Reading-impaired Children Research Articles

Do the Wechsler scales underestimate the difference between verbal and performance abilities in children with language-related disorders?

The present paper examines the validity of the Wechsler scales with children with language-related disorders, with whom the scales were not originally normed. The general question is whether we can take measures of IQ, normed with a normal sample, and then validly use them as indicators of the same constructs with samples significantly different from the normed sample. In previous papers it was pointed out that the pattern structurally simple > moderately complex > complex tests can be observed in their IQ profiles within both the Verbal scale and the Performance scale. In this paper, it is hypothesized that this scatter of scores leads to an underestimation of the global V-P IQ differences for children with language-related disorders because there are more structurally complex tests on the Performance scale than on the Verbal scale. To test this hypothesis, "purer" V-P IQ differences were calculated by comparing the scores on Verbal and Performance tests of equal structural complexity. WPPSI and WISC-R data from four groups of children were analyzed: language-impaired children (n = 128), reading-impaired children (n = 112), children from dyslexic families (n = 51), and normal children (n = 49). When the effect of the difference in structural complexity was controlled for, it was found that the distribution of the revised V-P IQ difference was significantly more toward the negative end of the spectrum than the traditional V-P IQ differences for language-impaired and reading-impaired children, and approaching a significant level for children from dyslexic families. As hypothesized, there were no significant differences between the two distributions of V-P IQ differences for normal children. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Plastic neural changes and reading improvement caused by audiovisual training in reading-impaired children.

This study aimed at determining whether audiovisual training without linguistic material has a remediating effect on reading skills and central auditory processing in dyslexic children. It was found that this training resulted in plastic changes in the auditory cortex, indexed by enhanced electrophysiological mismatch negativity and faster reaction times to sound changes. Importantly, these changes were accompanied by improvement in reading skills. The results indicate that reading difficulties can be ameliorated by special training programs and, further, that the training effects can be observed in brain activity. Moreover, the fact that the present training effects were obtained by using a program including no linguistic material indicates that dyslexia is at least partly based on a general auditory perceptual deficit.

Phonological and visual motion processing in reading impaired children

Phonological and visual motion processing in reading impaired children

Retrieval rate, accuracy and vocabulary elaboration (RAVE)in reading-impaired children: a pilot intervention programme

Although most severely reading-impaired children are characterized by two core deficits in phonological and naming speed processes, most current interventions emphasize only phonological skills. The present study assessed the efficacy of an eight-week pilot intervention programme designed to increase the speed and accuracy of naming or lexical retrieval skills. Because of the close relationship between word knowledge and the speed with which a word is retrieved, a second goal was to increase the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge. Subjects for the intervention included 17 severely impaired readers (mean age 13 years). Included for pre-intervention reader group comparisons were 31 average readers matched for reading age (mean age 10 years). Significant pre-intervention differences favouring controls were found on all naming speed measures and two measures of vocabulary depth. There were no differences in receptive vocabulary. Pre- and post-intervention comparisons for impaired readers indicated significant gains on word retrieval accuracy and vocabulary depth. There was significant generalization to an untrained naming speed task. Implications for diagnosis and treatment of reading-impaired children are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Interpreting the WISC-R subtest scores of reading impaired children--a structural approach.

The problem of characterising more specifically the cognitive requirements involved in subtests from standardised measures of intelligence represents a main problem in the research on exceptional populations. A new way of classifying tests of mental abilities is presented. Rather than focusing on the content of a given test, the present classification system focuses on their structures. The classification system is applied to the WISC-R (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Revised, Wechsler, 1974). It will be used to interpret the IQ-profiles of a clinically defined sample of reading impaired children (N = 82). The basic finding of the study is that the structural complexity of a subtest influences the tests results of reading impaired children. This influence is interpreted as a consequence of poor procedural knowledge; i.e., poor knowledge about how to organise complex sets of data. It is suggested that teaching of metacognitive strategies could be an aid for reading impaired children.

Auditory ERPs during rhyme and semantic processing: Effects of reading ability in college students

Event-related potential (ERP), reaction time (RT), and response accuracy measures were obtained during the phonological and semantic categorization of spoken words in 14 undergraduates: 7 were average readers and 7 were reading-impaired. For the impaired readers, motor responses were significantly slower and less accurate than were those of the average readers in both classification tasks. ERPs obtained during rhyme processing displayed a relatively larger amplitude negativity at about 480 ms for the impaired readers as compared to the average readers, whereas semantic processing resulted in no major group differences in the ERPs at this latency. Also, N480 amplitude was larger during semantic relative to phonological classification for the average readers but not for the impaired readers. Results are compared to a previous study of reading-impaired children on the same tasks.

Late Cognitive Brain Potentials, Phonological and Semantic Classification of Spoken Words, and Reading Ability in Children

Event-related potential (ERP), reaction time, and response accuracy measures were obtained during rhyming and semantic classification of spoken words in 10 average (mean age 11.64 years) and 9 impaired reading (mean age 12.10 years) children. The behavioral measures of classification did not distinguish the groups. In the ERPs, rhyme processing produced more pronounced group differences than did semantic processing at about 480 ms, with a relatively more negative distribution for the impaired readers at centroparietal sites. At about 800 ms in both classification tasks, the impaired readers displayed a late positivity that was delayed in latency and of larger amplitude at frontal sites than that for the average readers. The ERP findings suggest that the categorization of spoken words for meaning and sound result in increasingly more aberrant correlates of these processing demands in reading-impaired children.

Visual similarity between manual and printed alphabet letters

This study examined the visual similarity of American manual alphabet letters to their graphic counterparts. Forty-five nondisabled undergraduate college students, who were unfamiliar with the manual alphabet, viewed each of the manual alphabet letters from three angles. Eleven of the 26 manual letters (42%) were correctly identified at one or more viewing angles by more than 50% (23/45) of the subjects. Perhaps more importantly, all of the manual letters were perceived to have some positive degree of similarity to their corresponding graphic letters, and for 65% (17/26) of the manual letters, the subjects perceived a moderate to a very strong degree of similarity. These findings suggest that with minimal training, manual alphabet letters may potentially provide a visual cue for phonologically segmenting and sequencing oral and written language. Implications on the instructional use of fingerspelling to facilitate phonemic awareness for high-risk or reading-impaired children and augmented communicators le...

Phonological and spatial processing abilities in language- and reading-impaired children.

In the present study, we further examined (see Kamhi & Catts, 1986) the phonological processing abilities of language-impaired (LI) and reading-impaired (RI) children. We also evaluated these children's ability to process spatial information. Subjects were 10 LI, 10 RI, and 10 normal children between the ages of 6:8 and 8:10 years. Each subject was administered eight tasks: four word repetition tasks (monosyllabic, monosyllabic presented in noise, three-item, and multisyllabic), rapid naming, syllable segmentation, paper folding, and form completion. The normal children performed significantly better than both the LI and RI children on all but two tasks: syllable segmentation and repeating words presented in noise. The LI and RI children performed comparably on every task with the exception of the multisyllabic word repetition task. These findings were consistent with those from our previous study (Kamhi & Catts, 1986). The similarities and differences between LI and RI children are discussed.

Attentional Capabilities of Reading-Impaired Children during Dichotic Presentation of Phonetic and Complex Nonphonetic Sounds

Reading-impaired boys, who were deficient in nonverbal auditory processing skills, were tested on their ability to identify a single speech sound (CV) when presented in dichotic competition with a nontarget CV or complex nonspeech sound (bleat). Sixteen reading-impaired boys aged 9 to 14 and 16 age-matched controls were presented with 30 CV-CV pairs and 30 CV-Bleat pairs. No difference was found between the two groups in their ability to identify the target CV, regardless of whether the competing stimulus was phonetic or nonphonetic. It was concluded that reading-impaired children of the type studied here are characterized more by an attentional capacity limitation than by an inability to focus attention or by a specific inability to process phonetic information.

Toward an understanding of developmental language and reading disorders.

The primary purpose of this study was to compare the ability of language-impaired and reading-impaired children to process (i.e., encode and retrieve) phonological information. Four measures of phonological awareness and several measures of word and sentence repetition abilities were used to evaluate phonological processing skills. Two additional measures assessed children's awareness of lexical and morphological information. Subjects were 12 language-impaired (LI), 12 reading-impaired (RI), and 12 normal children between the ages of 6 and 8 years. The findings supported previous claims that children with reading impairments have difficulty processing phonological information. To our surprise, however, the LI children performed significantly worse than the RI children on only three measures, all involving word and sentence repetition. These findings raise questions about the distinctiveness of school-age children with a history of language impairment and poor readers with no history of language impairment.

Perceptual/motor profiles of reading impaired children with or without concomitant oral language deficits

In an attempt to understand the neurological mechanisms that might be involved in developmental communication disorders, re search has focused on perceptual and motor development as it pertains to development and disorders of communication. Early hypotheses pertaining to sub-groupings of dyslexic children have included de scriptions of perceptual profiles in various sensory modalities (Mykle bust, 1965; Quiros, 1964; Boder, 1973; Doehring, 1968). Subgroupings of reading-impaired children which include perceptual profiles are based primarily on results of tests that tap auditory or visual pro cessing of verbal material, such as the Digit Span Test from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale For Children—Revised (Wechsler, 1974) or various subtests from the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities

Auditory temporal perception, phonics, and reading disabilities in children

Reading-impaired and control children were given an experimental battery of nonverbal auditory perceptual tests which examined discrimination and temporal order perception. Stimulus tones were presented at various rates. There were no significant differences between groups on tests in which stimuli were presented at slow rates. However, when the same stimuli were presented more rapidly, the reading-impaired group made significantly more errors than the controls. The reading-impaired children's ability to use phonics skills (nonsense word reading) was also examined. There was a high correlation between the number of errors made on the phonics reading test and the number of errors made in responding to the rapidly presented stimuli in the auditory perceptual tests. The hypothesis that some reading impairments are related to low-level auditory perceptual dysfunction that affects the ability to learn to use phonics skills adequately is discussed.

Language and reading: Some perceptual prerequisites

Since Orton first noted the communicative and perceptual deficits of reading impaired children, many investigators have attempted to delineate in more detail the nature of perceptual impairment in children with language and reading disabilities. Considerable advances in our knowledge concerning the manner in which speech is processed as a code have occurred since Orton’s time. These advances have made it possible to demonstrate a more direct link between perceptual deficits and the development of communication skills, including reading.

Discrimination of time-altered sentential approximations and monosyllables by children with reading problems.

This study compared the performance of normal-reading and reading-impaired children using time-compressed three- and five-word sentential approximations to full grammaticality, and the Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification (WIPI) test presented with and without pictures. Results suggested that reading-impaired children could be differentiated from normal readers by scores on these measures and by types of errors made. Theoretical and pragmatic implications are discussed.

Some speech and auditory discrimination measurements in poor-reading children

It has been suggested that children who are unable to make simple and complex auditory discriminations or who are unable to perceive phoneme blending in words will have difficulty in phonics reading programs [NINDS Mongr. No. 9 (1969)]. Forty normal-hearing reading-impaired children with normal SRTs were given phonetically balanced words monaurally at 60 dB HL. Words were next presented to one ear at 10 dB SL and to the other at 40 dB SL. The later was altered so that all energy above 1.5 kHz was effectively attenuated. Intelligibility was determined for temporarily distorted speech (as in words “sounded out” and words with one or more missing phonemes.) JNDs for pitch and loudness were obtained with a reference tone of 1 kHz at 60 dB HL. The perception of binaural beats at 0.5 kHz was also noted. It was observed that reading-impaired children yielded normal speech discrimination scores but typically poor binaural scores. Difficulty in perceiving the temporarily altered and/or phonetically deleted speech was also significant for the poor readers. Pitch, intensity, and beat perception were found to be unimpaired. Errors found in listening were primarily restricted to the consonants, while errors in oral reading tended to be chiefly vowels. That is, vowels were usually heard correctly but read incorrectly. Types of errors and relation to orthography are discussed.