Dyslexia and Phonological Deficit - Graph

Dyslexia: Cognitive subtypes of dyslexia

Recent research into Dyslexia and the large range or variations in perception and experience accorded to those who have this condition.

Different theories conceptualise dyslexia as either a phonological, attentional, auditory, magnocellular, or automatisation deficit.

Such heterogeneity suggests the existence of yet unrecognised subtypes of dyslexics suffering from distinguishable deficits.

The purpose of the study was to identify cognitive subtypes of dyslexia.

Out of 642 children screened for reading ability 49 dyslexics and 48 controls were tested for phonological awareness, auditory discrimination, motion detection, visual attention, and rhythm imitation.

A combined cluster and discriminant analysis approach revealed three clusters of dyslexics with different cognitive deficits.

Compared to reading-unimpaired children;

• cluster no. 1 had worse phonological awareness; 
• cluster no. 2 had higher attentional costs; 
• cluster no. 3 performed worse in the phonological, auditory, and magno-cellular tasks. 

These results indicate that dyslexia may result from distinct cognitive impairments.

As a consequence, prevention and remediation programmes should be specifically targeted for the individual child's deficit pattern.

You can access the research paper here at PubMed.gov

Dyslexia: Cause may be different than previously known

Iris Berent

New research has argued that dyslexia may result from impairment of a different linguistic system than previously thought.

Speech perception engages at least two linguistic systems: the phonetic system, which extracts discrete sound units from acoustic input, and the phonological system, which combines these units to form individual words.

Previously, researchers generally believed that dyslexia was caused by phonological impairment, but results from the current study, led by Iris Berent of Northeastern University in Boston, suggest that the phonetic system may actually be the cause.

“Our findings confirm that dyslexia indeed compromises the language system, but the locus of the deficit is in the phonetic, not the phonological system, as had been previously assumed,” says Berent.

In the study, Hebrew-speaking college students had difficulty discriminating between similar speech sounds, but had no problem tracking abstract phonological patterns, even for novel words, suggesting that the phonological system is intact but the phonetic system is compromised.

“Our research demonstrates that a closer analysis of the language system can radically alter our understanding of the disorder, and ultimately, its treatment,” concluded Berent.

Read the full article here

The study has been published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044875

Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines

This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading.

Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described.

Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading.

Considerations for assessing children's phonological awareness are discussed, and descriptions of available measures are provided.

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;
Life is but a dream

Bow, bow, bow your boat
bently bown the beam.
Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily;
Bife is but a beam.

Sow, sow, sow your soat
sently sown the seam.
Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily;
Sife is sut a seam.

Activities like substituting different sounds for the first sound of a familiar song can help children develop phonological awareness, a cognitive substrate to reading acquisition.

Becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction, including instruction in phonics, word analysis, and spelling (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Chard, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998).

The most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989).

Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al., 1994).

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness.

Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993).

Despite the promising findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist.

For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for whom.

Moreover, many people do not understand the difference between phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics.

Still others are uncertain about the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading.

Read more of this article here: Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines | LD Topics | LD OnLine

Helping Struggling Readers Decode Unknown Words

Three common curriculum gaps that can intensify children’s reading problems are failing to teach them phonological awareness, automatic word recognition, and an alternative to single letter phonics.
Teach Phonological Awareness.

This is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds within spoken words. For example, say the word bat without the /b/ sound. Unfortunately, may struggling readers struggle with phonological awareness. To develop proficiency, they need instruction.

• Good phonics instruction should develop phonological awareness. The key to learning to decode words is the [alphabetic] principle that letters can represent sounds 
• The key to the development of the alphabetic principle, word recognition, and invented spelling is phonological awareness. 
• Phoneme awareness [part of phonological awareness] is the awareness of sounds in spoken words. As words are spoken, most sounds cannot be said by themselves.
• For example, the spoken word /cat/ has one continuous sound and is not pronounced “kuh-a-tuh.” 
• Children ordinarily concentrate on the meaning and do not think of the sounds in the word but, since letters represent sounds, a child must learn to think of words as having both meaning and sound in order to understand the alphabetic principle. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 340, references omitted)

Teach Automatic Word Recognition. Struggling readers who accurately identify words—slowly and laboriously—will likely tire of reading, resist reading, and become overwhelmed by the volume of all they must read.

Three keys to helping these children become fluent readers are to teach them how to quickly and accurately recognize words, to give them lots of daily practice in doing so, and to engage them in lots reading they find easy and enjoyable. This will help them to quickly identify words.

• Good phonics instruction leads to automatic word recognition. In order to read books, children need to be able to read words quickly and automatically. If a child stumbles over or has to decode slowly too many words, comprehension will suffer. 
• Although we want children to have a strategy for decoding words they do not know, we also want children to recognize many words automatically and be able to read them in context. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 343, references omitted)

Teach Word Families. Many phonics programs emphasize the sounds of individual letters and emphasize sounding out most words one or two letters at a time.

This helps many struggling readers to quickly and accurately identify unknown words. But many does not mean all.

Here’s a way that can help struggling readers who struggle with the sounds of individual letters, especially vowel sounds.

It uses word families, such ake: bake, brake, cake, make, quake, rake, sake, snake, take. Word families are also called phonograms or rimes.

• Recent scholarly inquiry into how children learn to decode words suggests that knowledge of certain sound and letter patterns in words may help readers figure out unfamiliar words.
• This is often called the analogy approach to word recognition, and a considerable amount of research supports its use as an instrument for word-recognition instruction.
• Predominant among such letter patterns are onsets and rhymes. An onset is formed by the individual consonant or consonant combination (such as pl, ph, st, sch, str, or th) that precedes the first vowel in a word or syllable. 
• Rhymes are another name for letter combinations that we have for years called “phonograms” or “word families,” the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and all subsequent consonants. For example, in the word bat, the b is the onset and the at is the rime; in slick, the sl is the onset and the ick is the rime.
• Fry (1998) has pointed out that just 38 common rime patterns can be used by readers to decode 654 one-syllable words. Moreover, these same rhymes can also be helpful for partial decoding of a much larger number of longer, more difficult, multisyllabic words. (Rasinski, 1999)

If your child struggles to identify unknown words when reading, ask yourself:

• Has the school assessed his phonological awareness skills? If they’re poor, are his teachers teaching him how to identify and manipulate sounds he hears in words?
• Are his teachers teaching him to recognize words quickly and accurately, or just accurately?
• If he struggles when using individual letters to sound out (decode) unknown words, can his teachers teach him to use word families (rhymes, phonograms)?

References
Rasinski, T. (1999). Making and Writing Words Using Letter Patterns. Retrieved 9/22/2011, from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/rasinski/MWW_LP.html.
Stahl, S.A., Duffy-Hester, A.M., & Stahl, K.A.D. (1998). Everything you wanted to know about phonics (but were afraid to ask). Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 338-355.

Dyslexia and SLI: Long-term reading and spelling outcome in Italian

Specific language impairment (SLI) diagnosed in the pre-school years is frequently associated with reading and writing difficulties at school age.

The nature of this relationship is unclear, despite the availability of a large number of studies, mostly on English speaking children. Phonological processing deficits have been considered the prominent cause of both difficulties.

However recent findings in both children with SLI and in children with reading difficulties are not easily accommodated within a single dimensional model explaining the relationship between oral and written language deficits.

This study focuses on the long-term reading and spelling outcome in relation to preschool oral language skills in a group of Italian adolescents with a documented history of SLI.

Sixteen Italian adolescents diagnosed as SLI at our Hospital in the pre-school years and 32 normal controls were submitted to an extensive assessment of oral and written language skills. At a group level SLI adolescents had weak oral and written language skills in almost all tests.

Results show that reading difficulties have some features in common with those of Italian developmental dyslexics but also have distinct characteristics, since reading accuracy and written comprehension, usually relatively spared in Italian developmental dyslexics, were impaired in adolescents with SLI.

Longitudinal analyses showed that expressive morpho-syntactic and lexical abilities at pre-school age were the oral language skills that best predicted reading and spelling outcomes in adolescents with SLI.

However, also children with severe phonological impairment in the absence of other oral language deficits showed later literacy difficulties, although less severe and mainly limited to reading accuracy.

The study supports the notion that there is a complex relationship between oral and written language difficulties which may change at different developmental time points, not captured by a single deficit model, but best conceptualised considering multiple interactions between language skills and literacy abilities.

Long-term reading and spelling outcome in Italian ... [Cortex. 2011] - PubMed result

Dyslexic Advantage - Memory and Dyslexia

Dyslexic Advantage - Memory and Dyslexia

A recent study from Norway shows what people with dyslexia have known a long time...that working memory is affected in dyslexia. In the picture below, control subjects trying to keep letter sounds in mind vs. subjects with dyslexia.

One of the most common mistakes we see in educators approaching the subject of dyslexia is to think the only issues is phonological awareness. Some students have both, but for most, the memory is a problem as big or even bigger than distinguishing sounds.

Problems from Working Memory Challenges

•Hard time following conversations in background noise
•Trouble learning a foreign language
•Problems following a foreign language speaker
•Dismissed as 'inattentive ADD'
•Have to write auditory information down to remember

The importance of realising that working memory issues are affecting dyslexia is that working memory seems to be highly trainable.

Some of greatest leaps in IQ's we've seen over the years have been in students who acquire more strategies to organise their ideas and who work hard at tasks to train up their working memory.

It doesn't always have to be expensive software programs to train up working memory - it can involve persisting at difficult working memory tasks like mathematics, writing, or acquiring an 'easier' foreign language.

Working memory problems also highlight the need to employ multisensory approach to learning sounds. Making images, humorous, or other more interesting information to forgettable facts or sounds can help the data to 'stick'.

Speech perception deficits by Chinese children with phonological Dyslexia

Speech perception deficits by Chinese children with phonological Dyslexia

Findings concerning the relation between dyslexia and speech perception deficits are inconsistent in the literature.

This study examined the relation in Chinese children using a more homogeneous sample-children with phonological dyslexia.

Two experimental tasks were administered to a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia, a group of age-matched control children, and a group of adults. In addition to a categorical perception task, a selective adaptation task was carried out.

The results indicated that Chinese children with phonological dyslexia were less consistent than both the child and adult control groups in identifying stimuli within a given phonetic category.

Furthermore, they did not show any significant adaptation effects in the selective adaptation task even when the adapting stimulus was identical to an endpoint stimulus in the test continuum. It seems that children with phonological dyslexia have a general deficiency in representing and processing speech stimuli.

Further papers on Dyslexia and Chinese or Oriental languages here ...............

Dyslexia Untied - Phonological Dyslexia

Phonological Dyslexia
(Also known as Dysphonetic, Auditory or dysphonesia dyslexia) This kind of dyslexia is the most common and the person has difficulty in identifying phenomes i.e the sounds within words, and will have difficulty matching letters to sounds.

When trying to read they will make wild guesses at words and will struggle with nonsense words or fictional words that have been constructed from Proper names, Mnemonics, etc.

Greater difficulty will occur when spelling words and they will try to make sense of the illogical chaos and lack of comprehension they are experiencing. Their attempts to spell will include impossible letter combinations e.g. 'sfr'

Most tests for Dyslexia will include the requirement to read nonsense words e.g. 'sluft' and 'prenck'. This is to force the subject to read and sound out the letter combination as a word, revealing an underlying comprehension with letters, words and their construction. Also, it is thought to prevent the subject from simply guessing words they have heard rather than one's they have read.

This test and exercise is meant to determine whether a subject has a Phonological Dyslexia.