Variance In Word Recognition Research Articles

Retrieval practice and word learning in children who are hard of hearing

Purpose Many children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) show poorer auditory word-learning skills than children with typical hearing (TH). The goal of this study was to test the effect of retrieval practice on word learning in children who are hard of hearing (HH). Method Twenty-six TH children and 16 children who are HH completed a speech perception and a vocabulary test, and a rapid word-learning game to learn new words under no retrieval, immediate retrieval, and spaced retrieval conditions. Result Linear mixed-effect models revealed that learning condition and time predicted 48% of the variance in word recognition, and age predicted 15% of word recall variance. We observed no differences in word recognition and recall between TH children and children who are HH. Children learned and remembered more words in the immediate and spaced retrieval practice conditions than in the no retrieval condition. Conclusion Retrieval practice is more effective for word learning and retention than passive exposure (no retrieval). Clinical and educational practices for children who are DHH could combine explicit instruction using targeted exposures and retrieval of new words with naturalistic approaches. Future studies should assess retrieval practice in real-life interventions to inform clinical and educational practices.

The roles of cognitive abilities and hearing acuity in older adults’ recognition of words taken from fast and spectrally reduced speech

AbstractPrevious literature has identified several cognitive abilities as predictors of individual differences in speech perception. Working memory was chief among them, but effects have also been found for processing speed. Most research has been conducted on speech in noise, but fast and unclear articulation also makes listening challenging, particularly for older listeners. As a first step toward specifying the cognitive mechanisms underlying spoken word recognition, we set up this study to determine which factors explain unique variation in word identification accuracy in fast speech, and the extent to which this was affected by further degradation of the speech signal. To that end, 105 older adults were tested on identification accuracy of fast words in unaltered and degraded conditions in which the speech stimuli were low-pass filtered. They were also tested on processing speed, memory, vocabulary knowledge, and hearing sensitivity. A structural equation analysis showed that only memory and hearing sensitivity explained unique variance in word recognition in both listening conditions. Working memory was more strongly associated with performance in the unfiltered than in the filtered condition. These results suggest that memory skills, rather than speed, facilitate the mapping of single words onto stored lexical representations, particularly in conditions of medium difficulty.

Word Recognition Variability With Cochlear Implants: The Degradation of Phonemic Sensitivity.

Cochlear implants (CIs) do not automatically restore speech recognition for postlingually deafened adults. Average word recognition remains at 60%, and enormous variability exists. Understanding speech requires knowledge of phonemic codes, the basic sound units of language. Hearing loss may result in degeneration of these long-term mental representations (i.e., "phonemic sensitivity"), and CI use may not adequately restore those representations. This investigation examined whether phonemic sensitivity is degraded for CI users, and whether this degradation results in poorer word recognition. Thirty adults with CIs and 20 normal-hearing controls underwent testing. Participants were assessed for word recognition in quiet, along with tasks of phonemic sensitivity using an audiovisual format to maximize recognition: initial consonant choice (ICC), in which they selected the word with the same starting sound as a target word, final consonant choice (FCC), in which they selected the word with the same ending sound, and backwards words, in which they repeated phonemes comprising words in backwards order. Phonemic sensitivity was poorer for CI users than for normal-hearing controls for ICC and FCC. For CI users, ICC and FCC predicted 25% and 40% of variance in word recognition, respectively. Longer duration of CI use did not lead to greater restoration in phonemic sensitivity. Even for adults who presumably had developed refined phonemic representations, hearing loss can degrade those representations, which results in poorer word recognition. Cochlear implants do not adequately restore those representations. Findings suggest the need for rehabilitative efforts to improve CI users' phonemic sensitivity.

Do Adults With Cochlear Implants Rely on Different Acoustic Cues for Phoneme Perception Than Adults With Normal Hearing?

PURPOSE Several acoustic cues specify any single phonemic contrast. Nonetheless, adult, native speakers of a language share weighting strategies, showing preferential attention to some properties over others. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing disrupts the salience of some cues: In general, amplitude structure remains readily available, but spectral structure less so. This study asked how well speech recognition is supported if CI users shift attention to salient cues not weighted strongly by native speakers. METHOD Twenty adults with CIs participated. The /bɑ/-/wɑ/ contrast was used because spectral and amplitude structure varies in correlated fashion for this contrast. Adults with normal hearing weight the spectral cue strongly but the amplitude cue negligibly. Three measurements were made: labeling decisions, spectral and amplitude discrimination, and word recognition. RESULTS Outcomes varied across listeners: Some weighted the spectral cue strongly, some weighted the amplitude cue, and some weighted neither. Spectral discrimination predicted spectral weighting. Spectral weighting explained the most variance in word recognition. Age of onset of hearing loss predicted spectral weighting but not unique variance in word recognition. CONCLUSION The weighting strategies of listeners with normal hearing likely support speech recognition best, so efforts in implant design, fitting, and training should focus on developing those strategies.

Relations between print exposure and literacy skills: New evidence from Grade 1–5

This study had two main aims: (a) to develop checklists adapted for the French culture and the age of the children whose level of print exposure (PE) was to be assessed and (b) to analyse the impact of print exposure on various literacy skills. The checklists consisted of Titles, Magazines, and Authors (targets and foils). The children's responses decreased from Titles to Magazines to Authors. With children in first grade and their parents (Expt 1), we established that PE shows links to socio‐economic status. In a longitudinal study conducted in Grade 1 (Expt 2), a hierarchical regression indicated that PE predicts variance in word reading after age, phonological skills, and letter knowledge have been partialled out. In older children (Expt 3), and only in Grades 4–5, PE accounts for unique variance in word recognition, in word spelling, and, finally, in vocabulary, after chronological and lexical age have been controlled for.

Cognitive antecedents of early reading ability: A test of the modularity hypothesis

This study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive antecedents of word recognition are uniquely domain-specific and unrelated to higher-order domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis was evaluated in a longitudinal study of 349 Hebrew-speaking children (mean age: 6.0 years) who were tested on a battery of domain-specific (phonological awareness, phonological memory, visual-orthographic processing, and early literacy) and domain-general tasks (general intelligence, higher-order reasoning, and language) at the end of kindergarten. Word recognition and reading comprehension were assessed at the end of Grade 1. Whereas the kindergarten domain-specific measures accounted for significant and substantial variance in word recognition (33%), the domain-general measures explained only 5% of the variance. Furthermore, the contribution of domain-specific variables to word recognition remained unaltered even after controlling for all domain-general and higher-order language tasks. Reading comprehension, in contrast, was predicted by both print-specific skills (51%) and domain-general abilities (44%). These findings strongly support the notion of word recognition modularity in a well-encapsulated orthography.

Phonological processing and oral language abilities in fourth-grade poor readers

This study investigated the contribution of phonological processing and oral language skills to reading abilities (word attack, word recognition, and comprehension) in 17 fourth graders identified as poor readers. Participants were assessed in the areas of phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and rapid naming, in addition to oral language abilities as predictors of poor reading skills. Results indicated that the strongest predictors of word attack skills were phonological awareness and grammaticality judgment. The combination of phonological awareness, grammaticality judgment, phoneme manipulation, and rapid naming of digits accounted for more than half of the variance in word recognition. Furthermore, the amount of discrepancy between IQ scores and reading achievement did not distinguish groups of poor readers. The results support the importance of metalinguistic skills to support reading ability. Phonological processing and oral language abilities may vary in children with poor reading skills as processing demands change with age and task. Learning outcomes As a result of this activity, the reader will be able to: (1) identify phonological processing and oral language skills that are most predictive of specific reading skills in poor readers; (2) describe further evidence of the lack of utility of the discrepancy model to define reading disorders in children.

Comparing the Relationships Among Two Different Versions of Alphanumeric Rapid Automatized Naming and Word Level Reading Skills

This study investigated whether two different versions of the serial rapid automatized naming (RAN) task, using similar alphanumeric stimuli, would differentially predict performance on word level reading skills (i.e., word recognition, nonword reading, and orthographic processing). To accomplish this, a subset of the Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center twin sample (N = 307) was administered two different versions of serial RAN (traditional and alternative), and the relationship among these measures and word level reading skills was examined using an extension of multiple regression analysis known as dominance analysis (Budescu, 1993). The traditional RAN task (RAN-T) involved rapidly naming a visual array of 50 items, consisting of 5 symbols in a given category that are presented 10 times in random order in 5 rows (Denckla & Rudel, 1976). In the alternative RAN task (RAN-A), participants were presented with a similar set of 6 symbols in 5-item rows but asked to name as many items as possible in 15 sec. Results of dominance analysis indicate that the RAN-A measure explained significantly more unique variance in word recognition and orthographic-processing skills than the RAN-T task. In the case of word recognition skill, RAN-A was found to dominate RAN-T. Several explanations for this pattern of results across the two versions of RAN are explored.

Asynchrony of Visual-Orthographic and Auditory-Phonological Word Recognition Processes: An Underlying Factor in Dyslexia.

This study investigated whether asynchrony ofspeed of processing (SOP) betweenvisual-orthographic and auditory-phonologicalmodalities can account for word recognitiondeficits among dyslexic readers. SOP amongelementary school dyslexic readers was comparedto that of chronologically age-matched normalreaders. SOP was assessed using nonlinguisticand linguistic auditory and visual low-leveltasks and higher-level orthographic andphonological tasks. Behavioral andelectrophysiological (ERP) measures of SOP wereobtained. Data indicated that dyslexic readerswere significantly slower than control readersin most of the experimental tasks. Moreover,dyslexics revealed a systematic SOP gap betweenthe auditory-phonological and thevisual-orthographic modalities. This gap wasfound in both P200 and P300 latencies, andexplained most of the variance in wordrecognition. A theory is proposed suggestingthat asynchrony between the processing rates ofthe visual and the auditory modalities may bean underlying cause of dyslexia.

Converging evidence for the concept of orthographic processing

Six different measures of orthographic processing (three different letter string choice tasks, two orthographic choice tasks, and a homophone choice task) were administered to thirty-nine children who had also been administered the word recognition subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test and a comprehensive battery of tasks assessing phonological processing skill (four measures of phonological sensitivity, nonword repetition, and pseudoword reading). The six orthographic tasks displayed moderate convergence – forming one reasonably coherent factor. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that a composite measure of orthographic processing skill predicted variance in word recognition after variance accounted for by the phonological processing measures had been partialed out. A measure of print exposure predictedvariance in orthographic processing after the variance in phonologicalprocessing had been partialed out.

Children's Difficulties in Text Comprehension: Assessing Causal Issues.

In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate information in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders' problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age match design to explore the direction of causality between comprehension skill and other abilities. We also present data from the first and second stages of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 and 8 to 9 years old. Multiple regression analyses show that a number of factors predict significant variance in comprehension skill even after "general ability" factors such as IQ and vocabulary have been taken into account. These findings suggest that, not only can children have comprehension problems in the absence of word recognition problems, but that distinctly different skills predict variance in word recognition and variance in comprehension. The data support the view that single-word reading skills and the ability to build integrated text representations make independent contributions to overall reading ability. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of children's problems in text comprehension, for deaf readers, and for remediation.

Decoding strategies as predictors of reading skill: A follow-on study

A follow-on study was conducted on first- and third-grade children who were tested on the Word Identification subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test. Errors were phonetically transcribed and proportions of total errors were assigned to one of four strategy types based upon the type of decoding analysis: whole word, part word, and either probable (legal) or improbable (illegal) phonetic decoding. The type of strategy employed was highly correlated with concurrent reading test scores and predicted 30 to 37% of the variance in word recognition 19 months later. Use of phonetic decoding was a strong positive predictor and whole word decoding a negative predictor at both first and third grade. Part word decoding became a negative predictor at third grade. Nearly all children used more than one strategy and there was a developmental trend to shift to a phonetic strategy. But this shift was not inevitable and had not occurred for 31% of the children at the close of the study. Children who stayed with the most inefficient strategies had significantly higher vocabulary scores and equivalent phonemic processing ability when compared to readers with more efficient decoding strategies.

Phonological Deficits, IQ, and Individual Differences in Reading Disability: Genetic and Environmental Influences

In this paper we review our recent work on the phonological reading deficit in reading disability. Disabled readers typically show poor nonword reading skills relative to their word recognition skills. Behavior-genetic analyses reveal that nonword reading deficits are highly heritable and that heritable variance in word recognition is closely linked to heritable variance in phonological coding. However, subjects vary considerably in terms of the degree of their phonological reading deficits. The analyses show that subjects with lower phonological skills (relative to word recognition) tend to have word recognition deficits that are more heritable compared to subjects whose nonword reading is more congruent with their word recognition skills. We also argue that subjects who showed poor word recognition relative to intelligence would be expected to have word recognition deficits that were more heritable compared to subjects whose reading and intelligence were more congruent. The analyses indicate a trend in this direction but the effect was not significant. We argue that both the nonword deficit dimension and the reading-IQ discrepancy dimension should be investigated in future analyses.

Children's literacy environments and early word recognition subskills

First-grade children completed a battery of tasks that included standardized measures of word recognition and spelling, measures of phonological and orthographic processing skill, and a short indicator of exposure to print via home literacy experiences. Phonological and orthographic processing skill were separable components of variance in word recognition. Orthographic processing ability accounted for variance in word recognition ability even after the variance in three phonological processing measures had been partialed. Additionally, variance in orthographic processing ability not explained by phonological abilities was reliably linked to differences in print exposure. The print exposure measure was not, however, linked to the measures of phonological processing. This finding was unexpected but it is consistent with some previous research. The theoretical implications of this result are discussed.