Rapid automatized naming skills of children with intellectual disability

Abstract

Background: A deficit in Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), acknowledged to be linked to dyslexia, has rarely been investigated as a potential explanation of the reading difficulties that children with intellectual disability (ID) often face. The existing studies mainly focused on adolescent or adults with ID matched to typically developing (TD) children on verbal mental age, or used a single RAN task. Aims: The aim of this study was to compare the RAN pattern and skills of children with ID and low reading skills to the ones of TD children with matched reading skills. Method: 30 children with mild to moderate ID with mixed etiology (M ¼ 9.4 years-old) were pair-matched to 30 TD children (M ¼ 4.3 years-old) on phonological awareness-and reading-level. They were all administered color, object, finger, and vowel RAN tasks. Outcomes and results: Results showed that children with ID had more domain-specific RAN skills and were largely slower in most of the RAN tasks than their younger TD peers. Conclusions and implications: This suggests that a deficit in RAN should be added to the explanations of their frequent reading difficulties, which might open new remediation possibilities. What this paper adds?Recently, a growing body of work has sought to understand why children with intellectual disability (ID) often face difficulties in learning to read. It has been highlighted that phonological awareness (PA)known to be involved in typical reading acquisition and in dyslexiais also an area of weakness among children with ID. It has even been shown that children with ID exhibit a deviant developmental pattern of PA. Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), which has also been deeply studied among typically developing (TD) children and among children with specific learning disorders, has conversely been far less investigated among individuals with ID. First, the few studies that compared the RAN skills of individuals with ID to the ones of TD children led to contradictory results regarding the preservation or impairment of these skills. Since RAN skills have been shown to follow an asymptotic evolution, the age of the individuals with ID and of the TD children to whom they are matched might be crucial. Second, it has not yet been investigated whether the RAN developmental pattern of children with ID is similar or different from the one of TD children. Third, most existing research has assessed RAN skills in children who already have reading skills, making direction of influence hard to ascertain. This study examined the RAN skills of 6to 12-year-old individuals with ID with very low reading skills on four RAN tasks relative to the ones of TD children matched on PAand reading-level, which has not yet been done. It shows that children with ID are characterized by both an atypical developmental pattern as well as by a deficit in RAN.

Effects of adaptations of a phonics-based reading intervention program on reading and spelling skills of students with intellectual disability who require augmentative and alternative communication

“…The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of adaptations of a phonics-based instructional reading program on word reading and spelling skills of individuals with ID who are AAC users. The instructional reading program (De Chambrier et al, 2021) that was adapted in the present study is designed to teach Frenchspeaking students with ID to read and spell. In a randomized controlled study, this program was shown to have a positive effect on word and non-word reading skills of verbal students with ID as well as a marginally significant positive effect with a medium effect size on spelling skills (Sermier Dessemontet et al, 2021).…”

“…Reading and spelling lessons from an instructional reading program (De Chambrier et al, 2021) that were adapted to the needs of students who are AAC users were used in this study. The instructional reading program has been developed for Frenchspeaking students with ID.…”

“…To allow for more efficient instructional situations, it would be interesting for future researchers to examine whether an intervention with larger groups of participants is possible and effective for all students to develop reading and spelling skills. It would also be interesting to examine whether the instructional reading program (De Chambrier et al, 2021) could be used jointly with students who can express themselves orally and students who are AAC users while adaptations of the program are incorporated only for the latter or as support for students with mild language disorders (e.g., difficulty to pronounce some sounds). Finally, it would have been interesting to carry out generalization probes with new, untaught words.…”

Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming: The Mediating Effect of Word Reading and Spelling in Children with Developmental Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Mild Intellectual Disability

“…However, the mechanism underlying the RAN-reading relation is still a subject of debate. According to the double-deficit hypothesis, PA and RAN are two separable sources of reading dysfunction [24]. Some authors (e.g., [15,[25][26][27][28]) indicate that PA is an area of weakness in children with ID of different etiologies.…”

Will an app-based reading intervention change how teachers rate their teaching self-efficacy beliefs? A test of social cognitive theory in Swedish special educational settings

“…Disability constitutes one of the greatest barriers for learning. Research has shown that students with intellectual disability (ID) have lower proficiency in reading compared to typical children (Dessemontet et al, 2017;van Wingerden et al, 2017;de Chambrier et al, 2021). To overcome these barriers, students with ID need highquality instruction.…”