures accounted for an additional 22% of the variance (R = 0.86, R2 = 0.73). The single best predictor of word list reading level was nonsense word list reading level, which was explained by the same set of five variables that explained real word reading (R = 0.77, R2 = .60). Severity of attentional problems was not linearly related to reading skill in this clinic sample.