Cost-Effective Prediction of Reading Difficulties

Abstract

This study addressed 2 questions: (a) Can preschoolers who will fail at reading be more efficiently identified by targeting those at highest risk for reading problems? and (b) will auditory temporal processing (ATP) improve the accuracy of identification derived from phonological processing and oral language ability? A sample of 227 preschoolers was screened for Performance IQ and was tested on phonological awareness (PA). The upper and lower quartiles of the PA distribution were selected as being at lowest and highest risk, respectively, for reading failure. Children with good and poor PA were tested on ATP, phonological short-term memory, rapid automatized naming, oral language, receptive vocabulary, and 2 measures of listening comprehension. Reading outcomes were measured at the end of Year 2. Only 1 child in the good-PA group became a poor reader by the end of Year 2, confirming that being in the top quartile for PA predicts positive reading outcomes. Discriminant analysis using the authors' test battery within the poor-PA group identified poor readers with sensitivity of.91 and specificity of.84, but ATP did not improve classification accuracy afforded by phonological and oral language. A brief screening procedure was formulated using only PA, phonological short-term memory, and demographic variables, with which 80% of children with poor PA who are at risk of reading problems can be identified. Further refinements of this screening procedure would increase accuracy of identification at the cost of only a small increment in required testing time.

Relationship Between Gender and Motor Skills in Preschoolers

“…Heath et al evaluated 230 students and the results showed that 15% of preschoolers had motor problems among which 5% had severe and 10% had moderate problems. Also, the disability rate of boys to girls was three to one regarding the motor skills (17). Considering the results of the current study and other studies, it seems that trainings and helps of preschool trainers and authorities in fine and gross motor skills (considering the gender) can be effective in the development and improvement of weaknesses and deficiencies of the mentioned motor skills.…”

“…It is important to consider the development of motor skills on the arrival of the children to school because it can affect their learning ability. In this regard, in the study on gross movements of the preschoolers concluded that motor skills programs significantly improve the growth and development of motor skills in children and teaches them what has to be tested (17). In the study on the level of fine and gross motor skills performances in preschoolers, it's concluded that higher performance depends on the level of daily muscle recruitment, and early education may improve motor skills and the level of learning among these children (18).…”

The Early Development Instrument: An Examination of Convergent and Discriminant Validity

“…Phonological awareness, the ability to manipulate the smallest units of sound in language, is currently considered one of the best predictors of later success in reading and writing (e.g., Heath and Hogben 2004;Savage and Carless 2004). Although phonological awareness is not tapped directly by the EDI, several items in the Language and Cognition domain include teacher evaluations of children's early reading and writing skills.…”

Rhythm perception and production predict reading abilities in developmental dyslexia

“…For instance, Tallal (1980, 2004) has suggested a rapid temporal processing deficit which would prevent the discrimination of different phonemes, in particular contrastive consonants such as [t]-[d] that acoustically differ in terms of rapid transient formants. While several studies supported a notion of causal link between impaired perception of rapid spectrotemporal cues and impaired literacy (Reed, 1989; De Martino et al, 2001; Tallal, 2004), recent research has suggested a rather limited role for rapid auditory processing in developmental dyslexia (Heath and Hogben, 2004a,b). …”