How you read affects what you gain: Individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system predict intervention gains in children with reading disabilities.

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in computational models of reading and focus on individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system. Specifically, we estimate the extent to which children with reading disabilities (n = 118 3rd-4th graders) rely on two sources of information during an oral word reading task-print-speech correspondences and semantic imageability-before and after a phonologically-weighted intervention. We show that children who relied more on print-speech regularities and less on imageability preintervention had better intervention gains. In parallel, children who over the course of the intervention exhibited greater increases in their reliance on print-speech correspondences and greater decreases in their reliance on imageability, had better intervention outcomes. Importantly, these two factors were differentially related to specific reading task outcomes, with greater reliance on print-speech correspondences associated with pseudoword naming, while (lesser) reliance on imageability related to word reading and comprehension. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical received funding from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant 48/20.

Literacy and early language development: Insights from computational modelling

“…Among these opportunities are: examining the causes of individual differences in learning to read; understanding the key pressure points in learning to read (such as transitions from monosyllabic to polysyllabic reading); predicting the impacts of different interventions on children's learning; and discovering how learning may vary across different languages and writing systems. The gap between behavioural and computational studies can then be narrowed through future behavioural work that specifies more closely the cognitive mechanisms involved in children's language task performance (e.g., Siegelman, Rueckl, van den Bunt, Frijters, Zevin, Lovett, Seidenberg, Pugh & Morris, 2022), together with increasingly detailed computational modelling that gets closer to children's language experience, and the constraints on their perception and production of language.…”

Modelling individual differences in reading using an optimised MikeNet simulator: the impact of reading instruction

“…Studies have investigated the variability in reading behaviors among typical readers (Hoffman et al, 2015;Woollams et al, 2016;Davies et al, 2017;Siegelman et al, 2020Siegelman et al, , 2022Chang, 2023) and dyslexic readers (Ziegler et al, 2008;Perry et al, 2019). Particularly, inter-subject variability in efficient OP and OS mapping sensitivity has been considered critical in contributing to variations in reading performance (Hoffman et al, 2015;Woollams et al, 2016;Siegelman et al, 2020Siegelman et al, , 2022. For instance, Woollams et al (2016) examined how individual differences in the degree to which readers rely on semantic access affect reading performances in a reading-aloud task.…”

“…To become a proficient reader, children need to learn the mappings between orthography (O), semantics (S), and phonology (P). Past literature has shown that reading behaviors differ across readers as a function of their sensitivity to OP and OS mappings during reading (Hoffman et al, 2015;Woollams et al, 2016;Siegelman et al, 2020Siegelman et al, , 2022. Moreover, these individual differences may be critical factors that influence the OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY Maria Mody, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, United States effectiveness of reading instruction.…”

“…Moreover, these individual differences may be critical factors that influence the OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY Maria Mody, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, United States effectiveness of reading instruction. For example, in designing and implementing intervention programs for children with reading disabilities (RD), Siegelman et al (2022) demonstrated significant intervention gains through phonology-focused instruction for RD children that relied more on OP regularities than OS regularities for reading. Hence, the differences in sensitivity to OP and OS mapping in reading performance motivated the present study to examine factors influencing beginning readers' sensitivity to different regularities.…”

“…The investigation aimed to determine the models' sensitivity to OP and OS regularities by drawing on a measure of semantic reliance (SR hereafter) to operationalise as the utilisation of OP and OS pathways. We then compared model performance with behavioral data reported in the reading literature (Woollams et al, 2016;Siegelman et al, 2020Siegelman et al, , 2022. Here, we provided a brief overview of individual differences in reading, early reading instruction and the computational framework employed in our model development.…”