Response to intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between children with and without reading disabilities: Evidence for the role of kindergarten and first-grade interventions.

Children at risk for early reading difficulties were identified on entry into kindergarten, and half of these children received small-group intervention two to three times a week during their kindergarten year. The other half received whatever remedial assistance was offered by their home schools. These children were again assessed at the beginning of first grade, and those who continued to have difficulties in reading received either one-to-one daily tutoring offered by project teachers from the beginning to the end of first grade or whatever remedial assistance was offered by their home schools over the same time period. All target children were periodically assessed through the end of third grade. Results suggest that either kindergarten intervention alone or kindergarten intervention combined with first-grade intervention are both useful vehicles for preventing early and long-term reading difficulties in most at-risk children.

Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades?

We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability ('dyslexia') over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such difficulties. The evidence suggests that inadequate facility in word identification due, in most cases, to more basic deficits in alphabetic coding is the basic cause of difficulties in learning to read. We next discuss hypothesized deficiencies in reading-related cognitive abilities as underlying causes of deficiencies in component reading skills. The evidence in these areas suggests that, in most cases, phonological skills deficiencies associated with phonological coding deficits are the probable causes of the disorder rather than visual, semantic, or syntactic deficits, although reading difficulties in some children may be associated with general language deficits. Hypothesized deficits in general learning abilities (e.g., attention, association learning, cross-modal transfer etc.) and low-level sensory deficits have weak validity as causal factors in specific reading disability. These inferences are, by and large, supported by research evaluating the biological foundations of dyslexia. Finally, evidence is presented in support of the idea that many poor readers are impaired because of inadequate instruction or other experiential factors. This does not mean that biological factors are not relevant, because the brain and environment interact to produce the neural networks that support reading acquisition. We conclude with a discussion of the clinical implications of the research findings, focusing on the need for enhanced instruction.

Morphological analysis by child readers as revealed by the fragment completion task.

Ten-year-old children performed a fragment completion task. Target fragments (e.g., T_ _N) were preceded by four types of study conditions. The identity condition consisted of the target (TURN). Themorphological condition included a related form (TURNED). The orthographic condition consisted of morphologically unrelated words (e.g., TURNIP). Finally, no similar word was presented in the study phase of the no-prime condition. Morphological relatives included orthographically transparent (TURNED-TURN) and orthographically opaque (RIDDEN-RIDE) forms. The results indicated that performance of child readers on the fragment completion task was sensitive to morphological relationships. Completion rates following opaque, as well as transparent, morphological relatives were significantly greater than those following orthographically similar forms. In sum, the fragment completion task provides a viable new tool for examining morphological processing in children and for differentiating morphological effects from effects of similar form.

Evidence for processing of constituent singleand multiletter codes: Support for multilevel coding in word perception.

This investigation assessed whether constituent codes are activated during word processing. In two experiments, a priming procedure was used to test whether printed word primes facilitate skilled readers' identification of subsequently presented letter and letter bigram targets appearing in the primes (present condition), relative to the same targets not appearing in the primes (absent condition). Experiment 1 demonstrated the priming of single-letter targets and indicated that priming effects are facilitative and not inhibitory. In Experiment 2, high- and low-frequency bigram targets appearing in word primes were shown to have a processing advantage over bigram targets not appearing in word primes. Single-letter constituents in low-frequency bigrams also benefited from priming; however, single letters in high-frequency bigrams showed no such benefit. The results in general suggest that both single- and multiletter constituents are available during word processing, and hence support multicomponent models of word perception.