Learning to Read

Question 1

What are the characteristics of Spoken language?

Answer 1

Auditory modality
Transient (real-time processing)
Hard to segment
More affected by noise

Question 2

What are the characteristics of written language?

Answer 2

Visual modality
Stable (possible to re-read)
Easier to segment (not true for all writing systems)
Clearer - less affected by noise

Question 3

Is reading parasitic on speech?

Answer 3

Orthography (written appearance)
Phonology (sounds)
Meaning (semantics)

Sometimes yes - homophones sound the same and so reading is imperative

Question 4

What are the four phases of reading development - Ehri (1992)?

Answer 4

1. Pre-alphabetic
2. Partial alphabetic
3. Full alphabetic
4. Consolidated alphabetic

Question 5

What is the pre-alphabetic phase?

Answer 5

Link between salient visual features and word or concept

Short
Doesn’t occur in all children

Question 6

What is the partial alphabetic phase?

Answer 6

Partial knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences

Unable to segment full words into their component sounds

Hard to read words not encountered before

Question 7

What is the full alphabetic phase?

Answer 7

Full development of grapheme-phoneme conversion

Children can read out words they have never seen before

Gradual development of the lexical identification route (irregular words

Question 8

What is the consolidated alphabetic phase?

Answer 8

Adult-like reading
Mastery of multi-letter sequences - syllables, morphemes and rhymes

Question 9

What is phonological awareness?

Answer 9

Implicit and explicit awareness of the sounds of a word.

Question 10

What is an example of IMPLICIT phonological awareness?

Answer 10

Ability to judge if words rhyme

Question 11

What is an example of EXPLICIT phonological awareness?

Answer 11

Ability to manipulate the sounds of words (delete, add, change) to create new words

Question 12

What are the 2 approaches for learning how to read?

Answer 12

Look and say/ whole word method

Alphabetic/ phonic method

Question 13

What is the Look and say/ whole word method?

Answer 13

Children learn to associate the sound of a word with a particular visual pattern

Question 14

What is the alphabetic/ phonic method?

Answer 14

Children learn to associate sounds with letters and use this to build up pronunciation of words

Question 15

What is developmental dyslexia?

Answer 15

Difficulties with developing reading abilities.

Child’s reading age is below what would be expected based on their age, IQ, background and education.

Affects 10-30% of the population

Question 16

What is developmental dysgraphia?

Answer 16

Difficulties with developing writing abilities.

Often occurs with dyslexia

Question 17

What are some causes of developmental dyslexia?

Answer 17

Multifactorial
Causes not fully known

2 main explanations:
Subtle visual difficulties
Subtle phonological difficulties

Question 18

What are subtle visual difficulties?

Answer 18

Magnocellular visual pathway - analysing fast changing visual information.

Difficulties with visuo-spatial attention

Distortion and blurring
Letter reversal
Superimposition

Question 19

What are subtle phonological difficulties?

Answer 19

Could be due to reduced left-right asymmetry of planum temporale in Wernicke’s area - important for speech perception.

Question 20

What is surface dyslexia?

Answer 20

Similar reading to reading-age match controls

Developmental delay - lexical identification develops later

Question 21

What is phonological dyslexia?

Answer 21

Different even compared to reading-age matched controls

Phonological short-term memory deficit
Speech perception difficulties

Question 22

What are the 4 interventions for Dyslexia and Dysgraphia?

Answer 22

1. Phonological skill training
2. Training eye-fixations
3. Increasing letter spacing
4. Multisensory method
   - reinforcing associations between words/ letters and how they sound using different sensory modalities