Reading Acquisition Research Articles

Reading Acquisition Software for Portuguese: Preliminary Results

Reading Acquisition Software for Portuguese: Preliminary Results

Cognitive Precursors of Reading: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

ABSTRACT In this paper, we survey current evidence on cognitive precursors of reading in different orthographies by reviewing studies with a cross-linguistic research design. Graphic symbol knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were found to be associated with reading acquisition in all orthographies investigated. However, apart from rapid naming, this association is mostly interactive, meaning that young children develop their symbol knowledge, and phonological and morphological awareness during reading development. Especially for phonological awareness, cross-linguistic evidence involving phonologically transparent orthographies, both alphabetic and non-alphabetic, suggests that it may be less of a hurdle than in the complex English orthography. Cross-linguistic research designs can be a useful methodological approach to test limits of reading theories that were initially developed for alphabetic orthographies.

Factors Explaining Deficits in Reading Acquisition: The Case of Williams Syndrome.

Purpose Multiple factors impact reading acquisition in individuals with reading disability, including genetic disorders such as Williams syndrome (WS). Despite a relative strength in oral language, individuals with WS usually have an intellectual disability and tend to display deficits in areas associated with reading. There is substantial variability in their reading skills. While some authors have postulated that phonological deficits are at the source of their reading deficits, others have suggested that they can be attributed to visuospatial deficits. This study was the first to undertake an in-depth exploration of reading skills among French-speaking children and adults with WS. We tested the assumption that some factors influence performance on single-word identification among individuals with WS, with a focus on the roles of phonological awareness and visuospatial skills. Method Participants were 29 French-speaking adults with WS and 192 controls matched for nonverbal mental age and reading level. We administered tests assessing reading (decoding and word recognition), vocabulary (expressive and receptive), and phonological and visuospatial skills. We also controlled for chronological age and nonverbal reasoning. Results Phonemic awareness was the most predictive factor of single-word identification in the WS group. Visuospatial skills also contributed, but not more or beyond other factors. More broadly, reasoning skills may also have accounted for the variability in single-word identification in WS, but this was not the case for either chronological age or vocabulary. Conclusions There is considerable heterogeneity among adults with WS, who may be either readers or prereaders. Similar profiles identified among individuals with other specific learning disabilities suggest that high reading variability is not specific to the neuropsychological profile of WS. We discuss a multidimensional approach to the factors involved in reading deficits in WS.

The Correlation Between Gray Matter Volume and Verbal Episodic Memory Encoding

The acquisition of reading by children is supported by deep changes in the brain systems devoted to vision and to language. The visual system controls the deployment of attention and gaze across texts, and identifies rapidly letters and their order within words. The output of those processes is fed to the language system, giving access to sounds and meaning. This expertize rests upon the interplay of numerous connected brain areas, and hence may be impaired in a broad variety of manners following brain lesions in literate individuals, resulting in acquired dyslexias. In this article, we review the main types of acquired dyslexias, their clinical features, pathophysiology, and anatomical correlates.

Evaluation and Psychoeducational Intervention of Learning Disabilities: A Case Study

Learning Disabilities are one of the most frequent deficits in the teaching and learning process, present between 5 and 15% of the students. Various definitions have been made, such as DSM 5, ICD-11, or other more psychoeducational definitions. The main problem is the unexpected difficulties in learning how to read or write despite having a medium intellectual capacity. Deficits can be found in: cognitive variables, visual perceptual processing, phonological processing, semantic processing, and morphosyntactic processing. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reading and writing learning disabilities of a Spanish-speaking subject. The methodology is a single case study, which is examined of a 7-year-old boy enrolled in the second year of Primary Education at a grant-maintained school in the city of Malaga (Spain). A psychoeducational evaluation proposal is described with different qualitative and quantitative techniques. The results indicate that the subject presents difficulties in his acquisition of Reading and Writing skills, showing signs of cognitive deficits in memory, attention, processing speed, visual and phonological processing, and difficulties in reading and writing. Finally, a proposal for psychoeducational intervention is described, which would be useful in promoting learning and improving the pupil's academic performance. The research shows the relevance of the global evaluation of cognitive and psycho-linguistic variables and the need to establish an early diagnosis. It is also necessary to highlight the relevance of early intervention and the establishment of clear educational guidelines towards the teacher and the family. The main limitations are determined from the single case study and the possible limitations of validity and generalizability of this study to other languages.

Developmental Dyslexia, Reading Acquisition, and Statistical Learning: A Sceptic's Guide.

Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive, or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism that allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli. The link between statistical learning and reading ability is indirect, with intermediate skills, such as knowledge of frequently co-occurring letters, likely being causally dependent on statistical learning skills and, in turn, causing individual variation in reading ability. We discuss theoretical issues regarding what a link between statistical learning and reading ability actually means and review the evidence for such a deficit. We then describe and simulate the “noisy chain hypothesis”, where each intermediary link between a proposed cause and the end-state of reading ability reduces the correlation coefficient between the low-level deficit and the end-state outcome of reading. We draw the following conclusions: (1) Empirically, there is evidence for a correlation between statistical learning ability and reading ability, but there is no evidence to suggest that this relationship is causal, (2) theoretically, focussing on a complete causal chain between a distal cause and developmental dyslexia, rather than the two endpoints of the distal cause and reading ability only, is necessary for understanding the underlying processes, (3) statistically, the indirect nature of the link between statistical learning and reading ability means that the magnitude of the correlation is diluted by other influencing variables, yielding most studies to date underpowered, and (4) practically, it is unclear what can be gained from invoking the concept of statistical learning in teaching children to read.

Orthography affects L1 and L2 speech perception but not production in early bilinguals

AbstractOrthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-phoneme correspondences influence bilingual speech perception and production, even when both languages have been acquired in early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque and Basque–Spanish early bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque pseudowords created by replacing Basque /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take the same orthographic form, <z>. Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks in Basque and Spanish to test whether speech sounds with the same orthographic form were produced similarly in the two languages. Results for both groups showed orthography had strong effects on speech perception but no effects on speech production. Taken together, these findings suggest that orthography plays a crucial role in the speech system of early bilinguals but does not automatically lead to non-native production.

Neuro-Behavioral Correlates of Executive Dysfunctions in Dyslexia Over Development From Childhood to Adulthood.

Dyslexia is a neurobiological learning disability in the reading domain that has symptoms in early childhood and persists throughout life. Individuals with dyslexia experience difficulties in academia and cognitive and emotional challenges that can affect wellbeing. Early intervention is critical to minimize the long-term difficulties of these individuals. However, the behavioral and neural correlates which predict dyslexia are challenging to depict before reading is acquired. One of the precursors for language and reading acquisition is executive functions (EF). The present review aims to highlight the current atypicality found in individuals with dyslexia in the domain of EF using behavioral measures, brain mapping, functional connectivity, and diffusion tensor imaging along development. Individuals with dyslexia show EF abnormalities in both behavioral and neurobiological domains, starting in early childhood that persist into adulthood. EF impairment precedes reading disability, therefore adding an EF assessment to the neuropsychological testing is recommended for early intervention. EF training should also be considered for the most comprehensive outcomes.

Which Factors Modulate Letter Position Coding in Pre-literate Children?

One of the central landmarks of learning to read is the emergence of orthographic processing (i.e., the encoding of letter identity and letter order): it constitutes the necessary link between the low-level stages of visual processing and the higher-level processing of words. Regarding the processing of letter position, many experiments have shown worse performance in various tasks for the transposed-letter pair judge-JUDGE than for the orthographic control jupte-JUDGE. Importantly, 4-y.o. pre-literate children also show letter transposition effects in a same-different task: TZ-ZT is more error-prone than TZ-PH. Here, we examined whether this effect with pre-literate children is related to the cognitive and linguistic skills required to learn to read. Specifically, we examined the relation of the transposed-letter in a same-different task with the scores of these children in phonological, alphabetic and metalinguistic awareness, linguistic skills, and basic cognitive processes. To that end, we used a standardized battery to assess the abilities related with early reading acquisition. Results showed that the size of the transposed-letter effect in pre-literate children was strongly associated with the sub-test on basic cognitive processes (i.e., memory and perception) but not with the other sub-tests. Importantly, identifying children who may need a pre-literacy intervention is crucial to minimize eventual reading difficulties. We discuss how this marker can be used as a tool to anticipate reading difficulties in beginning readers.

The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency.

A question under debate in psycholinguistics is the nature of the relationship between spoken and written languages. Although it has been extensively shown that orthographic transparency, which varies across writing systems, strongly affects reading performance, its role in speech processing is much less investigated. The present study addressed this issue in Persian, whose writing system provides a possibility to assess the impact of orthographic transparency on spoken word recognition in young children at different stages of reading acquisition. In Persian, the long vowels are systematically present in the script, whereas the spelling correspondence of short vowels is progressively omitted from the script in the course of reading acquisition, thus, turning transparent into opaque spelling. Based on this unique characteristic, we tested 144 monolingual Persian-speaking nonreaders (i.e., preschoolers) and readers (second graders to fifth graders and young adults) in an auditory lexical decision task using transparent and opaque words. Overall, the results showed that, in accordance with the fact that the diacritics of short vowels are progressively omitted during the second year of schooling, the stimuli containing short vowels (opaque words) were recognized more slowly than transparent ones in third graders. Interestingly, there is a hint that the emergence of the transparency effect in the third graders was associated with an overall slower recognition speed in this group compared to their younger peers. These findings indicate that learning opaque spelling-sound correspondence might not only generate interference between the two language codes but also induce a general processing cost in the entire spoken language system.

Emergent literacy skills of Saudi Arabic speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT Research with English-speaking populations has shown that there is a relationship between developmental language disorder (DLD) and emergent literacy skills in children. A small number of Arabic studies have indirectly investigated this relationship in typically developing (TD) children, and children with reading difficulties, and demonstrated the important role of morphosyntactic skills in Arabic reading acquisition. However, none of the previous work has examined the relationship between oral language and emergent literacy skills in children with and without DLD. The aims of this study are twofold: to investigate the language and emergent literacy skills of Saudi Arabic children with DLD aged between 4;0– 6;11 years of age; to compare their performance to age and socioeconomic status matched TD children, and to investigate the relationship between language and emergent literacy skills in both groups. A comprehensive Arabic language and emergent literacy battery was administered. Findings demonstrated that the TD group significantly outperformed the DLD group on most emergent literacy tasks. The DLD group was significantly less accurate than the TD group on syllable segmentation, and phoneme awareness skills. There were significant associations between oral language skills and emergent literacy skills in the DLD group. In the TD group, vocabulary knowledge and syntactic skills were associated with some emergent literacy skills. Syntactic skills were found to have moderately significant relationship with all emergent literacy skills in both groups. This might suggest the important role of morphosyntactic skills to literacy development in Arabic. Overall, findings were consistent with existing literature, and demonstrated strong relationships between oral language and emergent literacy skills in the Arabic language.

THE IMPACTS OF LEARNING TO READ ON BRAIN ACTIVITY AND A SOCIOCULTURAL VIEW ON HUMAN COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING: A POSSIBLE RELATION

Abstract: the present paper has a threefold objective: (i) to present a sociocultural view on human mental functioning; (ii) to review studies on the impacts of learning to read on brain activity; and (iii) to draw a parallel between a vygotskian view on human cognition and neuroscientific evidence of how learning to read impacts brain activity. The studies reviewed show the ways reading acquisition results in changes in brain activity, as well as how the brain reorganizes itself in order to accommodate new functions as a response to this process. From a vygotskian instance, this illustrates how one’s cognitive development is fostered on the external plane as they interact with socioculturally constructed means.

THE IMPACTS OF LEARNING TO READ ON BRAIN ACTIVITY AND A SOCIOCULTURAL VIEW ON HUMAN COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING: A POSSIBLE RELATION

Abstract: the present paper has a threefold objective: (i) to present a sociocultural view on human mental functioning; (ii) to review studies on the impacts of learning to read on brain activity; and (iii) to draw a parallel between a vygotskian view on human cognition and neuroscientific evidence of how learning to read impacts brain activity. The studies reviewed show the ways reading acquisition results in changes in brain activity, as well as how the brain reorganizes itself in order to accommodate new functions as a response to this process. From a vygotskian instance, this illustrates how one’s cognitive development is fostered on the external plane as they interact with socioculturally constructed means.

Use of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) for Teaching Reading Skills in Saudi Universities

This research paper endeavors to evaluate, assess and assert the expediency and efficacy of employing content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in teaching Reading skills to EFL students. It is a qualitative paper which examines and underscores the usefulness of developing EFL reading comprehension skills by using the CLIL teaching. The outcome of this teaching and learning methodology is predicted and determined by presenting and evaluating considerable researches carried out in this field by eminent language researchers. These studies unequivocally demonstrate that the application of CLIL in classrooms with regard to the acquisition and retention of EFL reading and vocabulary skills among college students has proved to be very helpful and palpable. It must be understood that CLIL does not help in making the teaching content simple or revising what learners already know. CLIL courses actually blend language and content together so as to enhance the language as well as the thinking abilities of the learners. The significant amount of research interest in this subject and its growing demand as a foreign language teaching approach necessitate intensive research and analysis as to its efficacy in other parts of the world. In this context, this paper examines and validates its efficacy for the Saudi EFL learners, in view of its ostensible advantages related to language awareness and content knowledge. This paper aims to address the problems and concerns of Saudi learners and teachers of EFL, and lays down the plans to implement CLIL courses in Saudi universities for the benefit of the students in this part of the world. The research concludes by encapsulating and analyzing the researches undertaken in this field and explaining the lessons learnt by employing CLIL courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels in Saudi universities.

Transfer facilitation effects of morphological awareness on multicharacter word reading in Chinese as a foreign language

AbstractThis study examined the transfer facilitation effects from English morphological awareness on Chinese multicharacter word reading in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). Fifty English-speaking American university CFL learners participated in our study who measured their English morphological awareness, Chinese morphological awareness, Chinese linguistic knowledge, Chinese word reading, and working memory. There were three major findings: (1) with approximately three years of formal Chinese instruction and limited Chinese print input, English-speaking adult learners of Chinese developed sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of multicharacter words in Chinese. (2) English morphological awareness did not directly contribute to Chinese bimorphemic three-character pseudoword reading yet contributed indirectly via the joint serial mediation by Chinese morphological awareness and Chinese monomorphemic two-character real word reading. (3) There was no additional influence from Chinese linguistic knowledge on Chinese word reading. And, English morphological awareness explained about 3.64% of the variance in second language Chinese bimorphemic three-character pseudoword reading. Discussion is provided regarding the transfer facilitation mechanism through which first language morphological awareness contributes to adult second language reading acquisition.

Development of thalamus mediates paternal age effect on offspring reading: A preliminary investigation.

The importance of (inherited) genetic impact in reading development is well established. De novo mutation is another important contributor that is recently gathering interest as a major liability of neurodevelopmental disorders, but has been neglected in reading research to date. Paternal age at childbirth (PatAGE) is known as the most prominent risk factor for de novo mutation, which has been repeatedly shown by molecular genetic studies. As one of the first efforts, we performed a preliminary investigation of the relationship between PatAGE, offspring's reading, and brain structure in a longitudinal neuroimaging study following 51 children from kindergarten through third grade. The results showed that greater PatAGE was significantly associated with worse reading, explaining an additional 9.5% of the variance after controlling for a number of confounds—including familial factors and cognitive‐linguistic reading precursors. Moreover, this effect was mediated by volumetric maturation of the left posterior thalamus from ages 5 to 8. Complementary analyses indicated the PatAGE‐related thalamic region was most likely located in the pulvinar nuclei and related to the dorsal attention network by using brain atlases, public datasets, and offspring's diffusion imaging data. Altogether, these findings provide novel insights into neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the PatAGE effect on reading acquisition during its earliest phase and suggest promising areas of future research.

CORRECTION OF LEARNING DISORDERS BY OPTIMIZING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ORIENTATION

Learning to read, write and calculate are proving to be some of the most significant cognitive processes in early education. The objective of this systematic review is to explore the associations between the psychomotor component and the academic achievement in writing, reading, and mathematics. An organized and methodical research of electronic databases was completed in order to determine significant studies. Twenty eligible articles were strictly evaluated, with extracted and summarized keywords. The two components of the psychomotor activity that influence reading were primarily the orientation ability and the fine motor skill, which is the one responsible for the correct spelling of “mirror-writing”. Differences in motor function were observed after intervention programmes. The results of all researchers have shown that there is a link between dysgraphia, dyslexia and the orientation ability or visual perception. Meanwhile, the role of cognitive and motor skills that underpinned mathematical performance was highlighted, and children who had a high capacity for spatial and visual orientation benefited from a better understanding and perception of geometric figures. However, the importance of students'''' spatial reasoning in relation to mathematics was identified, but only in terms of geometry. Poor quality of spatial notions has been found to be one of the causes of delay in the acquisition of reading, writing and mathematical calculation. The role of fine motor skills in the writing process was also noted, being of real importance in times when the child manipulates the writing tool and puts a word or a sentence on the page.

Functional and morphological correlates of developmental dyslexia: A multimodal investigation of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex.

The ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) is a region crucial for reading acquisition through selective tuning to printed words. Developmental dyslexia is a disorder of reading with underlying neurobiological bases often associated with atypical neural responses to printed words. Previous studies have discovered anomalous structural development and function of the vOT in individuals with dyslexia. However, it remains unclear if or how structural abnormalities relate to functional alterations. In this study, we acquired structural, functional (words and faces processing), and diffusion MRI data from 26 children with dyslexia (average age = 10.4 ±2.0 years) and 14 age-matched typically developing readers (average age = 10.4 ±1.6 years). Morphological indices of local gyrification, neurite density (i.e., dendritic arborization structure), and orientation dispersion (i.e., dendritic arborization orientation) were analyzed within the vOT region that showed preferential activation in typically developing readers for words (as compared to face stimuli). The two cohorts diverged significantly in both functional and structural measures. Compared to typically developing controls, children with dyslexia did not show selectivity for words in the left vOT (contrast: words > false fonts). This lack of tuning to printed words was associated with greater neurite dispersion heterogeneity in the dyslexia cohort, but similar neurite density. These group differences were not present in the homologous contralateral area, the right vOT. Our findings provide new insight into the neurobiology of the lack of vOT word tuning in dyslexia by linking behavior, alterations in functional activation, and neurite organization.

Algorithmic versus teacher‐led sequencing in a digital serious game and the development of second language reading fluency and accuracy

AbstractRecent years have seen a surge of calls for personalization of education. Automatised adaptivity in serious games has been advocated as a potential instantiation of such calls. Yet little is known about the extent to which personalised learning through automatised adaptivity poses an advantage for language learning over generalised teacher‐led sequencing in digital, game‐based learning environments. The goal of this paper is to address this question by comparing the learning outcomes in reading accuracy and fluency of didactic sequences designed by EFL teachers or by an adaptive algorithm. A total of 67 participants completed several proficiency and reading skills pretest and posttest and used the iRead system for 6 months. Results showed that all learners made progress in reading skills, but no significant differences were found between the two sequences in relation to the development of reading skills. It was also shown that adaptivity works best if it leads to increase in the number of games per feature. Results are discussed in the context of previous findings, and the role of adaptivity and sequencing is critically assessed. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic? Serious games have the potential to aid learning but empirical research is needed. Findings about the efficiency of serious games are mixed. Current and reviewed versions of the Simple View of Reading constitute a suitable framework to measure reading acquisition. What this paper adds? It contributes to the growing corpus of research on digital serious games. It provides empirical evidence on the use of an adaptive system in formal education. Comparing a teacher‐led sequence to an algorithmic adaptive sequence on the same digital serious game has never been done before. The paper shows the need to obtain both system‐internal and system‐external data in order to capture the impact of gameplay on the development of L2 reading skills. Implications for practise and/or policy It sheds some light on how certain game designs may actually help practise with different degrees of intervention by teachers. It is interesting for teachers to use an adaptive sequence that they can check and intervene in if needed.

Literacy, power, and affective (dis)encounter: An ethnographic study on a low-income community in Spain.

In areas of social exclusion, there are greater risks of facing discrimination at school. The teaching-learning processes may contribute toward the perpetuation of this inequality. This research analyzes a literacy event that takes place in a low-income school in Southern Spain. The new literacy studies have come to examine how power relationships and affective bonds work in such literacy practices. An ethnographic method was followed to facilitate a deeper understanding of multimodal literacy. Further, a social semiotics multimodal approach was adopted to analyze the meaning-making social process that takes place in the classroom. The participants comprised two teachers and 17 children, whose ages range from 5 to 7 years. Data were collected in the form of reports, audio recordings, video recordings, and photographs over a two-years period. The results obtained have revealed that the children have been taught writing and reading through a dominant orthodox model that fails to consider the community’s and families’ cultural capitals. They also show that the literacy process does not grant any affective quality. Neither is there an authentic dialogic space created between the school and the community. This lack of dialogue generates an inequality in the actual acquisition of comprehensive reading and writing skills at school, with instances of groups exclusion, owing to the anti-hegemonic practices of knowledge acquisition.