Phonological representations and learning to read

1. Phonological representations and learning to read Dr Julia Carroll Joanne Myers University of Warwick

2. Structure • Children with family history of dyslexia have similarities with speech impaired children • Young children classify words according to articulatory features • What phonological difficulties are linked to later reading difficulties?

3. The Phonological Representations Hypothesis • The reading and phonological awareness deficits in dyslexics are due to difficulties at the level of representations • Implications: • Children with dyslexia would have difficulties in a range of phonological tasks • These difficulties would be evident before reading tuition • Children with difficulties in phonological representations would have literacy difficulties

4. Children with family history of dyslexia • Tunick & Pennington, 2002: Children with a family history of dyslexia are much more likely to have speech difficulties. • Pennington & Lefly, 2001: children who go on to have dyslexia show difficulties in speech perception and production tasks. • Family risk dyslexics show less accurate articulation in the pre-school years (Elbro et al, 1998, Scarborough, 1990).

5. Children with speech difficulties • Many children with pre-school speech difficulties go on to develop below average reading skills (Bird, Bishop and Freeman, 1995) • Children with speech difficulties also show poorer letter knowledge and phonological awareness than control children (Nathan et al, 2004) • But… • Having speech difficulties is not a significant risk factor for reading difficulties in language impaired children (Bishop & Adams, 1990). • Children with poor speech and average language do not show significantly impaired reading development (Catts, 1991).

6. 1. Children with family history of dyslexia have similarities with speech impaired children • 17 children with family history of dyslexia were compared to 17 children with speech difficulties and 17 normally developing control children. • Three-way matched on: • Age (4;0 years to 6;6 years) • Type of schooling • Gender • Assessed on: • Literacy • Letter knowledge and word reading • Phonological awareness • Syllable matching, Initial sound matching, rhyme matching • Phonological processing • Nonword repetition, articulation accuracy, mispronunciation detection • Phonological learning • Learning new words in a storybook situation

7. Results: Composite scores

8. Nonword repetition scores Articulation accuracy scores Control family risk speech Control family risk speech

9. 1. Summary • Children with family history of dyslexia look similar to children with speech impairment • BUT • The relationship is not simple – children with speech impairments sometimes read well and children with dyslexia don’t have very poor speech

10. 2. Articulatory features in representations • We don’t know much about typical children’s phonological representations • Seem to differ from adult’s representations • More ‘global’ or syllabic • Sensitive to similarities that adults don’t hear

11. Sensitivity to non-phonemic information • Spelling • Confusions between similar words • Voicing errors – lig for lick • Especially in clusters or word finally • sbider for spider • Chain for train • Classification • More likely to classify words as similar if they share features • E.g. tug and mud

12. 2. Young children classify words according to articulatory features • 125 children tested: • 59 from Reception (m= 4;11 years) • 66 from Nursery (m = 4;0 years) • Five measures used, four focused on: • Explicit classification: • Forced Choice (based on Storkel, 2002) • Sound Families • Implicit memory • Word Production • Memory confusions

13. Hypotheses • Young children code words according to phonetic features – particularly manner of articulation • Therefore, they are more likely to say words are similar if they share manner of articulation. • They are likely to be confused by words sharing phonetic features in priming or memory tasks

14. Classification – Forced Choice tug Same Phoneme Manner Place Different Onset + nucleus tug tough bus son mum mud young mum Rime tug hug Based on Storkel (2002)

15. Forced choice n = 93 tug tough bus son mum mud tug hug young mum

16. Memory confusions: Treiman & Breaux, 1982 “[bis]” • Children and adults taught three name – animal associations • Two words share a common phoneme • Two words share ‘global similarity’ • Which pair are most likely to be confused? • Adults – common phoneme pair • Children – globally similar pair “[bun]” “[diz]”

17. Memory Confusions “[mern]” “[moab]” “[vit]” Mern and moab share one phoneme Mern and vit share place of articulation (broadly) 1 manner and phoneme 1 place and phoneme 1 manner and place Time A Time B = 24 hours later

18. Memory Confusions At both time points, 63% of all errors were confusions At both times, distribution of the confusions differs from the random distribution: Time 1: χ2 (3) = 18.01, p < .01 Time 2: χ2 (3) = 81.22, p < .01

19. 81.1% shared a vowel 62.2 % were rhyming words 16.8% shared vowel and manner in the coda Only 2% shared a vowel without shared manner in coda 4.0 % shared onset and vowel 11.6% shared onset with a different vowel Can you tell me words that sounds like… ? You can even make up words! Only CVCs were analysed Word Production (n = 79) “Bed” “Nut” “Shop” “That”

20. Study 2: Summary • Children think of words that share manner of articulation as similar • They are particularly likely to notice this word-finally • This occurs across several tasks

21. What we know and what we don’t • Children with weak phonology are at risk of reading difficulties • But some show good reading progress • How can we separate the ones who will progress well? • Language • Phonological representations • Input or output processes

22. Our new research project • Select a large group of children at risk of phonological and literacy problems • Children at family risk of dyslexia • Children in regular speech therapy • Children with low nonword repetition scores • Assess different aspects of their phonology and language • Assess their reading after 6 months • Which aspects of phonology link to literacy?

23. Tasks we will use • Phonology tasks • Nonword repetition • Output • Articulation (picture naming) • DEAP (Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology) • Input • Mispronunciation detection • Memory and representations • Forced choice classification • Phonological priming • Memory confusions • Language and literacy tasks • CELF pre-school sentence structure, expressive vocabulary, recalling sentences • Letter knowledge, single word reading and spelling

24. How can you help? • Give details of the project to parents of suitable children: • Between 3;9 years and 6;0 years • Speech difficulties • No clear physical abnormalities (e.g. cleft lip & palate) • Regardless of their language skills • English as a first language • We can test children at home, at school or at the university • We can provide a brief report for parents • www.warwick.ac.uk/go/juliacarroll