An instructional study: Improving the inferential comprehension of good and poor fourth-grade readers.

Four classroom teachers provided instruction to improve the inferential comprehension of 40 good and poor 4th-grade readers, as determined by scores on the Stanford Achievement Test. The experimental treatment consisted of 3 parts: (a) making students aware of the importance of drawing inferences between new information and existing knowledge structures; (b) getting students to discuss, prior to reading, something they had done that was similar to the events in the text and to hypothesize what would happen in the text; and (c) providing students with many inferential questions to discuss after reading the selection. Results show that poor readers benefited significantly from the instruction, but good readers did not. This differential effect was attributed to the dissimilar aptitudes of good and poor readers and the dissimilar instructional methods that are used with good and poor readers in schools. Conclusions focus on the positive prospect of modeling successful instructional procedures on theoretical, basic research. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resilient readers? University students who are poor recoders but sometimes good text comprehenders.

The authors screened 194 university students to determine whether some could comprehend text well despite very poor recoding skills, measured by pseudoword reading. Most of the 17 poorest recoders had never been identified as reading disabled. We classified 6 poor recoders as "resilient readers" because their text comprehension scores were average or above, relative to the sample as a whole. They were indistinguishable from 6 matched typical readers on measures of text comprehension derived from oral-reading think-aloud protocols. There was no evidence that the resilient readers relied on superior verbal ability or working memory to compensate for poor recoding. The resilient readers were poor at spelling, reading isolated words, and reading text rapidly, but they showed adequate phonemic awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pattern-analyzing disability in poor readers.

Conducted a study of 15 good and 22 poor readers (as measured by the Wide Range Achievement Test and the vocabulary portion of the WISC), to assess Ss' encoding of semantic and graphemic features of sentences. Ss were administered a test of recognition memory for sentences. The test permitted separate analyses to be made of the graphemic pattern-analyzing skills required in reading sentences and of a more interpretive skill. Both groups of children performed about equally on tests involving language use and grammar, but the poor readers were markedly retarded in aspects of the graphemic analysis (pattern analyzing) of the texts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Asymmetry of cerebral hemispheric function in normal and poor readers.

Reviews studies that have attempted to use methods of brief lateral visual presentation of linguistic stimuli to investigate asymmetry of organization of cerebral hemispheric functions in normal and poor readers. It is argued that any between-group differences found in such studies can be properly interpreted only when it is known that Ss in both groups approached the given tasks in the same way. It is shown that most existing studies have failed to meet this requirement because of failure to control Ss' central fixation, failure to demonstrate that the same types of stimuli were recognized by normal and poor readers, failure to take into account the possibility that normal and poor readers may have used different strategies or processes to accomplish particular tasks, and failure to compare groups of normal and poor readers matched on reading ability. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recall of thematically relevant material by adolescent good and poor readers as a function of written versus oral presentation.

36 7th grade good and poor readers read one prose passage and listened to a 2nd one. They were tested, following each passage, for comprehension and recall of that passage. Under both reading and listening conditions, good readers recalled a greater proportion of the stories, and the likelihood of their recalling a particular unit was a clear function of the units's structural importance; poor readers recalled less of the stories, and their recall protocols were not as clearly related to variations in structural importance. Performance following reading was significantly correlated with performance following listening. Results indicate that poor readers suffer from a general comprehension deficit and that similar processes are involved in reading and listening comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Idiosyncratic response patterns among good and poor readers.

Reading skill is considered to be a function of the match of S's response-elaboration patterns to the available cues scanned from the material. It was postulated that poor readers typically respond less consensually than good readers and that both groups make more errors on material which is designed to evoke idiosyncratic patterns of responding. It was found that both good (N = 24) and poor readers (N = 24) in the 5th grade made more errors on stories written in a here-and-now context than on stories in a past-and-far away context; for stories which included affective content, only poor readers showed increases in errors. The poor readers also made fewer consensual responses than did the good readers on a story-completion task and a word-association task. Implications for the reeducation of poor readers were discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inter- vs. intrasensory deficit in paired associate learning in poor and normal readers.

Conducted a study with poor and normal readers (n = 28 males and 2 females) in Grades 4-6, to test the notion that reading disability can be attributed to deficient intersensory integration by means of nonverbal unimodal (visual-visual and auditory-auditory) and cross-modal paired associates. The prediction that poor readers would show significantly greater difficulty than normal readers in inter- vs intrasensory learning was not supported. Results conflict with previous findings. It is concluded that deficient intersensory functioning does not characterize 9-12 yr old poor readers but may be prominent in younger children. (French summary) (40 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are IQ scores valid for children who are poor readers?

Remedial services for children with reading problems are often allocated according to discrepancies between reading and IQ scores. Results of some recent research suggest, however, that IQ scores of poor readers do not covary with their levels of functioning in other cognitive domains. This study evaluated whether the external validity of IQ scores (from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Revised [WAIS—R]) was moderated by reading levels within 2 separate samples of a total of 382 referred children (aged 7–16 yrs). It was found that IQ scores had expected correlations with external measures of verbal, visual-spatial, short-term memory, and arithmetic ability, and that these relations were invariant across levels of reading skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Echoic memory processes in good and poor readers.

Conducted 4 experiments to determine whether echoic memory plays a role in differences between good and poor readers. In Exp I, with 9 poor (mean age 11.05 yrs) and 9 good (mean age 10.9 yrs) readers, and Exp II, with 12 poor (mean age 10.85 yrs) and 12 good (mean age 10.7 yrs) readers, a suffix procedure was used in which the S was read a list of digits with either a tone control or the word go appended to the list. For lists that exceeded the length of the Ss' memory span by 1 digit (i.e., that avoided ceiling effects), poor readers showed a larger decrement in the suffix condition than did good readers. In Exp III, with 14 poor (mean age 10.64 yrs) and 14 good (mean age 10.83 yrs) readers, Ss shadowed words presented to 1 ear at a rate determined to give 75–85% shadowing accuracy. The item presented to the nonattended ear were words and an occasional digit. At various intervals after the presentation of the digit, a light signaled that the S was to cease shadowing and attempt to recall any digit that had occurred in the nonattended ear recently. Whereas good and poor readers recalled the digit equally if tested immediately after presentation, poor readers showed a faster decline in recall of the digit as retention interval increased. In Exp IV, using Ss from Exp II, bursts of white noise were separated by 9–400 msec of silence, and the S was to say whether there were 1 or 2 sounds presented. There were no differences in detectability functions for good and poor readers. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading in Arabic orthography: the effect of vowels and context on reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers in reading paragraphs, sentences, and isolated words

This study investigated the effect of vowels and context on the reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers in reading paragraphs, sentences, and words. Central to this study is the belief that reading theory today should consider additional variables, especially when explaining the reading process in Arabic orthography among poor and normal/skilled readers. This orthography has not been studied. Reading theory today is the sum of conclusions from studies conducted in Latin orthography. The subjects were 77 native Arabic speakers, 34 of them poor readers and 44 normal/skilled readers. The subjects had to read in Arabic 15 paragraphs, 60 sentences, and 210 words. There were three reading conditions: fully vowelized, partially vowelized, and unvowelized texts. The results showed that vowels and contexts were important variables to facilitate word recognition in poor and normal/skilled readers in Arabic orthography.     

Syntax and retention in good and poor readers.

The purpose of the experiment was to discover whether syntactic structure facilitates recall in good readers and whether this effect exists in children who are poor readers. A paired-associate task equated the two groups on their ability to associate words. Each child was taught with a tape recorder four sentences, composed of nonsense elements; two of which were syntactically structured, the other two unstructured. The good readers learned the structured sentences more rapidly than the unstructured sentences. The poor readers learned both kinds of sentences with equal facility. There was no difference between the good readers' and the poor readers' ability to retain the unstructured material. Hence, the locus of the facilitation effect lies in the syntactic cues, implicit in the structured lists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive-motivational characteristics of children varying in reading ability: Evidence for learned helplessness in poor readers.

Employing a cognitive-motivational analysis, the present investigation sought to determine some specific self-perceptions that might contribute to motivational and performance deficits observed in children with reading difficulties. 72 5th-grade boys of relatively good, average, and poor reading ability were assessed on tasks in which success and failure were manipulated. Consistent with predictions, poor readers displayed characteristics indicative of learned helplessness and low self-concepts of ability. These included significantly lower initial estimates of success, less persistence, attribution of failures to lack of ability and of successes to factors beyond personal control, and greater decrements in expectancy of success following failure. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial order ability in good and poor readers.

Tested a poor reading group (16 4th graders, 2 yr. behind their appropriate reading level) and a good reading group (16 4th graders with average reading scores between the 33rd and 70th percentiles) on sequencing and nonsequencing tests in the auditory, visual, and tactual modes. No differences were found between the performance of good and poor reader groups on the ability to sequence. Results are discussed in terms of perceptual vs. linguistic sequencing abilities. (French summary) (19 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rotation of mental images and asymmetries in word recognition in disabled readers.

Two experiments with 72 right-handed children (9–11 yrs old) revealed marked dissimilarities in perceptual coding between impaired and fluent readers. In Exp I, 26 boys with reading disabilities and average intelligence were compared to 26 good readers on a test of visual–spatial, short-term memory. Both groups performed equally well in their spatial recall on transformed visual fields. However, poor readers coded the test stimuli differently, in a nonanalytic and synchronous fashion. In a follow-up experiment, 10 disabled readers compared with 10 good readers showed a lower right- over left-field advantage when reporting single words presented tachistoscopically. Taken together, results disconfirm the widely held ideas that poor readers are suffering from spatial disorientation, left–right confusion, mirror-image equivalence, or lack of cerebral dominance. Findings suggest that the perceptual "anormalies" often linked with reading disability may result from nonpathological variations in the structural operations used to encode visual information. This difference in the organization of encodings in visual memory may be related to asymmetries in brain functioning. (42 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metalinguistic differences among three kinds of readers.

We identified two types of poor readers and compared them with each other and with a comparable group of good readers for their performance on a series of metalinguistic tasks. We showed the specific problem underlying each of the two types of poor readers to be related to two separable components of metalinguistic skill. We use the results of the study to argue that global analyses of reading and metalinguistic skills are not adequate for understanding either the structure of each skill or the relation between them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical memory in poor and normal readers: Developmental differences in the use of category cues.

Examined whether differences between poor and normal reading children on lexical memory tasks may be attributed to semantic development, using 80 2nd and 6th graders. Ss were presented with 4 lists of taxonomic categories and were asked to recall items under (a) noncued and random conditions, with Ss instructed to recall as many items as possible and (b) cued and blocked conditions, with Ss told to recall items in a category. All Ss performed better with category cues. Group differences on category recall were more reliable at Grade 6, suggesting that facility in accessing taxonomic categories may differentiate poor and normal readers more reliably at older age levels. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological representations in young readers

Second through 6th graders were presented with nonword primes (orthographic, pseudohomophone, and control) and target words displayed for durations (30 and 60 ms) that were brief enough to prevent complete processing. Word reading skills were assessed by 3 word and nonword naming tasks. Good readers exhibited more orthographic priming than poor readers at both durations and more pseudohomophone priming at the short duration only. This suggests that good readers activate letter and phonemic information more efficiently than poor readers. Good readers also exhibited an equal amount of priming at both durations, whereas poor readers showed greater priming at the longer duration. This suggests that activation was not under strategic control. Finally, priming was reliable for both high- and low-frequency targets. This suggests that readers activate consistent information regardless of target word characteristics. Thus, quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological information in skilled readers results from the precision and redundancy of their lexical representations.     

Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading disability.

Reading impaired first graders were given daily tutoring as a "first cut" diagnostic to aid in distinguishing between reading difficulties caused by basic cognitive deficits and those caused by experiential deficits. Reading achievement in most of these children was found to be within or above the average range after one semester of remediation. Children who were difficult to remediate performed below both children who were readily remediated and normal readers on kindergarten and first-grade tests evaluating phonological skills, but not on tests evaluating visual, semantic and syntactic skills. The results are consistent with convergent findings from previous research suggesting that reading problems in some poor readers may be caused primarily by phonological deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of word identification speed in skilled and less skilled beginning readers.

Three phases comprise the development of word reading skill: accuracy, automaticity, and speed. The 3rd phase is reached when components of the identification process (i.e., graphic, phonological, semantic) are unitized in memory for particular words. Attainment of this final phase was explored with 2 experiments. In Exp I with Ss from 1st-, 2nd-, and 4th-grade classes, skilled and less skilled readers identified familiar printed words, CVC nonwords, digits, and pictures. Attainment of unitized speeds to printed words was inferred if Ss identified words as rapidly as digits. This level was exhibited by skilled readers in all grades but by less skilled readers only in 4th grade. Unitized speed with CVCs was evident among 2nd- and 4th-grade skilled readers, but not among less skilled readers at any grade. In Exp II, 18 1st-grade and 19 2nd-grade poor readers practiced reading familiar words and CVCs. Practice boosted RTs to CVCs but not to words read accurately before training, and RTs to both remained slower than digit RTs, indicating that practice promotes the development of unitized speeds very slowly in less skilled readers. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive processing deficits in poor readers with symptoms of reading disabilities and ADHD: More alike than different?

The cognitive differences among poor-reading children with characteristics of reading disabilities (RD) and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) when compared with children with comorbid symptoms (RD + ADHD) and slow learners (SL) on measures of phonological and executive processing were investigated. No significant differences in performance emerged between the ability groups in phonological processing. The SL + ADHD & slow learners performed better than RD groups (RD alone and RD + ADHD) on the visual-spatial working memory (WM) factor score and the RD-alone group was inferior to RD + ADHD, SL + ADHD, and SL-alone groups on the verbal WM factor score. The results support the notion that poor readers, whether suffering from RD or ADHD symptoms, share a common phonological core deficit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)