H860 Reading Difficulties

1. H860 Reading Difficulties Week 2 The Development of Reading (Difficulties)

2. Today’s session • The rocky road to reading • Discussion of intervention presentations • Break • Early literacy development • Memo briefing

3. Recap from last week • General reading difficulties have many causes • The signature of specific reading difficulties is that they are ‘unexpected’ • The most readily identifiable SRD is dyslexia, a specific difficulty with phonological processing • Caveat: labels are products of culture and time

4. For a child to learn to read, a lot of precursors have to be in place… • Thus, our understanding of intervention should not just start at the school years

5. Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia • Prospective study of over 200 Finnish children from birth • Half were at familial risk for dyslexia

6. 1st year of life… • ERP recordings in the first week of life and 6 months differed between at-risk and non-risk babies • Newborn responses to /ga/ syllable related to poorer receptive language across groups at 2.5 years. Similar trend at 5 years. • Newborn responses in the left hemisphere predicted poorer reading skills at 6.5 years, and poorer reading accuracy and fluency, as well as poorer spelling skills, at 7 years • At-risk children with overall slow motor development had a smaller vocabulary and used shorter sentences than children in all other subgroups

7. 2 year olds… • Maximum sentence length at 2 years lower in at-risk group • Accuracy of speech sound articulation at 2.5 years predicts early reading acquisition • Control mothers produce more symbolic play and language in interactions with their children • Mothers' child-directed symbolic language contributed toward the comprehension skills of at-risk 14- and 18-month-olds. This association was absent in the control group until 30 months.

8. At-risk late talkers

9. 3 years and beyond… • At-risk group have lower expressive language scores at 3.5. By 5 years both expressive and receptive language scores are lower • At-risk group have lower phonological awareness • Phonological awareness, letter knowledge and RAN predict future reading from 3.5 years

10. Lyytinen et al. (2006)

11. Pause • If asked to give advice to the parents of an at-risk 3.5 year old, what would you say/what information would you want to obtain from them?

12. Early risk screens • TOPEL, Test of Preschool Early Literacyhttp://www.proedinc.com/customer/productView.aspx?ID=4020 • ALL Assessment of Language & Literacy http://harcourtassessment.com/haiweb/cultures/en-us/productdetail.htm?pid=015-8074-742

13. Self-promotion time

14. Music and Literacy Katie Overy, 2003 • Rhythm-based music training 3 x 20 minute sessions, for 15 weeks • Improved children's phonological and spelling skills… • However, the causal pathway from rhythm skills to phonology and reading is not yet understood.

15. Measuring Beat Sensitivity

16. Measuring Beat Sensitivity RL CA Dyslexia PNAS, 2002

17. Neural bases of beat processing • What is the neural profile for beat processing in children? • Does this vary in children with dyslexia? • If yes, what is the developmental trajectory: • difference, delay or a more complex picture?

18. Strong beat

19. Weak beat

21. Literacy Instruction Begins • The ‘basic’ task – learning the associations between the sounds and words of your language and the symbol system of your language

22. Treiman and Kessler • Writing maps spoken language through units of meaning (morphosyntax) and/or sound (phonology) • Logographic systems use meaning units – e.g. Chinese languages 鼠 - rat

23. Logographic systems • Zoo ‘move’ ‘thing’ ‘garden’ Chinese writer must master 2,000-3,000 logograms to have a good dictionary

24. Phonological systems • The invariance issue – ‘tomato’ • Syllabaries • Segmental systems – e.g. Spanish, English • Fewer symbols – easier to learn! • But, finer cuts make symbol decisions harder: ‘sweet girl’

25. Phonological systems • Intonation not represented – implications for fluency? • Mixtures possible: • Past tense ‘ed’ • Plurals • Dealing with our pasts… /w/ in wrist, /x/ - gh, /k/ in knight Vowel merger in N. America – lawn/lot

26. Word Reading

27. Ways to read a word… • jone • greak • disland • nepot • dalf • heact • bacht • souquet • nuitar • beights

28. Ways to read a word… • Decoding, e.g. c-a-t  /k//æ//t/ • Pronouncing common spelling patterns as chunks e.g. –ight, ing • Retrieving words from memory (sight word reading) e.g. none, yacht • By analogy e.g. yellow  fellow • By predicting words from context

29. Frith’s stage model Spelling is driver Reading is driver • Logographic • Alphabetic • Orthographic

30. Profile of Word Reading (i)

31. Profile of Word Reading (ii)

32. Profile of Word Reading (iii)

33. Memos…