No abstract

No abstract

Zusammenfassung. Fragestellung: Obwohl die morphologische Bewusstheit (MB) eine wichtige Rolle beim Schriftspracherwerb spielt, ist sie im deutschsprachigen Raum wenig untersucht und es gibt keine publizierten Testverfahren dafür. Diese Studie untersucht den Zusammenhang der MB mit verschiedenen Maßen der Lesefähigkeit, mit der Rechtschreibfähigkeit und der phonologischen Bewusstheit (PB) bei deutschsprachigen Kindern. Methodik: Um die MB zu erheben, wurde ein MB-Screening entwickelt. 172 Zweitklässler wurden hinsichtlich Lesegeschwindigkeit, Leseflüssigkeit, lautierendem Lesen von Pseudowörtern und Rechtschreibleistungen sowie ihrer MB und PB getestet. Ergebnisse: Die MB korrelierte auch im Deutschen mit den erhobenen Maßen der Lesefähigkeit sowie mit der Rechtschreibfähigkeit und der PB. Die MB konnte sowohl zusätzlich zur PB als auch alleine einen signifikanten Beitrag an Varianz der Lesegeschwindigkeit, Leseflüssigkeit und Rechtschreibleistung aufklären. Beim lautierenden Lesen von Pseudowörtern war die zusätzliche Varianzaufklärung durch die MB hingegen nicht signifikant. Außerdem war die Varianzaufklärung sowohl einer Lesestörung als auch einer Rechtschreibstörung durch die MB alleine signifikant. Schlussfolgerungen: Die Ergebnisse bestätigen die wichtige Rolle der MB im Schriftspracherwerb auch im Deutschen. Besonders für die Förderung nicht nur der Rechtschreibung, sondern bspw. auch der schwer zu fördernden Lesegeschwindigkeit, ist die MB ein vielversprechender Ansatz.

Developmental dyslexia is a reading disorder that is associated with deficits in phonological processing, where the exact neural basis for those processing deficits remains unclear. In particular, disagreement exists whether degraded phonological representations or an impaired access to the phonological representations causes these deficits. To investigate this question and to trace changes in neurophysiology during the process of reading acquisition, we designed a longitudinal study with event related potentials (ERPs) in children between kindergarten and second grade. We used an explicit word processing task to elicit the late positive component (LPC), which has been shown to reflect phonological processing. A brain-wide analysis of the LPC with an electrode-wise application of mixed effects models showed significantly attenuated amplitudes in the left temporo-parietal region in dyslexic children. Since these differences were only present in the word and not in the picture (i.e. control) condition, the attenuated amplitudes might reflect impaired access to the phonological representations of words. This was further confirmed by the longitudinal development, which showed a rapid increase in amplitude at the beginning of reading instruction and a decrease with continuing automatization, possibly pointing to a progression from grapheme-phoneme parsing to whole word reading. Our longitudinal study provides the first evidence that it is possible to detect neurophysiological differences in the LPC between children with dyslexia and control children in both preliterate and very early stages of reading acquisition, providing new insights about the neurophysiological development and a potential marker of later reading problems.

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4–10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants performed a visual categorization task while a task-irrelevant sequence of sounds was presented which consisted of frequently repeated standard sounds and rarely interspersed novel sounds. On average, participants responded slower in the categorization task after novel sounds. This distraction effect was more pronounced in children. Throughout the experiment, the initially strong distraction effects declined to level of adults in the groups of 6- to 10-year-olds. Such a decline was neither observed in the groups of the 4- and 5-year-olds, who consistently show a high level of distraction, nor in adults, who showed a constantly low level of distraction throughout the experimental session. Results indicate that distraction control is a highly dynamic process that qualitatively and quantitatively differs between age groups.We conclude that the analysis of short-term dynamics provides valuable insights into the development of attention control and might explain inconsistent findings regarding distraction control in middle childhood. In addition, models of attention control need to be refined to account for age-dependent rapid learning mechanisms. Our findings have implications for the design of learning situations and provide an additional source of information for diagnosis and treatment of attention deficit disorders.