Nonsense Syllable Confusions in Children with Reading Disabilities

1. Nonsense Syllable Confusions in Children with Reading Disabilities Presented to the Executive Board of The Reading Group April 1, 2007

2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign • Dr. Cynthia J. Johnson, presenting • Dr. Jont Allen1 and Dr. Cynthia J. Johnson2, Primary Investigators • Sandeep Phatak1, Sara Steele2, and Bryce Lobdell1, and Seok-Youn Yoon2 doctoral students 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 2 Department of Speech and Hearing Science

3. Previous Studies • Language impairment (LI) may originate with difficulties in hearing speech sounds • Fellbaum et al., 1995 • Ziegler et al., 2005 • Merzenich et al., 1996 • Tallal et al., 1996

4. Children with LI are at risk for developing reading disabilities (RD) • Catts et al., 2002 • 50% of kindergartners with specific language impairment eventually develop reading disabilities • Flax et al., 2003 • 68% of 2nd grade children with language impairments also have reading impairments

5. We reasoned that RD might be related to speech perception difficulties.

6. Much of the study of RD has focused on letter-sound correspondence in decoding or phonological awareness, rather than purely speech-perception abilities. • Our study focuses on speech-perception abilities, in children with reading disabilities and normal hearing.

7. The Research Question • Do children with RD due to decoding or comprehension difficulties confuse consonants and vowels more often than children without such reading difficulties? • Children in our study have a history of reading problems and varying reading profiles.

8. Method

9. Participants • 7 children with RD (4 girls, 3 boys) • 3rd and 4th grades • Ages 8;4 to 10;5 • 6 were receiving reading services at The Reading Group • The 7th was reading below grade level.

10. Control Group: 2 children whose diagnostic reports indicated RD primarily due to attentional, motivational, or school attendance problems due to health problems • RD Group: 5 children

11. Diagnostic Test Battery • Hearing Screening • Reading Profile • Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised • Word Recognition • Word Attack • Gray Oral Reading Test-4 • Reading Comprehension • Fluency

12. Reports of reading assessments and Reading Group lesson progress

13. Language Profile • Nonverbal cognition • Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test: Matrices subtest • Listening vocabulary • Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III • Grammar • Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-4

14. Phonological awareness • Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing • Articulation • Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 • 15-20 minute sample of the child’s conversation.

15. Child’s Reading-Language Profile • Will be created from the tests and reports • Nonword Repetition Task (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998) • 12 nonsense words • 1-4 syllables long • Example: “chinotoib” • Speech perception, memory, production

16. Task 1: Syllable Confusion Oddball Task (SCO) • Measures ability to discriminate between 2 speech sounds • Syllables presented by the computer • Child listens with headphones • For 10 hourly sessions

17. Computer randomly selects 3 consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) syllables • Spoken by three different talkers • From a set of 18 talkers • Professionally recorded by the Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania

18. 2 syllables the same; 1 different • Different C or V • e.g., “da-da-fa” • The child indicates the odd syllable. • Children averaged 36 trials per sound. • Play several examples of the SCO trials.

19. Task 2: Nonsense Syllable Confusion Matrix Task (NSCM) • Measures ability to identify a speech sound • Syllables presented by the computer • Child listens with headphones • For 10 hourly sessions

20. The child listens to 1 CV or VC syllable at a time • The child repeats what he or she hears • Customized for each child • to provide more examples of high-error sounds on the SCO task.

21. Responses were phonetically transcribed by two examiners • The children averaged 61 trials per sound. • Play several examples of the SCO trials.

22. Preliminary Results: RD Group • 4 of the 5 children with RD made numerous perceptual errors for consonants and vowels in the SCO and NSCM tasks.

23. “Laura’s” SCO Task • Scored low for 38% of 24 consonants • For 4 types of consonants • /p/, 33 % correct • “ch”, 67% correct • 13% of 15 vowels • “u” as in “cut”, 64%

24. “Laura’s” NSCM Task • Harder for her than the SCO task, primarily due to poor vowel identification • NSCM = 72% • SCO = 84% correct

25. “Laura’s” Reading-Language Profile • Difficulty segmenting words into phonemes, imitating sentences, and repeating nonwords • High listening vocabulary • PPVT-III: SS = 122

26. History of reading difficulties and services at The Reading Group to learn reading strategies • Currently reading at grade level, but with effort.

27. Preliminary Results: Control Group • 2 controls and 1 boy in the RD group • Scored high on the SCO Task • > 75% correct on more than 91% of the sounds • Clearly, children in this age range can be highly successful on the SCO task.

28. Preliminary Results: Patterns for the RD Group • Some group patterns emerged for the 4 children with perceptual errors. • SCO task • 3 children had a substantial number of consonant errors (≤ 75% correct) • on 8, 9, and 13 consonants (out of 24) • 2 had a substantial number of vowel errors • on 7 and 11 vowels (out of 15)

29. NSCM Task (with 3 of the 4 children analyzed) • 2 children performed worse on NSCM (Task 2) than SCO (Task 1). • Expected because NSCM emphasized SCO errors. • Surprisingly, consonants better than vowels (all 3 children) • Mean for consonants = 82% correct • Mean for vowels = 72% correct

30. Both Tasks, 2 or 3 children: • Erred on 3 vowels • Short “e” as in “pet” • “oo” as in “look” • Short “o” as in “pot” • Erred on 2 consonants • “th” as in “they” • “ng” as in “sing”

31. Interestingly, certain sounds were only problematic on one task but not the other (problematic for ≥ 2 children) • SCO Task • 7 vowels, including: • “e” as in “see” • long “u” as in “tune” • short “o” as in “pot” • 8 consonants, including “p, b, t, d”

32. NSCM Task • 6 vowels • 8 consonants, including: • “f, v” • “th” as in “think”, th” as in “they” • “z”, “zh” as in “measure” • “J” • “ng” as in “sing”

33. Task 2 Confusion Matrices (NSCM Task) • Will be created for consonant and vowel for each child (as in Allen, 2005; Phatak & Allen, 2007) • Will show which kinds of sounds are confused with each other, for individual children and the RD Group • Example of a possible Confusion Matrix on the next slide.

35. Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) • Will be scored for the number of correct phonemes in 12 nonwords • 3 nonwords at each of 4 levels • 1 syllable, 2 syllable, 3 syllable (“chinotoib”), and 4 syllables long • Will be compare to speech perception (the SCO and NSCM scores). • To see if speech perception is related to phonological awareness, memory, and production for new words (NRT nonwords).

36. Reading Profiles • Reading profiles will be prepared • to characterize children as having • Decoding difficulties (word recognition and attack) • Reading Comprehension difficulties • Reading Fluency difficulties • Vocabulary, Grammar, or Articulation difficulties related to reading. • Will be compared to speech perception (the SCO and NSCM scores).

37. Discussion • Many studies show that reading disability is related to poor phonological awareness, such as knowing rhymes and first sounds of words • Catts et al., 2006

38. Preliminary results suggest that our RD Group exhibited speech perception difficulties more peripheral (low level) in auditory processing of speech than previously reported. • 4 of 7 children run so far. • The 8th child has just been enrolled. • A 9th child was unable to complete the study but had numerous perceptual confusions.

39. Preliminary results show some common confusions in the SCO discrimination and NSCM identification data among children with RD • We think there may be some auditory working memory challenges on the SCO task. • Some children appear to find it hard to remember the sequence of 3 syllables.