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The phonology and semantics session brought us away from the more traditional type of investigation in which the child's difficulties are viewed in relation to individual word recognition problems. Consequently, the audience was reminded that reading involves a number of processes that not only include the recognition of words, but also the connection of these to stored concepts and the development of meaning from grammatical constructs and the reader's existing language skills. Therefore, in this sense the session considered what is seldom addressed in research, and often pondered by practitioners: comprehension.
Kirsten Windfhur (University of Manchester) set the stage in her talk titled 'Beyond Phonological Awareness: The Role of Paired Associate Learning in Learning to Read'. This presentation, while reminding us that phonological awareness is an important pre-reading skill, also suggested how it has in many ways predominated in the literature; perhaps to the detriment of our understanding of other factors which contribute to reading success. The factor that this talk went on to discuss was that of paired associate learning. This indeed seems an important consideration in terms of how recent investigations have concentrated on the role of language processes to reading, and how the relationship of visual processes has largely been a separate area of inquiry. Consequently, we know little about how these two processes work together in terms of each process' contribution in (word) acquisition. Interestingly, this review also reminded us of which skills and processes are not deficient in the poor reader, those being the poor reader's equal ability to process and recall visual information that does not require the application of a verbal code. The results of the presented study showed that compared with dyslexic children, normal readers have two mechanisms in their reading system: phonological awareness and verbal learning. Conversely, it appears that both of these systems can be impaired in dyslexic readers.
The second talk given by Kate Nation (University of York) followed nicely as it addressed 'Semantic Skills, Vocabulary Development and Learning to Read'. Conducted with Paula Clarke and Margaret Snowling, this study also took us beyond the importance of phonological awareness to subsequent reading ability, and addressed the role of language skills beyond phonology. Importantly, this not only considered the role of visual and verbal processes in acquisition (in paired associate learning tasks), but also that of semantic processes necessary for comprehension.
The study involved children who have specific reading comprehension difficulties in spite of normal decoding skill. Not unlike the poor reader, when these poor comprehenders are required to make associations in visual - visual paired associate learning tasks (e.g., @^* = ~#>), they perform as well as children of the same chronological age. These poor comprehenders also learned to associate novel objects with novel names, but were not as able in learning the semantic properties of these objects, or in the retention of these over time. It would therefore, appear that a difficulty in learning semantic associations may lead to weaknesses in developing print knowledge. In this sense, within educational settings, practitioners will recognise how a good knowledge of word meanings will assist children in their ability to identify words in print.
In a similar sense, poor readers do not do as well as other same aged children in visual - verbal paired associate learning tasks where the children are presented with visual stimuli that are paired with a verbal label (e.g., @^* = vok). Therefore, it seems that like the poor comprehenders, the visual - visual learning condition appears to be the easiest. Thus, in terms of a difficulty in learning new reading words, in the case of the poor reader the problems are specific to verbal but not visual short-term memory processes, whereas for the poor comprehender they appear specific to semantic processes. Put another way, it seems as though the poor reader encounters difficulty where visual stimuli have to be named, or in the integration of visual and verbal codes, the poor comprehender encounters difficulty in attaching semantic information.
The third talk presented by Joy Stackhouse (University College London) was conducted with colleagues Liz Nathan (University of Sheffield), Nata Goulandris (University College London), and Margaret Snowling (University of York). The talk titled 'Identifying Children at Risk for Literacy Problems' concerned a 4 year study of children with speech and language difficulties. The work involved a large number (n=50) of children with specific speech difficulties, and 50 normally developing children.
Unlike many investigations, this study uniquely considers not only the growth of children over an extended period (e.g. 4 years), but also their ability on a solid range of tasks mapping linguistic and reading skill at a variety of processing levels, i.e., from input (auditory perception), through segmentation (phonological processing), to output (speech production). It is this type of investigation that appears to be conducted in the spirit of a clinical analysis or case study approach in which all of the principal processes involved in skilled reading development are reviewed. For example difficulties at the level of input would be expected to impact on most aspects of the phonological processing system, which in turn are known to affect subsequent spelling and reading development. Finally, children without speech difficulties will usually be unaffected in phonological awareness tasks because in addition to requiring accurate perception (input) successful speech production also requires the ability to work with phonological information (e.g., segmentation and synthesis).
Thus, the authors looked at auditory discrimination, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, reading, spelling, and speech and language abilities at three separate points in time. In the beginning the children with both speech and language difficulties were less able than children with speech problems alone on most of the presented tasks. The speech and language impaired group had both input and more severe output (speech production) problems than the speech (alone) problem group. Interestingly, it was found that performance at this time (time 1) did not account for subsequent reading and spelling development later on (e.g., at time 3). However, when the children were separated according to either typical or delayed reading and spelling, and their ongoing and previous speech difficulties examined, literacy difficulties were shown to be present at ages 5 and 6. Importantly, these researchers consider individual case analyses which are fundamental to outlining particular patterns of development within the profile of individual children with different ranges of speech and/or language difficulties. As the talk also addressed links between these profiles and teacher's perceptions of the children, amongst other developmental, social, and therapy factors, it would appear worthwhile to obtain a more detailed summary of the report and/or related citations from the author. j.stackhouse@ucl.ac.uk
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