L8 - Reading development

Question 1

Describe qualities of the average skilled reader

Answer 1

• Reads at least 300 words/minute
• Can identify 50, 000+ words
• Can simultaneously:
  
  • > retrieve word meanings
  • > syntactically parse the text
  • > integrate text with previous context and LTM to create meaning

Question 2

What is reading and what does it require?

Answer 2

Acquired, “culturally engineered” skill

Requires:

• highly sophisticated pattern recognition skills
• efficient memory encoding and retrieval processes
• symbolic processing

Question 3

What is Specific Reading Disability (SRD)?

Answer 3

Reading difficulty despite at least average cognitive ability and educational opportunity.

Question 4

What did Rutter and Yule’s (1977) epidemiological study of SRD find?

Answer 4

• SRD is a reading level 2 years lower than expected for age and IQ (even for age 10 with IQ age 12, but reading age 10)
• 77% referrals male, only 54% general reading problem.
• biological and environmental contributions (larger families and late birth order, family history).

Question 5

Why is it hard to determine the causes of Specific Reading Disorder ?

Answer 5

• Many factors required in reading; non-cognitive (motivation, practice), general cognitive (attention, listening comprehension), and specific cognitive factors (visual discrimination, phonemic awareness).
• Difficult to determine causal factors because poor readers are worse than good readers at many tasks.

Question 6

What are the theories of reading?

Answer 6

Top-down theories

• Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game, where knowledge and context predicts next word. Readers should attend to meaning.
  
  • > efficient reading is purely visual, highly selective and inferential and natural.
  • > whole language approach to instruction

Bottom-up theories

• Reading = decoding x comprehension.
• Children learn to decode words by mapping written words to phonological lexicon. They use comprehensive processes that they already use for processing written and spoken language.

Question 7

Why is phonological information important for reading?

Answer 7

Two possibilities:

• Direct access: map printed words straight onto meanings. Learn association between patterns of words and meanings in spoken language.
• Indirect access: learn to translate from orthography of language into phonology. Then use spoken word semantic links.

Question 8

What is phonemic awareness?

Answer 8

• Ability to attend to and manipulate the separate sounds in words (e.g. know beginning of pat is “p” and if you took it away it would be “at”)
• Best predictor of success at learning to read up until grade 2.
  
  • > trained phonemic awareness and increased performance of reading and spelling especially when it connected phonological segments to letters, lasts for up to 6 years.
• Influenced by reading instruction
• Facilitated by exposure to alphabetic orthography

Question 9

Why is it hard to acquire phonemic awareness?

Answer 9

Spoken language is learned holistically, and children attend to meaning rather than form.

To acquire children need:

• become aware symbolic status of words
• develop sensitivity to the form of words

Question 10

What is phonemic awareness a good predictor of and why?

Answer 10

Reading: PA at school entry level predicts future reading skill.
Deficits in phonemic awareness specifically impede reading (2012 meta-analysis).

Question 11

Is there a cause of Specific Reading Disorder?

Answer 11

• Many factors influence successful reading, but doesn’t mean there are different causes.
• Lies in “phonological core” which is essential to link orthography with phonology and meaning.
• Failing to acquire these processes has reverberating consequences (get worse and worse); academic achievement, vocabulary growth, self-esteem.