Screening for Dyslexia in University Students: a Standardized Procedure Based on Conditional Inference Trees.

OBJECTIVE: The focus of this study is on providing tools to enable researchers and practitioners to screen for dyslexia in adults entering university. The first aim is to validate and provide diagnostic properties for a set of seven tests including a 1-min word reading test, a 2-min pseudoword reading test, a phonemic awareness test, a spelling test, the Alouette reading fluency test, a connected-text reading fluency test, and the self-report Adult Reading History Questionnaire (ARHQ). The second, more general, aim of this study was to devise a standardized and confirmatory procedure for dyslexia screening from a subset of the initial seven tests. We used conditional inference tree analysis, a supervised machine learning approach to identify the most relevant tests, cut-off scores, and optimal order of test administration. METHOD: A combined sample of 60 university students with dyslexia (clinical validation group) and 65 university students without dyslexia (normative group) provided data to determine the diagnostic properties of these tests including sensitivity, specificity, and cut-off scores. RESULTS: Results showed that combinations of four tests (ARHQ, text reading fluency, phonemic awareness, pseudoword reading) and their relative conditional cut-off scores optimize powerful discriminatory screening procedures for dyslexia, with an overall classification accuracy of approximately 90%. CONCLUSIONS: The novel use of the conditional inference tree methodology explored in the present study offered a way of moving toward a more efficient screening battery using only a subset of the seven tests examined. Both clinical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

eLIPS: Development and Validation of an Observational Tool for Examining Early Language in Play Settings.

Intervention in the early years can help to mitigate the risks that early language and communication difficulties pose for later learning and well-being. Critical to this is the capacity of early years educators to evaluate language development accurately in the classroom in order to target individual support effectively. This article reports on the development and testing of the Early Language in Play Settings (eLIPS) tool, an observational measure of child language. An action research model was used in the design of the tool with the result that the methodology adopted was compatible with an early years child-centered approach. Observations of children in play settings were used to gather information about early language through subscales measuring social communication, receptive and expressive language. A series of preliminary trials with 3- to 5-year-olds, established that the eLIPS measures have concurrent validity with scores from a standardized language assessment, the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool 2 UK . Investigation of internal consistency showed reliability for use by researchers and early years educators together with inter-rater reliability across these groups. It was concluded that eLIPS has potential as a tool to assist early years educators in understanding individual patterns of language acquisition in a play-based environment and for framing team discussions about approaches to early language support.

Investigating pseudohomophone interference effects in young second-language learners.

This study aimed to investigate phonological activation during silent word reading in French adolescents learning English as a second language (L2) at secondary school. Grade 6 and Grade 8 adolescents performed lexical decision tasks in English, where we compared processing of nonwords that were homophonic to real L2 words (i.e., pseudohomophones [PsHs]; e.g., grean) with that of orthographic control pseudowords (OCs; e.g., greun). In Experiment 1, PsHs were constructed so that they sounded like L2 words when using cross-language (L1) grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) only (e.g., grine), whereas PsHs were constructed with within-language (L2) GPCs (e.g., grean) in Experiment 2. Results showed a PsH interference effect as reflected by higher error rates and/or longer rejection times for PsHs compared with OCs whether using within-language or cross-language GPCs and at both grade levels. Evidence of this PsH interference effect was also observed in Experiment 3, which used PsHs that sounded like real L1 words when using L2 GPCs (e.g., droal for the French word drôle [funny in English]). We suggest that young L2 learners automatically activate both L1 and L2 GPCs during L2 silent reading in favor of strong cross-language interactions at the orthography-to-phonology interface. The results are discussed in relation to bilingual and developmental models on visual word recognition.

Language and Reading: the Role of Morpheme and Phoneme Awareness.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Although spoken language in the form of meta-linguistic awareness is widely regarded as being involved in reading development, the extensive literature based on different experimental tasks, age groups, and languages makes it difficult to establish consensus about the type of awareness that is critical and the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The purpose of this review is to explore the links between reading and two specific aspects of meta-linguistic awareness, namely, phoneme awareness and morpheme awareness. RECENT FINDINGS: Research has uncovered distinct levels of meta-linguistic awareness that stand in different relationships to learning to read. Empirical findings support the reciprocal involvement of an awareness of phonemes and morphemes in reading development but the precise nature of the relationship between spoken and written language is subject to cross-language variation. SUMMARY: A universal model of reading development is needed that is sufficiently flexible to allow interplay in the processing of phonology, orthography, and meaning in response to the linguistic characteristics of the spoken and written forms of the language being acquired. The linguistic characteristics that influence the development of phoneme and morpheme awareness are compared for alphabetic and morphographic orthographies and related to typical and atypical patterns of reading acquisition.

What Is the Influence of Morphological Knowledge in the Early Stages of Reading Acquisition Among Low SES Children? A Graphical Modeling Approach.

Children from low-SES families are known to show delays in aspects of language development which underpin reading acquisition such as vocabulary and listening comprehension. Research on the development of morphological skills in this group is scarce, and no studies exist in French. The present study investigated the involvement of morphological knowledge in the very early stages of reading acquisition (decoding), before reading comprehension can be reliably assessed. We assessed listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phoneme awareness, morphological awareness as well as decoding, word reading and non-verbal IQ in 703 French first-graders from low-SES families after 3 months of formal schooling (November). Awareness of derivational morphology was assessed using three oral tasks: Relationship Judgment (e.g., do these words belong to the same family or not? heat-heater … ham-hammer); Lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who runs is a …? (runner)]; and Non-lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who lums is a…? (lummer)]. The tasks differ on implicit/explicit demands and also tap different kinds of morphological knowledge. The Judgement task measures the phonological and semantic properties of the morphological relationship and the Sentence Completion tasks measure knowledge of morphological production rules. Data were processed using a graphical modeling approach which offers key information about how skills known to be involved in learning to read are organized in memory. This modeling approach was therefore useful in revealing a potential network which expresses the conditional dependence structure between skills, after which recursive structural equation modeling was applied to test specific hypotheses. Six main conclusions can be drawn from these analyses about low SES reading acquisition: (1) listening comprehension is at the heart of the reading acquisition process; (2) word reading depends directly on phonemic awareness and indirectly on listening comprehension; (3) decoding depends on word reading; (4) Morphological awareness and vocabulary have an indirect influence on word reading via both listening comprehension and phoneme awareness; (5) the components of morphological awareness assessed by our tasks have independent relationships with listening comprehension; and (6) neither phonemic nor morphological awareness influence vocabulary directly. The implications of these results with regard to early reading acquisition among low SES groups are discussed.

HelexKids: A word frequency database for Greek and Cypriot primary school children.

In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1 with Grades 2 to 6. It provides values for Zipf, frequency per million, dispersion, estimated word frequency per million, standard word frequency, contextual diversity, orthographic Levenshtein distance, and lemma frequency. These values are derived from 116 textbooks used in primary education in Greece and Cyprus, producing a total of 68,692 different word types. HelexKids was developed to assist researchers in studying language development, educators in selecting age-appropriate items for teaching, as well as writers and authors of educational books for Greek/Cypriot children. The database is open access and can be searched online at www.helexkids.org .

Automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition in bilingual children: A cross-language masked priming study in grades 3 and 5.

Previous masked priming research has shown automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition in monolingual skilled adult readers. Activation also occurs across languages in bilingual adult readers, suggesting that the activation of phonological representations is not language specific. Less is known about developing readers. First, it is unclear whether there is automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition among children in general. Second, no empirical data exist on whether the activation of phonological representations is language specific or not in bilingual children. The current study investigated these issues in bilingual third and fifth graders using cross-language phonological masked priming in a lexical decision task. Targets were French words, and primes were English pseudowords of three types: (a) phonological primes, which share phonological information with the target beginning (e.g., dee-DIMANCHE [Sunday], pronounced /di:/-/dimãʃ/); (b) orthographic control primes, which control for letters shared by the phonological prime and target (e.g., d) and their position (e.g., doo-DIMANCHE, pronounced /du:/-/dimãʃ/); and (c) unrelated primes, which share no phonological or orthographic information with the target beginning (e.g., pow-DIMANCHE, pronounced /paʊ/-/dimãʃ/). Significant phonological priming was observed, suggesting that (a) phonological representations are rapidly and automatically activated by print during visual word recognition from Grade 3 onward and that (b) the activation of phonological representations is not language specific in bilingual children.

Phonemic-Morphemic dissociation in university students with dyslexia: an index of reading compensation?

A phonological deficit constitutes a primary cause of developmental dyslexia, which persists into adulthood and can explain some aspects of their reading impairment. Nevertheless, some dyslexic adults successfully manage to study at university level, although very little is currently known about how they achieve this. The present study investigated at both the individual and group levels, whether the development of another oral language skill, namely, morphological knowledge, can be preserved and dissociated from the development of phonological knowledge. Reading, phonological, and morphological abilities were measured in 20 dyslexic and 20 non-dyslexic university students. The results confirmed the persistence of deficits in phonological but not morphological abilities, thereby revealing a dissociation in the development of these two skills. Moreover, the magnitude of the dissociation correlated with reading level. The outcome supports the claim that university students with dyslexia may compensate for phonological weaknesses by drawing on morphological knowledge in reading.

Adolescent reading skill and engagement with digital and traditional literacies as predictors of reading comprehension.

This study investigates the concurrent predictors of adolescent reading comprehension (literal, inferential) for fiction and non-fiction texts. Predictors were examined from the cognitive (word identification, reading fluency), psychological (gender), and ecological (print exposure) domains. Print exposure to traditional and digital texts was surveyed using a diary method of reading habits. A cross-sectional sample of 312 students in early (11-13 years) or middle adolescence (14-15 years) participated from a range of SES backgrounds. Word identification emerged as a strong predictor of reading comprehension across adolescence and text genres. Gender effects favouring female students were evident for reading frequency but not for reading skill itself. Reading habits also differed, and comprehension advantages were observed among females for fiction and males for non-fiction. Age effects emerged for reading frequency, which was lower in middle adolescence. Although more time was spent on digital than on traditional texts, traditional extended text reading was the only reading habit to predict inference-making in comprehension and to distinguish skilled from less skilled comprehenders. The theoretical and educational implications of these results are discussed.

How language affects children's use of derivational morphology in visual word and pseudoword processing: evidence from a cross-language study.

Developing readers have been shown to rely on morphemes in visual word recognition across several naming, lexical decision and priming experiments. However, the impact of morphology in reading is not consistent across studies with differing results emerging not only between but also within writing systems. Here, we report a cross-language experiment involving the English and French languages, which aims to compare directly the impact of morphology in word recognition in the two languages. Monolingual French-speaking and English-speaking children matched for grade level (Part 1) and for age (Part 2) participated in the study. Two lexical decision tasks (one in French, one in English) featured words and pseudowords with exactly the same structure in each language. The presence of a root (R+) and a suffix ending (S+) was manipulated orthogonally, leading to four possible combinations in words (R+S+: e.g., postal; R+S-: e.g., turnip; R-S+: e.g., rascal; and R-S-: e.g., bishop) and in pseudowords (R+S+: e.g., pondal; R+S-: e.g., curlip; R-S+: e.g., vosnal; and R-S-: e.g., hethop). Results indicate that the presence of morphemes facilitates children's recognition of words and impedes their ability to reject pseudowords in both languages. Nevertheless, effects extend across accuracy and latencies in French but are restricted to accuracy in English, suggesting a higher degree of morphological processing efficiency in French. We argue that the inconsistencies found between languages emphasize the need for developmental models of word recognition to integrate a morpheme level whose elaboration is tuned by the productivity and transparency of the derivational system.

Cognitive flexibility predicts early reading skills.

An important aspect of learning to read is efficiency in accessing different kinds of linguistic information (orthographic, phonological, and semantic) about written words. The present study investigates whether, in addition to the integrity of such linguistic skills, early progress in reading may require a degree of cognitive flexibility in order to manage the coordination of this information effectively. Our study will look for evidence of a link between flexibility and both word reading and passage reading comprehension, and examine whether any such link involves domain-general or reading-specific flexibility. As the only previous support for a predictive relationship between flexibility and early reading comes from studies of reading comprehension in the opaque English orthography, another possibility is that this relationship may be largely orthography-dependent, only coming into play when mappings between representations are complex and polyvalent. To investigate these questions, 60 second-graders learning to read the more transparent French orthography were presented with two multiple classification tasks involving reading-specific cognitive flexibility (based on words) and non-specific flexibility (based on pictures). Reading skills were assessed by word reading, pseudo-word decoding, and passage reading comprehension measures. Flexibility was found to contribute significant unique variance to passage reading comprehension even in the less opaque French orthography. More interestingly, the data also show that flexibility is critical in accounting for one of the core components of reading comprehension, namely, the reading of words in isolation. Finally, the results constrain the debate over whether flexibility has to be reading-specific to be critically involved in reading.

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies.

Phonological development was assessed in six alphabetic orthographies (English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese and Spanish) at the beginning and end of the first year of reading instruction. The aim was to explore contrasting theoretical views regarding: the question of the availability of phonology at the outset of learning to read (Study 1); the influence of orthographic depth on the pace of phonological development during the transition to literacy (Study 2); and the impact of literacy instruction (Study 3). Results from 242 children did not reveal a consistent sequence of development as performance varied according to task demands and language. Phonics instruction appeared more influential than orthographic depth in the emergence of an early meta-phonological capacity to manipulate phonemes, and preliminary indications were that cross-linguistic variation was associated with speech rhythm more than factors such as syllable complexity. The implications of the outcome for current models of phonological development are discussed.

Rimes and superrimes: an exploration of children's disyllabic rhyming skills.

The study investigated the extension of rhyme awareness to disyllabic stimuli. Three experiments are reported which examine the disyllabic rhyme production skills of adults and of children in their first, second or third year of schooling. Stress pattern and phonological rime and superrime neighbourhood density were manipulated. Rhyming skills were influenced by stress pattern. With initial stress, rhyming responses were based predominantly on the superrime but with final stress, rhyming responses variously shared the superrime, the final syllable and the final rime unit with the target. Neighbourhood density affected the likelihood of production of a real word rhyming response. Some implications for the organization of an orthographic lexicon of multisyllables are discussed.

Differing sequences of metaphonological development in French and English.

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable --> onset-rime --> phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English speakers aged 4;11 (N = 10), 5;3 (N = 21), and 6;5 (N = 23) and French speakers aged 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;8 (N = 34). Experiment 2 assesses performance in the common unit task using English speakers aged 4;7 (N = 22), 5;7 (N = 23), and 6;11 (N = 22), and French speakers aged 4;7 (N = 20), 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;7 (N = 33). The experiments reveal crosslinguistic differences in the processing of syllables prior to school entry with French speakers exhibiting a greater consistency in manipulating syllables. Phoneme awareness emerges in both languages once reading instruction is introduced and rime awareness appears to follow rather than precede this event. Thus, the emergence of phonological awareness did not show a universal pattern but rather was subject to the influence of both native language and literacy.