Word Decoding Research Articles

Beyond Elkonin Boxes: Using Multisensory Strategies to Master Decodable High Frequency Words with First Graders

Increasing engagement may enable struggling readers to catch up with their peers. This study examined the impact of using multisensory strategies with Elkonin boxes to teach decodable words to first grade students. The study found that student interest impacted engagement, particularly when it was a combination of auditory, tactile, and visual. Multisensory strategies enabled the high frequency words to enter the memory system through multiple channels, thereby creating stronger learning and higher engagement.

초등영어 리터러시 격차 및 보정체계 연구

This study diagnosed the basic literacy skills and analyzed the competency gaps of 91 second graders across four classes of a public elementary school in Metropolitan City B in South Korea. Second graders were selected because they have not begun formally studying EFL (English as a foreign language) in school. Based on Acadience Reading K-6, the test used in this study consisted of 30 multiple-choice questions specifically developed for Korean students encompassing eight diagnostic areas (Alphabetics, Letter Naming, Fluency, First Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segment Fluency, Non-Sense Word Fluency, Word Decoding, and Maze). The study found a wide gap among the participants in basic literacy skills, and a key variable was the starting age of English study. Multi-level analysis showed that the participants’ abilities grew systematically and disproportionately. Explicit instruction for the deficit areas was found to be required, and systematic phonics education was deemed essential. The study attempted to derive the implications of systematic intervention in the future, based on the revealed areas of deficit in the detailed literacy capabilities.

Predicting the development of Papiamento and Dutch word decoding efficiency in the Dutch Caribbean

Abstract We investigated the development of word decoding (Grades 4–6; 165 children) in Papiamento (L1) and Dutch (L2) in the postcolonial context of the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. The results show a steady development over the upper Grades for both L1 Papiamento and L2 Dutch word decoding in that children became more efficient in word decoding over the years. However, the children were generally better decoders in L2 Dutch than in L1 Papiamento. Moreover, the initial language of decoding instruction did not matter for the development of word decoding. The groups were equally efficient in L1 and L2 word decoding in Grades 4–6. Furthermore, rapid naming and phonological awareness predicted L1 word decoding development, whereas rapid naming, phonological awareness, and working memory predicted L2 word decoding development. Finally, evidence was found for linguistic interdependencies for word decoding development from L1 to L2 and vice versa.

Decoding intervention for young students with mild intellectual disabilities: A single-subject design study

Students with intellectual disabilities need more time and explicit instruction to develop word decoding. Most previous research on interventions among these students is performed in English. Therefore, the current study examined the impact of a word-decoding intervention in Swedish on individual students with intellectual disabilities. A single-subject-design study was conducted with five students with mild intellectual disability in the fourth grade. They needed to enhance decoding, and Swedish was their first language. Their word and non-word decoding was measured during the baseline and intervention phases. The intervention with the Wolff Intensive Program was delivered by special education teachers supporting phonemic decoding and reading fluency training during 25 sessions. All five students developed their decoding as they decoded more words in a given time (NAP=0.84-1.00) and decreased their decoding errors in both word and nonword decoding (NAP=0.72-1.00). The results are promising but need to be confirmed in additional studies.

Quantifying the uniqueness and efficiency of the MLAT relative to L1 attainment as a predictor of L2 achievement: A conceptual replication

AbstractIn this conceptual replication of Sparks and Dale ([2023]. The prediction from MLAT to L2 achievement is largely due to MLAT asessment of underlying L1 abilities. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–25) utilizing a dataset previously reported by Sparks et al. ([2009]. Long-term relationships among early L1 skills, L2 aptitude, L2 affect, and later L2 proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 725–755.), L1 achievement scores over 1st–5th grades and L2 aptitude scores from the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) in 9th grade were examined as predictors of L2 achievement for U.S. secondary students completing L2 courses in 9th and 10th grades. The study’s focus was on the uniqueness and efficiency of MLAT with respect to measuring L1 achievement in predicting L2 achievement. All L1 measures and MLAT predicted L2 literacy and language, and L1 measures predicted MLAT scores. Word decoding was the strongest overall L1 predictor, though there was variation across the L2 measures. The unique contribution of MLAT was modest, as the majority of total prediction (77–86%) was due to L1 measures. The efficiency of MLAT in capturing predictive variance from L1 abilities was moderately high (median ∼73%) but variable across the L1 and L2 measures. Findings are generally consistent with those of Sparks and Dale (2023) showing that prediction from MLAT to L2 is largely due to MLAT’s assessment of L1 abilities, even though a substantial amount of L2 prediction-relevant L1 variance is missed by MLAT.

The Effects of an Adult Literacy App on Word Decoding

The Effects of an Adult Literacy App on Word Decoding

Decoding speech perception from non-invasive brain recordings

Decoding speech from brain activity is a long-awaited goal in both healthcare and neuroscience. Invasive devices have recently led to major milestones in this regard: deep-learning algorithms trained on intracranial recordings can now start to decode elementary linguistic features such as letters, words and audio-spectrograms. However, extending this approach to natural speech and non-invasive brain recordings remains a major challenge. Here we introduce a model trained with contrastive learning to decode self-supervised representations of perceived speech from the non-invasive recordings of a large cohort of healthy individuals. To evaluate this approach, we curate and integrate four public datasets, encompassing 175 volunteers recorded with magneto-encephalography or electro-encephalography while they listened to short stories and isolated sentences. The results show that our model can identify, from 3 seconds of magneto-encephalography signals, the corresponding speech segment with up to 41% accuracy out of more than 1,000 distinct possibilities on average across participants, and with up to 80% in the best participants—a performance that allows the decoding of words and phrases absent from the training set. The comparison of our model with a variety of baselines highlights the importance of a contrastive objective, pretrained representations of speech and a common convolutional architecture simultaneously trained across multiple participants. Finally, the analysis of the decoder’s predictions suggests that they primarily depend on lexical and contextual semantic representations. Overall, this effective decoding of perceived speech from non-invasive recordings delineates a promising path to decode language from brain activity, without putting patients at risk of brain surgery.

Direct speech reconstruction from sensorimotor brain activity with optimized deep learning models.

Objective.Development of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is key for enabling communication in individuals who have lost the faculty of speech due to severe motor paralysis. A BCI control strategy that is gaining attention employs speech decoding from neural data. Recent studies have shown that a combination of direct neural recordings and advanced computational models can provide promising results. Understanding which decoding strategies deliver best and directly applicable results is crucial for advancing the field.Approach.In this paper, we optimized and validated a decoding approach based on speech reconstruction directly from high-density electrocorticography recordings from sensorimotor cortex during a speech production task.Main results.We show that (1) dedicated machine learning optimization of reconstruction models is key for achieving the best reconstruction performance; (2) individual word decoding in reconstructed speech achieves 92%-100% accuracy (chance level is 8%); (3) direct reconstruction from sensorimotor brain activity produces intelligible speech.Significance.These results underline the need for model optimization in achieving best speech decoding results and highlight the potential that reconstruction-based speech decoding from sensorimotor cortex can offer for development of next-generation BCI technology for communication.

Predicting children’s perceived reading proficiency with prosody modeling

Reading is a foundational skill and the focus of school-level education efforts across countries. The assessment of linguistic competence from oral reading has long been the subject of scientific studies linking the reader’s comprehension of the text to various measures of oral reading fluency. Given the time and resource intensive nature of such assessment, it is of interest to automate the prediction of reading fluency from audio recordings using the same pedagogical rubrics. Given recent findings about the importance of prosody to the communicative purpose of reading aloud, we discuss new approaches to modeling it reliably for the automatic assessment task. We present a new data set of children’s oral reading screened for minimum word decoding skill and rated for comprehensibility by two human experts. We develop a system for the automatic prediction of rater scores that also facilitates insights about the complementarity and inter-dependence of computed lexical accuracy, rate and prosodic features as corroborated by multiple performance measures. With achieved values of correlation and agreement that surpass the corresponding inter-rater measures, we also show how text-dependent prosodic features, informed by speech rate and speaking style, contribute prominently to system performance.

Phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese-English bilingual word decoding (reading)

Phonological awareness is one of core reading requisites in early reading acquisition. Children develop initial phonemic awareness and phonological awareness, which in turn contribute to their learning-to-read skills, word reading and decoding abilities in particular. This review study synthesized the relationship between phonological awareness and word reading ability in monolingual and Chinese-English bilingual readers to shed light on the universal and language-specific mechanisms of phonological awareness in word reading in two typologically-distant languages. The findings indicate that phonological awareness has different grain sizes (e.g., onset, rime, phoneme, and syllable) in shaping early reading acquisition. More important, the current study highlights the uniqueness of universality and language specificity in Chinese-English bilingual reading acquisition. In addition to general phonological awareness facets, lexical tone awareness has been endorsed as a key predictor of early Chinese-English bilingual word reading.

Vocabulary Diversity in Personal Narratives Produced in Response to the Global TALES Protocol in Dutch-Speaking Students with and without Dyslexia

Introduction: This study examines whether there are differences in expressive vocabulary between participants with and without dyslexia in personal narratives in response to the Global TALES protocol. Methods: 22 monolingual Dutch-speaking participants aged 11–16 with dyslexia and 22 age and gender-matched peers without dyslexia were assessed on measures of decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling of words, pseudowords, verbs, and sentences. The participants also produced personal narratives in response to the six prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol. We analyzed the personal narratives for expressive vocabulary and counted the total number of different words (TNDW). Results: The study revealed a significant relationship between TNDW and reading comprehension (r = 0.45, p = 0.002, BF₁₀ = 17.70), spelling words (r = 0.42, p = 0.005, BF₁₀ = 8.93), and spelling and writing conventions in sentences (r = 0.37, p = 0.016, BF₁₀ = 3.11). The Global TALES protocol was successful in eliciting personal narratives in the Dutch-speaking participants with and without dyslexia. Participants with dyslexia used fewer different words (M = 192.27, SD = 64.37; 95% CI: [151.84–232.71]) compared to peers without dyslexia (M = 265.50, SD = 116.28; 95% CI: [225.06–305.93]; F(1, 42) = 6.68; p = 0.013; η² = 0.14). When we compared the probability of models, Bayesian factors revealed moderate evidence for group differences in TNDW (BF = 3.94). Conclusion: Our findings indicate that older school-age participants with dyslexia may lag behind their peers in expressive vocabulary in a personal narrative discourse task that is relevant to everyday functioning. The results of this study highlight the relationship between expressive vocabulary and reading comprehension and the importance of the assessment of spoken language skills in children with dyslexia. Reading problems might lead to less advanced spoken language, which in turn may negatively affect the expressive vocabulary growth in individuals with dyslexia.

A Prospectus for Bilingual Early Reading Instruction

In this paper, we describe a framework for bilingual decoding instruction, with a call for collaborators. Decoding is the ability to apply knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to pronounce words. We adopt a standard phonological approach for early instruction that could be expanded to include practice with constructive morphemes, like prefixes and suffixes, and reading for meaning. Decades of research have shown that word decoding is a bottleneck in reading comprehension. Unless children develop sight-word reading capabilities, comprehension of texts is severely hampered. The present approach draws on children’s spoken vocabulary knowledge in their native language as a bridge to decoding in a second language. The goal is to develop a tutoring system that draws on current and forthcoming multimedia technologies, and to implement the system in multilingual countries, e.g.: USA, India, Ukraine and across national borders. As a starting point, the authors will use a web platform https://ethicalengineer.ttu.edu designed in 2017 by the USA, Indian, and Ukrainian collaborators, several of them being co-authors of this paper, as a model for the new website for reading instruction. The Ethical Engineer website demonstrates one mechanism through which instructors can reach out to establish connections within and outside their native country around topics and issues of common interest and support educator cooperation and research development. The new model hopes to achieve success comparable to that of the EthicalEngineer. Using computer-based instruction allows for empirical testing of teaching methods, thereby optimizing the educational process. It is important to take advantage of this to ensure the most effective methods are used in early reading instruction for children. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

A Study of Embodied-Cognitive Teaching Approach to Teach English Reading in College

English Reading plays an important role in English learning. Hence, improving the learners' English reading ability is one of the key issues for English teachers in colleges. This study conducts an experiment on teaching English Reading for the freshmen of E-Commerce major in a higher vocational college, in which the experimental group adopts the Embodied-Cognitive Teaching approach and the control group the traditional teaching approach. In order to ensure the reliability of the study, the data of the two groups of learners are obtained and recorded from the teaching platform. With the help of SPSS Statistic analysis software, the study finds that there is no significant difference in the scores of the instant intensive reading test and the instant vocabulary test between the experimental group and the control group. But there is significant difference in the scores of the instant extensive test and after-class vocabulary tests between the two groups; the experimental group performs better than the control group on the aspects of conceptual understanding and word decoding skills, which shows that Embodied-Cognitive teaching approach helps to improve the learners' reading ability and is one of the new and effective ways for teaching English Reading in Chinese colleges.

Maternal education as an environmental factor related to reading in children with reading difficulties: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

The expanded simple view of reading (SVR) model suggests that word decoding, language comprehension and executive functions are necessary for reading comprehension. Children with reading difficulties (RDs) often have deficits in critical components of reading established in the expanded SVR model and alterations in brain function of reading-related regions. Maternal education could provide children with advantageous educational opportunities or resources that support reading acquisition. The primary goal of this study was to examine the contributions of maternal education to the behavioural and neurobiological correlates of the expanded SVR model. Seventy-two 8- to 12-year-old children with RDs and typical readers (TRs) completed reading, behavioural and an functional magnetic resonance imaging stories-listening task to determine the functional connectivity of the receptive language network to the whole brain in association with maternal education. Higher maternal education was associated with better vocabulary in children with RDs and positive functional connectivity between the receptive language network and regions related to visual processing in children with RDs versus TRs. These data suggest that maternal education supports the ability to comprehend oral language and engagement of neural networks that support imagination/visualization in children with RDs.

From Italian to Russian with the Superpower of Intercomprehension Inference in Graphical Decoding Across Different Alphabets

Intercomprehension is the ability to understand a language that is related to an already familiar one. It is based on the activation of previous knowledge and cognitive strategies, such as inference. In this article, we claim that intercomprehensive reasoning can also be applied across European linguistic families. We argue that by creating didactic materials based on the fundamentals of the intercomprehensive approach, it is possible to leverage the students’ natural ability for intercomprehension when approaching a completely unfamiliar language of Europe. In particular, we study if inference can be applied to graphical decoding of familiar and authentic words in an unfamiliar European language with a different alphabet. A small-scale empirical study conducted in Rome with Italian speakers shows that they were able to autonomously decipher the Russian alphabet through a specifically created task.

Relations Between Reading Motivation and Reading Efficiency—Evidence From a Longitudinal Eye‐Tracking Study

AbstractStudies on the relation between children's reading motivation and early developmental stages of reading competence are rare and have neglected on‐line measures of reading skill (e.g., eye movements indicating word decoding). For this reason, we investigated the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation on the efficiency of reading processes based on eye‐movement data. Moreover, we examined reading efficiency as a mediator of the relation between motivation and comprehension. German elementary school students in Grades 1–3 (N = 131) were tested on three measurement occasions. Specifically, we assessed reading motivation, reading amount, and sentence comprehension at Time 1, reading efficiency at Time 2 (2 months after Time 1), and all of the variables again at Time 3 (10 months after Time 2). Reading efficiency was assessed while children read age‐appropriate sentences and comprised measures of first‐fixation duration, gaze duration, total reading time, forward‐saccade length, and refixation probability. Linear and cross‐lagged panel models showed significant favorable relations between intrinsic reading motivation (operationalized as involvement and enjoyment of reading), but not extrinsic reading motivation (operationalized as striving to outperform one's peers), and most measures of reading efficiency, while controlling for gender, grade level, and reading amount. The reverse effects of reading‐efficiency indicators on intrinsic reading motivation were all significant. Moreover, the test of the mediation model revealed a significant indirect effect of Time 1 intrinsic reading motivation on Time 3 sentence comprehension mediated by Time 2 reading efficiency. We concluded that intrinsic reading motivation, in contrast to extrinsic reading motivation, facilitates reading comprehension through its effect on reading efficiency, independent of variations in reading amount.

Predicting variation in word decoding development in deaf and hard-of-hearing children

Background: Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children may experience difficulties in word decoding development. Aims: We aimed to compare and predict the incremental word decoding development in first grade in Dutch DHH and hearing children, as a function of kindergarten reading precursors. Methods and procedures: In this study, 25 DHH, and 41 hearing children participated. Kindergarten measures were phonological awareness (PA), letter knowledge (LK), rapid naming (RAN), and verbal short-term memory (VSTM). Word decoding (WD) was assessed at three consecutive time points (WD1, 2, 3) during reading instruction in first grade. Outcomes and results: The hearing children scored higher than the DHH children on PA and VSTM only, although the distribution of WD scores differed between the groups. At WD1, PA and RAN predicted WD efficiency in both groups; but PA was a stronger predictor for hearing children. At WD2, LK, RAN, and the autoregressor were predictors for both groups. While at WD3, only the autoregressor was a significant predictor. Conclusions and implications: WD development in DHH children on average shows similar levels as in hearing children, though within the DHH group more variation was observed. WD development in DHH children is not as much driven by PA; they may use other skills to compensate.

Let's eat grandma: Awareness of punctuation and capitalization rules' violations predicts the development of reading comprehension

An increasing body of evidence indicates that reading and writing are interconnected, but more studies are needed to investigate the mechanisms through which these two skills are associated. In this paper we report a study where we explored the relationship between second grade students' awareness of punctuation and capitalization rules' violations (a component of writing process) and their reading comprehension. The results showed that students' awareness of punctuation and capitalization rules’ violations was moderately corelated with reading comprehension (r = .64) and predicted reading comprehension tested in Spring after accounting for reading comprehension tested in Fall, word decoding fluency, listening comprehension, general cognitive ability, and demographic variables. Our findings outline an under-researched association between reading and writing and point out to a potential new avenue to improve reading comprehension.

Profiling Adult L2 Readers in English Bridge Programs: A Not-So-Simple View of L1 Effect.

This study aimed to validate the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in L2 English readers with alphabetic and morphosyllabic L1 writing system backgrounds. Forty-five L2 English learners enrolled in American university bridge programs completed a set of tasks that measured real word decoding efficiency, pseudoword decoding efficiency, linguistic (listening) comprehension, passage reading comprehension, and word meaning inferencing. There were two major findings: (1) only pseudoword decoding efficiency predicted passage reading comprehension in learners with a morphosyllabic L1, whereas both pseudoword decoding efficiency and linguistic comprehension were significant predictors in learners with an alphabetic L1; (2) pseudoword decoding efficiency was a significant predictor of word meaning inferencing in learners with a morphosyllabic L1, and moderated the effect of real word decoding efficiency on word meaning inference in learners with an alphabetic L1. The findings indicate the complex relationships among word decoding, linguistic comprehension, and passage reading comprehension in adult L2 English learners.

Word reading transfer in two distinct languages in reading interventions: How Chinese-English bilingual children with reading difficulties learn to read

PurposeSkills developed from literacy training in L1 are shown to transfer to reading in L2 when both languages involve an alphabetic writing system. However, transfer of literacy skills between a logographic L1 and an alphabetic L2 is less studied. This study examined whether the gain in literacy skills after an 8-week training on 1) Chinese character recognition or 2) English phonics, may generalize across the two languages in Chinese elementary students with reading disabilities. MethodsChinese-speaking students identified with reading difficulties were randomly assigned to the Chinese intervention (Chinese character orthography training), English intervention (English phonics training), and control groups. Their Chinese and English literacy skills were measured before and after the interventions. ResultsThough training on the orthography of Chinese characters significantly improved performance in Chinese word reading and Chinese orthographic awareness, our results did not provide evidence for the generalization of word-decoding skills from L1 Chinese to word reading in L2 English. However, phonics training in L2 English benefitted not only English word reading, but also cross-language word reading in L1 Chinese. ConclusionWe postulated that teaching children analytical skills in decoding words in an alphabetic writing system might likewise benefit their word decoding in a logographic script.