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This symposium covered a wide breadth of research, reflecting the impressive range of research in the conference as a whole. The session began with two talks concerning a large scale intervention study carried out in Cumbria by Professors Peter Hatcher and Charles Hulme at the University of York. This study investigates the use of the sound linkage training programme in a whole class situation. It was found that, while there were significant improvements for the experimental groups as a whole, the treatment was especially effective for children in the bottom third of the group for letter knowledge, reading and language level. This suggested that structured phonics teaching is especially important for those children at risk of reading failure.
The second talk of the morning focussed on the longitudinal predictors of reading development within this intervention study. It was found that in the first year of schooling, letter knowledge and rhyme awareness combined together to predict growth in reading skills. However, as the children grew older, phoneme awareness became a stronger predictor than rhyme awareness. This data adds to the debate about the relative predictive strength of rhyme and phoneme awareness. The data differs from other recent studies in finding rhyme awareness more predictive of reading than phoneme awareness in the first year of schooling. It is suggested that this is because these children were involved in a highly structured phonics training programme over the time of testing. It may be that rhyme knowledge predicts how well children will respond to phoneme awareness training.
Shirley Cobbold, from the University of Cheltenham and Gloucester, then presented a talk examining the performance of children on a serial naming task. She found that individual differences in the task were almost entirely dues to differences in the interval between stimuli, rather than by time to articulate the stimuli themselves, which remained relatively constant across time. This suggests perhaps that difficulties on this task are caused by difficulties in phonological retrieval, rather than speech rate.
Jennifer Simpson (University of Surrey) carried on the session by examining efficacy of the Dyslexia Early Screening Test as a predictor of the later development of dyslexia. It was found that the test did not predict dyslexia thoroughly, and in fact accounted for only a small proportion of the variance in later reading development. Further studies in this area are planned.
Heikki Lyytinen discussed the possible early language markers of dyslexia with reference to his study of the early development of children with family history of dyslexia. It was found that children with family history of dyslexia who began talking late were likely to continue to show language difficulties throughout the pre-school years, unlike normally developing late talkers, who in most cases had caught up with their peers by the age of five. This interesting study will be more conclusive when the children reach school age and their literacy development can be assessed.
In general, then the symposium brought together a range of scientific work, from practical school based screening measures to more theoretically motivated studies of children with family history of dyslexia. As a whole, though, they all touched on the importance of phonological processing to the development of reading, and raised some interesting questions about the relationship of this phonological processing to early language development.
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