Reading-disabled Boys Research Articles

Connections between reading disability and behavior problems: Testing temporal and causal hypotheses

In this study of children's reading and behavior problem status from Grade 2 to Grade 4 of elementary school, we tested hypotheses concerned with the temporal and causal connections between these two closely associated disorders. Children with both, either, or neither kinds of problems were followed up over 2 years. While reading disability remained stable over time, there was greater variability in behavior problem status. Our data did not support the claim that reading problems lead to the development of behavior problems. Children who were comorbid had the worst outcome at follow-up, suggesting that behavior problems may exacerbate reading delay. Reading-disabled children were lower (albeit in the normal range) on intelligence, but when IQ was controlled, large group differences on reading and spelling were still evident. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) type behavior problems significantly differentiated children with comorbid problems from children with behavior problems alone. Sex differences were noted in the association, with two-thirds of reading-disabled boys also having behavior problems and two-thirds of reading-disabled girls having no behavior problems, suggesting that pathways to reading disability may be gender specific.

Reading problems and antisocial behaviour: developmental trends in comorbidity.

Samples of poor and normal readers were followed through adolescence and into early adulthood to assess continuities in the comorbidity between reading difficulties and disruptive behaviour problems. Reading-disabled boys showed high rates of inattentiveness in middle childhood, but no excess of teacher-rated behaviour problems at age 14 and no elevated rates of aggression, antisocial personality disorder or officially recorded offending in early adulthood. Increased risks of juvenile offending among specifically retarded-reading boys seemed associated with poor school attendance, rather than reading difficulties per se. Reading problems were associated with some increases in disruptive behaviour in their teens in girls.

Search for letter identity and location by disabled readers.

Reading-disabled boys, reading- and age-matched controls, and adults searched letter arrays for the identity or location of a probe letter. Response time (RT) and accuracy were examined as a function of the temporal relation between probe and array letters (probe first, simultaneous, array first), and array size (1-5 letters). Although disabled readers closely resembled age controls in RT, their accuracy differed significantly when large letter arrays were tested. In the letter identification task, this was only evident when the array letters preceded the probe; in the letter location task, it occurred in all three probe conditions. Correlational analyses showed that all subjects were influenced by the visual, but not the phonological, similarity between letters. Thus, a reading-related impairment is evident in both letter identification and letter location processes, even when the phonological coding of letters has been minimized.

Study strategies and story recall in attention deficit disorder and reading disability

The role of metacognition and executive processes in mediating use of study skills was examined in groups of attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADD-H), normal, and non-ADD-H reading-disabled (RD) boys, matched on age and verbal IQ. On a story recall task, ADD-H boys did not differ from normals in their immediate gist recall of a story or in their recall following a study period. RD boys demonstrated inferior recall in both conditions. Study skills of the ADD-H boys were poorer than those of normal boys on all measures. They spent less time studying, expended less effort, and employed more superficial strategies. However, their poor strategies did not appear to reflect a lack of metacognitive awareness. Results are discussed in terms of the impact of motivational variables in modulating strategy use in ADD-H boys and the impact of verbal processing problems in reading disabilities. Implications for treatment and the relationship between ADD-H and RD are discussed.

Supraspan verbal memory in attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity normal and reading-disabled boys

To assess memory problems associated with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADDH) and reading disability (RD), nonverbal subspan, span, and supraspan measures was administered to 30 ADDH, 30 normal, and 24 RD boys, ages 7 to 12. Results from the supraspan verbal measures, which included word lists and related and unrelated paired associates, are reported. Across all verbal tasks, deficits became most apparent in ADDH boys on measures requiring organized, deliberate rehearsal strategies, sustained strategic effort, and careful consideration of response alternatives. This pattern suggests impaired self-regulatory or "executive" processes. RDs showed more generalized deficits across the verbal measures, suggesting problems with verbal processing. Recent studies supporting this interpretation are reviewed.

Neurolinguistic deficits and the left hemisphere in the reading disabled

The relationship between cerebral laterality and neuropsychological functions, particularly phonemic analysis, was examined in a group of 20 reading disabled (RD) and 20 nonreading disabled (NRD) 8‐ to 12‐year‐old boys. Compared with NRD children, RD children exhibited an equivalent right ear and left hemispheric superiority for reporting dichotically presented words. However, even with experimental control for attention, the RD boys’ performance was poorer than NRD boys with both left and right ears. In addition, the RD children displayed poor performance on nine scales of the Luria Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery‐Children's Revision (LNNB‐CR), and had the most difficulty with the scales and items designed to tap left hemispheric dysfunction (i.e., the Left Sensorimotor, Receptive Speech, Expressive Language, Reading, and Writing scales). All of the RD children also performed poorer than any NRD child on a test of phonemic analysis, the Lindamood Test of Auditory Conceptualization (LAC), which assess...

Cognitive processing deficits in reading disabilities: A prefrontal cortical hypothesis

Much research investigating the neuropsychological underpinnings of reading disabilities has emphasized posterior brain regions. However, recent evidence indicates that prefrontal cortex may also play a role. This study investigated cognitive processes that are associated with prefrontal and posterior brain functions. Subjects were 12-year-old reading disabled and nondisabled boys. Discriminant analysis procedures indicated that measures of prefrontal functions distinguished between the two groups better than measures of posterior functions. The results suggest that reading disabled boys have difficulty with cognitive processes involving selective and sustained attention, inhibition of routinized responses, set maintenance, flexibility in generating and testing alternative hypotheses, and phonemically based language production.

Short-term serial recall in ADDH, normal, and reading-disabled boys.

Short-term retention of verbal items of span and subspan length was examined in hyperactive (ADDH), normal and non-ADDH reading-disabled boys. Performance of ADDH and normal boys did not differ on three measures of verbal serial recall. Thus, it appears that the cognitive deficits of ADDH children cannot be attributed to deficient retention of stimuli. In contrast, reading-disabled (RD) boys performed significantly more poorly than both normal and ADDH boys when required to recall verbal items following "filled" delay intervals in which the children were required to perform a competing verbal activity. The results suggest that verbal encoding of RD children is particularly vulnerable to interference from other verbal stimuli. ADDH and RD children may represent subsamples of children demonstrating academic difficulties, with each group showing a characteristic pattern of cognitive deficits.

Auditory event-related potentials in attention and reading disabled boys

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 4 groups of children: (1) reading disabled, (2) attentional deficit disorder with hyperactivity, (3) attentional deficit disorder without hyperactivity, and (4) normal controls. Subjects were instructed to press a button to a low probability tone (target, P=0.168) and to ignore all other events which included a high probability tone (non-target, P=0.664) and an unexpected novel sound ( P=0.168). The amplitude of several late ERP components and the latency of the P3b component were examined. As in a previously reported visual study with the same sample of children, the overall amplitude of the P3b component was significantly smaller in all the clinical groups than in controls. Two other late components (slow wave and Pc) were also smaller in the clinical groups than in controls. P3 latency did not, however, differentiate the groups.

Training of component reading skills

Fifteen reading-disabled boys, classified according to reading subskill deficits, formed three subgroups: Oral Reading, Associative, and Sequential. On the rationale that training procedures emphasizing accuracy and speed of response to letters, syllables, and words would improve reading skills, the children were trained daily for two and one-half months. Two schedules of testing and training allowed for an untrained control group and a follow-up group. The results indicated that the computer-assisted training procedures were not only effective in improving component reading skills, but in addition there was a transfer of training to achievement measures of reading word recognition. This study lends support to the hypothesis that training according to subgroup classification, using training procedures which incorporate an application of the automaticity theory and a combination of task-analytic and process-oriented models, is an effective training approach for reading-disabled children.

Efficacy of "talking books" for a group of reading disabled boys.

No significant differences in proficiency of reading-listening comprehension among 24 reading-disabled boys in Grades 4, 5, and 6 were noted after hearing "talking book," taped stories, and teacher-read presentations.

Problem solving in hyperactive, normal, and reading-disabled boys.

Diagnostic problem solving was examined in groups of hyperactive, normal, and nonhyperactive reading-disabled boys matched on age and verbal IQ. On the matrix solution task employed (a version of the game of 20 Questions) hyperactives used less efficient questions and strategies than the other two groups, in spite of the task being designed to maximize the performance of the hyperactives. Reading-disabled children were not significantly worse than normal children on the task. The results were interpreted as suggesting that the attentional difficulties of hyperactives retard the development of strategies for solving complex problems. Nonhyperactive reading-disabled children may be less affected in this area because of the absence of significant attentional difficulties.

Functional cerebral lateralization in subtypes of disabled readers

This study investigated the functional cortical organization of reading-disabled boys and age-matched normal readers. Subjects were initially classified according to E. Boder's (1971a. In B. Bateman (Ed.), Learning disorders. Seattle: Special Child Publications. Vol. 4.) distinction between dysphonetic children (who make nonphonetic, bizarre spelling errors), dyseidetic children (who make phonetically acceptable errors, but do not respond to some words as “wholes”), and children who display normal error patterns (who make phonetically acceptable errors and respond to words as “wholes”). It was hypothesized that different types of reading disability would be associated with different patterns of lateralized brain function. This proposal was examined by testing subjects on three experimental neuropsychological measures—hemispheric time-sharing, conjugate lateral eye movements, and tactile directional perception. Conjugate lateral eye movements were disregarded as the control subjects failed to show predicted asymmetries on this measure. The two other measures were considered valid and demonstrated atypical lateralization in the reading-disabled groups. Lateralization of verbal and/or spatial functiosn differed among the reading-disabled groups and an attempt was made to relate these atypical patterns to the type of reading difficulties presented.

Retrieval and evaluation of symbolic information in dyslexia

A group of 35 reading disabled boy and 35 matched controls were studied over a two-year period in order to evaluate the validity of traditional hypotheses about the causes of serious reading impairment in preadolescent boys for whom the common disadvantages of economic privation, bilingualism and emotional instability were absent. The popular hypothesis of perceptual deficit was not supported by the data, although the finding that most reading disabled boys have a short-term memory deficit was affirmed. The most important new findings was that about one-fourth of the reading disabled boys had serious difficulty in maintaining an efficient set to process and/or evaluate information, especially when that information was contained in oral speech.