Spoken word recognition in reading disabled children.

Abstract

This study compared spoken word recognition in 39 reading disabled and 61 normally achieving children on a speech gating task and examined the relationships among speech recognition, phonemic awareness, and reading. Children listened to increasingly longer segments of the speech input from word onset and guessed the identity of the target word. Words were either high or low frequency and had few or many similarly sounding word neighbors in the listener's lexicon. Reading disabled children needed more of the speech input than normally achieving peers to identify target words with few similarly sounding neighbors. The amount of speech input for recognition predicted the youngest children's reading performance, after variance due to measures of phonemic awareness and receptive vocabulary were accounted for. The argument is developed that spoken word recognition may be developmentally delayed in those with reading disabilities and may play a causal role in these children's failure to acquire adequate alphabetic knowledge.

Auditory word identification in dyslexic and normally achieving readers

“…Metsala (1997b) found a group difference only for sparse neighborhoods, and Griffiths and Snowling (2001) found no group differences. Boada and Pennington's (2006) groups did differ, both on whole word matching and on initial consonant identification.…”

“…Therefore, their null results could not be attributed to an unrepresentative dyslexic sample. They concluded, contrary to Metsala (1997b), that dyslexic children had segmentally organized phonological representations. They argued, based on null results for the gating task and the presence of rapid name retrieval difficulties, that phonological deficits in dyslexia involve problems in the generation of phonological output rather than the adequacy of phonological representations per se.…”

“…In such a case, it was assumed that the child would be able to identify the word correctly if it was repeated or presented in context. This part of the scoring method was also used in the two previous gating studies with dyslexic children (Griffiths & Snowling, 2001;Metsala, 1997b). We also report alternative analyses in which participants' responses were excluded from analyses if they made an error in identifying either the category or the exact word on Gate 6 (which represented an intact word).…”

“…Relatively few studies have used the gating paradigm with children (Boada & Pennington, 2006;Dollaghan, 1998;Edwards et al, 1999;Elliot, Hammer, & Evan, 1987;Elliot, Scholl, Grant, & Hammer, 1990;Griffiths & Snowling, 2001;Metsala, 1997aMetsala, , 1997bMontgomery, 1999;Walley, 1988;Walley, Michela, & Wood, 1995;Wesseling & Reitsma, 2001). Performance is scored in terms of initial consonant or whole word matching.…”

“…A methodological issue with the studies by Metsala (1997b), Boada and Pennington (2006), and especially Griffiths and Snowling (2001) is the items themselves. The items chosen have a number of embedded words.…”