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An intervention study was carried out with two nine-year-old Greek-speaking dyslexic children. Both children were slow in reading single words and text and had difficulty in spelling irregularly spelled words. One child was also poor in... more
An intervention study was carried out with two nine-year-old Greek-speaking dyslexic children. Both children were slow in reading single words and text and had difficulty in spelling irregularly spelled words. One child was also poor in non-word reading. Intervention focused on spelling in a whole-word training using a flashcard technique that had previously been found to be effective with English-speaking children. Post-intervention assessments conducted immediately at the end of the intervention, one month later and then five months later showed a significant improvement in spelling of treated words that was sustained over time. In addition, both children showed generalisation of improvement to untrained words and an increase in scores in a standardised spelling assessment. The findings support the effectiveness of theoretically based targeted intervention for literacy difficulties.
The study investigated the outcome of a word-web intervention for children diagnosed with word-finding difficulties (WFDs). Twenty children age 6-8 years with WFDs confirmed by a discrepancy between comprehension and production on the... more
The study investigated the outcome of a word-web intervention for children diagnosed with word-finding difficulties (WFDs). Twenty children age 6-8 years with WFDs confirmed by a discrepancy between comprehension and production on the Test of Word Finding-2, were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 11) and waiting control (n = 9) groups. The intervention group had six sessions of intervention which used word-webs and targeted children's meta-cognitive awareness and word-retrieval. On the treated experimental set (n = 25 items) the intervention group gained on average four times as many items as the waiting control group (d = 2.30). There were also gains on personally chosen items for the intervention group. There was little change on untreated items for either group. The study is the first randomised control trial to demonstrate an effect of word-finding therapy with children with language difficulties in mainstream school. The improvement in word-finding for treated items wa...
The present study examined whether equivalents of surface and phonological subtypes of developmental dyslexia could be found among a sample of 84 poor readers aged 9-12 years in Greece. Word reading latency was used as a measure of... more
The present study examined whether equivalents of surface and phonological subtypes of developmental dyslexia could be found among a sample of 84 poor readers aged 9-12 years in Greece. Word reading latency was used as a measure of lexical skill, and nonword reading accuracy was used as a measure of nonlexical skill. A simple regression of word reading latencies on nonword reading accuracy scores was performed for 42 developing readers. A total of 2 poor readers with accurate nonword reading plus slow word reading relative to controls (equivalents of surface dyslexia) and 2 poor readers with inaccurate nonword reading plus fast accurate word reading relative to controls (equivalents of phonological dyslexia) were identified from amongst the sample of poor readers. Further testing of these 4 cases on measures of irregular-word and nonword spelling revealed additional evidence of a dissociation between lexical and nonlexical impairments. These results support the notion that dual-route models can be used to explore individual differences among dyslexic readers in transparent orthographic systems such as Greek. An attempt is also made to interpret the results in terms of a double deficit theory of dyslexia.
In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1... more
In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1 with Grades 2 to 6. It provides values for Zipf, frequency per million, dispersion, estimated word frequency per million, standard word frequency, contextual diversity, orthographic Levenshtein distance, and lemma frequency. These values are derived from 116 textbooks used in primary education in Greece and Cyprus, producing a total of 68,692 different word types. HelexKids was developed to assist researchers in studying language development, educators in selecting age-appropriate items for teaching, as well as writers and authors of educational books for Greek/Cypriot children. The database is open access and can be searched online at www.helexkids.org .
We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General... more
We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General semantic knowledge was measured using standardized tasks in which children defined words and made judgments about the relationships between words. Item-specific knowledge of to-be-read words was assessed using auditory lexical decision (lexical phonology) and definitions (semantic) tasks. Regressions and mixed-effects models indicated a close relationship between semantic knowledge (but not lexical phonology) and both regular and exception word reading. Thus, during the early stages of learning to read, semantic knowledge may support word reading irrespective of regularity. Contextual support particularly benefitted reading of exception words. We found evidence that lexical-semantic knowledge and context make separable contributions to word reading.
We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General... more
We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General semantic knowledge was measured using standardized tasks in which children defined words and made judgments about the relationships between words. Item-specific knowledge of to-be-read words was assessed using auditory lexical decision (lexical phonology) and definitions (semantic) tasks. Regressions and mixed-effects models indicated a close relationship between semantic knowledge (but not lexical phonology) and both regular and exception word reading. Thus, during the early stages of learning to read, semantic knowledge may support word reading irrespective of regularity. Contextual support particularly benefitted reading of exception words. We found evidence that lexical-semantic knowledge and context make separable contributions to word reading.
A case study is reported of a ten year old girl (NT) who was a fluent speaker of a Turkish origin alphabetic language as well as Greek and English. The study focuses on NT’s reading and spelling in English and Greek as she did not have... more
A case study is reported of a ten year old girl (NT) who was a fluent speaker of a Turkish origin alphabetic language as well as Greek and English. The study focuses on NT’s reading and spelling in English and Greek as she did not have literacy skills in her mother tongue. NT had average reading ability in Greek and English, but her spelling ability for both familiar words and pseudowords was impaired in both languages. Assessments revealed that NT did not appear to have a deficit of phonological awareness, however visual attention span was impaired. An intervention was conducted with the aim of improving whole-word (lexical) spelling processes in English and Greek. Post-intervention assessments carried out immediately at the end of the intervention and one month and four months later showed a significant improvement in spelling that was sustained over time. The findings support the notion of specific profiles of dyslexia/dysgraphia not only in monolingual English speakers (Castles ...
We report an experiment designed to investigate 6-to-7-year-old children's ability to acquire knowledge of sublexical correspondences between print and sound from their reading experience. A computer database containing the... more
We report an experiment designed to investigate 6-to-7-year-old children's ability to acquire knowledge of sublexical correspondences between print and sound from their reading experience. A computer database containing the printed word vocabulary of children taking part in the experiment was compiled and used to devise stimuli controlled for grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) frequency and rime neighbourhood consistency according to the children's reading experience. Knowledge of GPC rules and rime units was compared by asking children to read aloud three types of nonword varying in regularity of GPC and consistency of rime pronunciation. Results supported the view that children can acquire knowledge of both GPC rules and rime units from their reading experience. GPC rule strength affects the likelihood of a GPC response; rime consistency affects the likelihood of a rime response.
A case study is reported of a ten year old girl (NT) who was a fluent speaker of a Turkish origin alphabetic language as well as Greek and English. The study focuses on NT’s reading and spelling in English and Greek as she did not have... more
A case study is reported of a ten year old girl (NT) who was a fluent speaker of a Turkish origin alphabetic language as well as Greek and English. The study focuses on NT’s reading and spelling in English and Greek as she did not have literacy skills in her mother tongue. NT had average reading ability in Greek and English, but her spelling ability for both familiar words and pseudowords was impaired in both languages. Assessments revealed that NT did not appear to have a deficit of phonological awareness, however visual attention span was impaired. An intervention was conducted with the aim of improving whole-word (lexical) spelling processes in English and Greek. Post-intervention assessments carried out immediately at the end of the intervention and one month and four months later showed a significant improvement in spelling that was sustained over time. The findings support the notion of specific profiles of dyslexia/dysgraphia not only in monolingual English speakers (Castles ...
ABSTRACT In this study we investigate the relative frequencies of female and male terms in early reading material for children using the Children’s Printed Word Database as a resource. As roles of females and males have changed over time... more
ABSTRACT In this study we investigate the relative frequencies of female and male terms in early reading material for children using the Children’s Printed Word Database as a resource. As roles of females and males have changed over time it is of interest to see if there has been a corresponding change in representations of females and males in children’s books. We carried out analyses regarding different words related to gender. Except for nouns referring to relatives, we found in all word groups a preponderance of male terms. The imbalance of male and female pronouns is equivalent to that reported by Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) in a frequency count of printed words in children’s book in the USA conducted some 40 years ago. The results are discussed in terms of gender inequality in reading materials and the development of social mores and stereotypical ideas.
We describe a lexical database consisting of morphologically and phonetically tagged words that occur in the texts primarily used for language arts instruction in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia in the initial period of primary... more
We describe a lexical database consisting of morphologically and phonetically tagged words that occur in the texts primarily used for language arts instruction in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia in the initial period of primary education (up to grade 4 or 5). The database aims to parallel the contents and usage of the British English Children's Printed Word Database.
T T e present study uses the cognitive-psycholin-guistic framework to investigate the decoding of novel printed letter strings in young readers. This approach involves delineating the cognitive processing systems (such as the visual word... more
T T e present study uses the cognitive-psycholin-guistic framework to investigate the decoding of novel printed letter strings in young readers. This approach involves delineating the cognitive processing systems (such as the visual word recognition system and sublexical ...
RI is an emergent trilingual boy, literate in Greek and English, with difficulties in reading and spelling in both languages. Assessment with non-literacy tests revealed a deficit in phonological ability and in visual memory for... more
RI is an emergent trilingual boy, literate in Greek and English, with difficulties in reading and spelling in both languages. Assessment with non-literacy tests revealed a deficit in phonological ability and in visual memory for sequentially presented characters. RI took part in a training programme that targeted sublexical spelling processes. Post-intervention assessment revealed improvement in reading and spelling in Greek but not in English. Assessments of lexical and sublexical skills showed improvement in nonword spelling and nonword reading for Greek. For English, there was some indication of improvement in nonword reading at delayed post-intervention testing, but no evidence of improvement in nonword spelling. Possible reasons for the difference in outcome for the two languages are considered, including the level of transparency of written Greek and English.
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Masked priming in a lexical decision task was used to investigate representations of cognates in Greek-English bilingual participants. Experiment 1 involved adults who had English or Greek as their dominant L1. The task involved cognates... more
Masked priming in a lexical decision task was used to investigate representations of cognates in Greek-English bilingual participants. Experiment 1 involved adults who had English or Greek as their dominant L1. The task involved cognates (words similar in form and meaning) and non-cognates (words similar in meaning, as well as word unrelated primes. Priming for cognates was found only when the prime was in participants’ dominant language and the target was in L2. In Experiment 2 the task was the same but participants were 9 to 11 year old bilingual children, with Greek or English as their dominant language. Priming was symmetrical with priming cognate effects from L1 to L2 being larger than from L2 to L1. Priming was not observed for non-cognates in either Experiment 1 or Experiment 2. Findings are discussed within the framework of theories of cognate and non-cognate word representation in bilinguals.
We evaluated a simple computational model of productive vocabulary acquisition, applied to simulating two case studies of 7-year-old children with developmental word-finding difficulties across four core behavioural tasks. Developmental... more
We evaluated a simple computational model of productive vocabulary acquisition, applied to simulating two case studies of 7-year-old children with developmental word-finding difficulties across four core behavioural tasks. Developmental models were created, which captured the deficits of each child. In order to predict the effects of intervention, we exposed the computational models to simulated behavioural interventions of two types, targeting the improvement of either phonological or semantic knowledge. The model was then evaluated by testing the predictions from the simulations against the actual results from an intervention study carried out with the two children. For one child it was predicted that the phonological intervention would be effective, and the semantic intervention would not. This was borne out in the behavioural study. For the second child, the predictions were less clear and depended on the nature of simulated damage to the model. The behavioural study found an ef...
Patterson and Morton (1985) proposed a model for the skilled reading of words and non-words that accommodates two non-lexical routines. One is the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence system which utilizes the regularity of letter to sound... more
Patterson and Morton (1985) proposed a model for the skilled reading of words and non-words that accommodates two non-lexical routines. One is the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence system which utilizes the regularity of letter to sound correspondences for single letters and digraphs. The other is a system of “bodies”–-the vowel and terminal letters of a monomorphemic, monosyllabic word. The idea of the
... Bilingual Biscriptal Deep Dyslexia 419 ... material intended for adults, most content words are written in kanji characters, whilst function words and derivational and inflectional ... models of the reading of alphabetic scripts have... more
... Bilingual Biscriptal Deep Dyslexia 419 ... material intended for adults, most content words are written in kanji characters, whilst function words and derivational and inflectional ... models of the reading of alphabetic scripts have p-oposed that there are at least two processing routes, a ...
In Experiment 1 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years were tested for neighbourhood and pseudohomophone effects in nonword reading. Neighbourhood effects (N effects) were robust irrespective of group or type of nonword. Pseudohomophones were... more
In Experiment 1 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years were tested for neighbourhood and pseudohomophone effects in nonword reading. Neighbourhood effects (N effects) were robust irrespective of group or type of nonword. Pseudohomophones were read more accurately than other nonwords but this finding was robust only for the younger 8-9-year-olds. High-frequency words were read more accurately than low-frequency words, but the reverse applied to pseudohomophones based on high- and low-frequency words, although this was not robust. Error rates for the 9-10-year-olds in Experiment 1 were low, and so it was difficult to interpret the lack of a pseudohomophone advantage for reading nonwords in this age group. Experiment 2 was therefore carried out, which consisted of a replication of the first study with a further group of 9-10-year-olds, but pronunciation latencies were measured, as well as accuracy. All the effects obtained in Experiment 1 were replicated but, in addition, an advantage for pseudohomophones in terms of pronunciation latencies was observed. The implications for accounts of reading development are discussed.
... Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Journal Article]. Surface dyslexia. Coltheart, Max; et al. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology, Vol 35(3-A), Aug 1983, 469-495. Abstract. Describes 2 cases... more
... Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Journal Article]. Surface dyslexia. Coltheart, Max; et al. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology, Vol 35(3-A), Aug 1983, 469-495. Abstract. Describes 2 cases of surface dyslexia. ...
Paap and Noel (1991) found that participants' pronunciation latencies were faster for low-frequency irregular words when named under a concurrent high digit memory load than when named under a low load. The effects... more
Paap and Noel (1991) found that participants' pronunciation latencies were faster for low-frequency irregular words when named under a concurrent high digit memory load than when named under a low load. The effects reported by Paap and Noel haveproved difficult to replicate in subsequent studies. The present research suggests that individual differences in word recognition skill relate to who will or will not show these effects. In two experiments, participants were allocated to skill groups on the basis of latency in tasks tapping lexical and sub-lexical reading processes. In both studies, only one group (the "intermediate skilled"), showed evidence of such effects. A combined analysis of the data from Experiments 1 and 2 was carried out. This confirmed and extended the analyses of the individual experiments. The results are discussed in relation to contemporary models of word recognition.
PM, an adult developmental dyslexic, was markedly slower than controls in her reading speed of single words, connected text, and non‐words. A remediation programme was implemented that involved repeated presentation of a set of 160 words,... more
PM, an adult developmental dyslexic, was markedly slower than controls in her reading speed of single words, connected text, and non‐words. A remediation programme was implemented that involved repeated presentation of a set of 160 words, together with a gradual reduction in exposure time. Post‐intervention testing revealed that the programme successfully increased PM's reading speed. A significant effect of word
... reading words based on context or on features of the word such as length or salient ... by close orthographic neighbours (this should be predicted by models with local representations of words ... The 20 children who comprised Group A... more
... reading words based on context or on features of the word such as length or salient ... by close orthographic neighbours (this should be predicted by models with local representations of words ... The 20 children who comprised Group A had a mean reading age, as measured by the ...
ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to examine the spelling development of Greek-speaking children in the early school grades. Although Greek orthography is regular for reading, it is much less transparent as far as spelling is... more
ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to examine the spelling development of Greek-speaking children in the early school grades. Although Greek orthography is regular for reading, it is much less transparent as far as spelling is concerned. Spelling development was investigated using a word spelling task designed to explore the effects of word length, familiarity and spelling regularity. One hundred and fifty normally developing primary school children living in Cyprus took part in the study. Results suggest that the children employed both phonological and lexical strategies in spelling Greek words. Results indicated that sub-lexical procedures were more marked for younger children, whereas lexical processing was employed more widely by older children. The findings are interpreted in terms of stage developmental models.
Two groups of undergraduate students, matched for reading skill but differing in spelling ability, participated in three experiments with the aim of exploring the causes of differences in spelling skill in this population. In the first... more
Two groups of undergraduate students, matched for reading skill but differing in spelling ability, participated in three experiments with the aim of exploring the causes of differences in spelling skill in this population. In the first experiment participants were presented with a ...
... The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger. A Darkness More Than Night, Michael Connelly. The Rowan Tree, Iris Gower. Want to Play? PJ Tracy. ... The Van, Roddy Doyle. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Hellier. The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad.... more
... The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger. A Darkness More Than Night, Michael Connelly. The Rowan Tree, Iris Gower. Want to Play? PJ Tracy. ... The Van, Roddy Doyle. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Hellier. The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad. Possession: A Romance, AS Byatt. ...
... All rights reserved 09116044 96 15.00+0.00 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PICTURE NAMING: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VERBS AND NOUNS JULES DAVIDOFF and JACKIE ... We should also like to thank Judit Druks and Andrew Radford for helpful discussions of... more
... All rights reserved 09116044 96 15.00+0.00 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PICTURE NAMING: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VERBS AND NOUNS JULES DAVIDOFF and JACKIE ... We should also like to thank Judit Druks and Andrew Radford for helpful discussions of this work. ...
Five experiments examined nonword pronunciation. As reported by McCann and Besner (1987), accurate, regular pronunciations increased as the number of orthographic neighbors (N) increased. Adults read pseudohomophones (nonwords that sound... more
Five experiments examined nonword pronunciation. As reported by McCann and Besner (1987), accurate, regular pronunciations increased as the number of orthographic neighbors (N) increased. Adults read pseudohomophones (nonwords that sound like a word) more accurately than other nonwords only when the nonwords were low n, shared the consonants with the words on which they were based, and overall accuracy was lower. Children showed a pseudohomophone advantage even when N was high. Adults pronounced nonwords comprised of inconsistent endings (with existing regular and irregular pronunciations) in an irregular fashion when this resulted in a word; this applied to relatively high-N items.
... DOI: 10.1080/0144341042000211643 Morag Stuart * a , Maureen Dixon b * & Jackie Masterson c pages 251-261. Available ... nonwords. Thompson, Cottrell and Fletcher‐Finn (19967. Thompson, GB, Cottrell, DS and Fletcher‐Finn, CM.... more
... DOI: 10.1080/0144341042000211643 Morag Stuart * a , Maureen Dixon b * & Jackie Masterson c pages 251-261. Available ... nonwords. Thompson, Cottrell and Fletcher‐Finn (19967. Thompson, GB, Cottrell, DS and Fletcher‐Finn, CM. (1996). ...
ABSTRACT The revised Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, the British Ability Scales (BAS) single‐word reading test, the Hertfordshire sentence reading test and the NFER‐Nelson Group Reading Test 6‐12 (GRT 6‐12), were given to infant and... more
ABSTRACT The revised Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, the British Ability Scales (BAS) single‐word reading test, the Hertfordshire sentence reading test and the NFER‐Nelson Group Reading Test 6‐12 (GRT 6‐12), were given to infant and junior children in a primary school. The results were analysed as infant and junior data, then re‐analysed according to reading ability. For the latter analysis two ability groups were formed, those scoring a reading age under 9 on the Neale and those scoring over 9. In practical terms it was considered important to discuss the results in terms of low and high reading ages as well as in terms of infant and junior data. Significantly higher scores were obtained on the BAS, Hertfordshire and GRT 6‐12 tests than on the Neale for the infant children in analysis 1 and for the lower ability group in analysis 2. However, children in the higher ability group in analysis 2 obtained equivalent scores on the BAS and the Neale. In addition to the quantitative analysis, a qualitative analysis of the items in the tests was carried out. It is argued that the discrepancies observed in the test scores are sufficiently large to warrant re‐standardisation of particular tests.
The phonemic discrimination of subjects with developmental dyslexia was investigated in the present study. Two adult developmental phonological dyslexics are first reported. Both were good at reading real words but had difficulty reading... more
The phonemic discrimination of subjects with developmental dyslexia was investigated in the present study. Two adult developmental phonological dyslexics are first reported. Both were good at reading real words but had difficulty reading and spelling novel stimuli. Further ...
... Source: TESL Canada Journal, v3 n1 p29-36 Nov 1985. More Info: Help Peer-Reviewed: N/A. Publisher: TESL Canada Federation. 408-4370 Dominion Street, Burnaby, BC V5G 4L7, Canada. Tel: 604-298-0312; Fax: 604-298 ...
The study involved an investigation of variables associated with single word spelling in 7- and 9-year-old monolingual and bilingual English- and Greek-speaking children. Children were administered assessments of phonological and visual... more
The study involved an investigation of variables associated with single word spelling in 7- and 9-year-old monolingual and bilingual English- and Greek-speaking children. Children were administered assessments of phonological and visual memory. Results revealed the importance of phonological and visual memory for young English-speaking children. However, for young Greek-speaking children only phonological memory was important, in accordance with the characteristics of the transparent Greek orthography. For older English and Greek monolingual children only visual memory, and not phonological memory, was strongly associated with single word spelling, indicating that as children get older whole word recognition skills are more important for single word spelling in both orthographies. The results were also supported by the stimulus-related analyses. Findings suggest that spelling processes do not greatly differ between the orthographies and they also support transfer of spelling process...
The aim of the present study is to examine the validity of the tree-pruning hypothesis (TPH) put forward by [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y.(1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and... more
The aim of the present study is to examine the validity of the tree-pruning hypothesis (TPH) put forward by [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y.(1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425]. The TPH ...
Page 1. Object and action picture naming in English and Greek Nikoletta Bogka, Jackie Masterson, Judit Druks, Meltini Fragkioudaki, Eftychia-Sapfo Chatziprokopiou, and Konstantinos Economou University of Essex, UK Three ...
A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F. showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments revealed that R.F. did not appear to... more
A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F.
showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments
revealed that R.F. did not appear to have a phonological deficit, but indicated impaired multicharacter
processing ability for visually presented letter arrays. On the basis of previous research linking multicharacter
processing and reading we developed an intervention aimed at improving R.F.’s ability to report
letter arrays of increasing length. Following a 9-week programme, improvement was observed, and
investigation of R.F.’s reading revealed gains in single word reading speed and accuracy. The findings
support the significance of intervention studies for testing hypotheses regarding causal relationships
among cognitive processes and the notion of specific profiles of developmental dyslexia/dysgraphia in
both opaque and transparent orthographies.
The current study aimed to investigate in a group of nine Greek children with dyslexia (mean age 9.9 years) whether the surface and phonological dyslexia subtypes could be identified. A simple regression was conducted using printed word... more
The current study aimed to investigate in a group of nine Greek children with dyslexia (mean age 9.9 years) whether the surface and phonological dyslexia subtypes could be identified.
A simple regression was conducted using printed word naming latencies and nonword reading accuracy for 33 typically developing readers. Ninety per cent confidence intervals were
established and dyslexic children with datapoints lying outside the confidence intervals were identified. Using this regression-based method three children with the characteristic of
phonological dyslexia (poor nonword reading), two with surface dyslexia (slow word naming latencies) and four with a mixed profile (poor nonword reading accuracy and slow word
naming latencies) were identified. The children were also assessed in spelling to dictation, phonological ability, rapid naming, visual memory and multi-character processing (letter
report). Results revealed that the phonological dyslexia subtype children had difficulties in tasks of phonological ability, and the surface subtype children had difficulties in tasks of multicharacter simultaneous processing ability. Dyslexic children with a mixed profile showed deficits in both phonological abilities and multi-character processing. In addition, one child
with a mixed profile showed a rapid naming deficit and another showed a difficulty in visual memory for abstract designs. Overall the results confirm that the surface and phonological
subtypes of developmental dyslexia can be found in Greek-speaking children. They also indicate that different subtypes are associated with different underlying disorders.
A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F. showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments revealed that R.F. did not appear to... more
A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F. showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments revealed that R.F. did not appear to have a phonological deficit, but indicated impaired multicharacter processing ability for visually presented letter arrays. On the basis of previous research linking multicharacter processing and reading we developed an intervention aimed at improving R.F.'s ability to report letter arrays of increasing length. Following a 9-week programme, improvement was observed, and investigation of R.F.'s reading revealed gains in single word reading speed and accuracy. The findings support the significance of intervention studies for testing hypotheses regarding causal relationships among cognitive processes and the notion of specific profiles of developmental dyslexia/dysgraphia in both opaque and transparent orthographies.
"The study investigated single-word spelling performance of 33 English- and 38 Greek-speaking monolingual children, and 46 English- and Greek-speaking bilingual children (age range from 6;7 to 10;1 years). The bilingual children were... more
"The study investigated single-word spelling performance of 33 English- and 38 Greek-speaking monolingual children, and 46
English- and Greek-speaking bilingual children (age range from 6;7 to 10;1 years). The bilingual children were divided into
two groups on the basis of their single-word reading and spelling performance in Greek. In line with predictions, we found
that scores on an assessment of phonological awareness were a significant predictor of spelling in English for the bilingual
children with stronger Greek literacy skill. Phonological awareness scores were also a strong predictor of spelling in Greek
in the monolingual Greek-speaking children. For the bilingual children with weaker Greek literacy ability, spelling in English
was predicted by performance in a test of visual memory. This was more in line with results for the monolingual
English-speaking children, for whom spelling performance was predicted by visual memory and phonological awareness
scores. Qualitative analysis of misspellings revealed that phonologically appropriate errors were significantly greater in the
strong Greek literacy ability bilingual group than the weaker Greek literacy ability bilingual group. Stimulus analyses using
regression techniques are also reported. The results are interpreted to suggest that"
Characteristics of written English (the presence of irregularly spelled words such as yacht, debt, mortgage, for instance) allow the observation of whether children with reading difficulties are relying on phonic decoding or whole word... more
Characteristics of written English (the presence of irregularly spelled words such as yacht, debt, mortgage, for instance) allow the observation of whether children with reading difficulties are relying on phonic decoding or whole word lexical processes. The writing system in Greek is very transparent and this means that the distinction between regularly and irregularly spelled letter strings that exists for English is not present, and so it is not possible to capitalise on this feature. An alternative means for investigating reliance on different literacy processes is to look for semantic priming effects. We carried out a priming study employing visually presented primes and targets. Participants were Greek-speaking children with reading difficulties aged 9 to 11 years old and typically developing age-matched control children. There were four experimental conditions in which the relationship between prime and target differed: 1) same identity (where the prime and target were the same), 2) orthographically/phonologically associated, 3) semantically associated and 4) unrelated. The aim was to see whether a lack of semantic priming would be observed for the Greek-speaking dyslexic children, as has been reported for English dyslexic children. The results revealed robust priming effects for the control children in the present study but no evidence of semantic priming effects for the dyslexic children. In order to ensure that the findings were not due to item characteristics, in Experiment 2 we used a different set of stimuli. The result replicated the findings from the first experiment.
We report two training studies designed to investigate the relation between phonological awareness, sound-to-letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five-year-old readers. Effects of visual memory and of teaching... more
We report two training studies designed to investigate the relation between phonological awareness, sound-to-letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five-year-old readers. Effects of visual memory and of teaching methods are also explored.In our first study, novice five-year-old readers able to segment initial phonemes and with good knowledge of mappings between sounds and letters learned words more easily from repeated exposure to texts. Results suggested that visual memory influenced word learning in non-segmenting but not in segmenting children. Spelling regularity did not affect ease of learning. Nouns were easier to learn than function words.In the second study, although phonological awareness and sound-to-letter mapping knowledge still exerted a significant influence, all novice five-year-olds were able to learn words more easily if these were taught out-of-context singly on flashcards.Results support the view that mental representations of printed words are more easily formed by beginners who are able to match at least some of the phonological segments detected in the spoken word to letters in the printed word.
A training study was conducted to investigatethe relationship between phoneme segmentationability and the development of orthographicrepresentations. Five-year-old children withvarying degrees of phoneme segmentationability were taught to... more
A training study was conducted to investigatethe relationship between phoneme segmentationability and the development of orthographicrepresentations. Five-year-old children withvarying degrees of phoneme segmentationability were taught to read ten new words byrepeated presentation of the words onflashcards. It was found that those childrenwho were most well equipped to perform phonemesegmentation tasks acquired this new readingvocabulary significantly faster than those whowere less phonemically aware. A series ofpost-tests was implemented to discover thenature of the internal orthographicrepresentations which the children had createdfor the words learned. The results of thesepost-tests demonstrated that the children whowere most phonemically aware had alsointernalised the most detailed orthographicrepresentations, despite needing fewerlearning trials. Salient letters fororthographic storage were predictable from thechildren's phoneme segmentation abilities. This paper provides strong support for thethesis that phonemic awareness is related toorthographic storage as well as alphabeticreading techniques.
Visual letter search performance was investigated in a group of dyslexic adult readers using a task that required detection of a cued letter target embedded within a random five-letter string. Compared to a group of skilled readers,... more
Visual letter search performance was investigated in a group of dyslexic adult readers using a task that required detection of a cued letter target embedded within a random five-letter string. Compared to a group of skilled readers, dyslexic readers were significantly slower at correctly identifying targets located in the first and second string position, illustrating significantly reduced leftward facilitation than is typically observed. Furthermore, compared to skilled readers, dyslexic readers showed reduced sensitivity to positional letter frequency. They failed to exhibit significantly faster response times to correctly detect target letters appearing in the most, compared to least, frequent letter position within five-letter words, and response times correlated with positional letter frequency only for the initial, and not the final, letter position. These results are compatible with the SERIOL (sequential encoding regulated by inputs to oscillations within letter units) model of orthographic processing proposed by Whitney and Cornelissen (2005). Furthermore, they suggest that dyslexic readers are less efficient than skilled readers at learning to extract statistical regularities from orthographic input.
Page 1. Object and action picture naming in English and Greek Nikoletta Bogka, Jackie Masterson, Judit Druks, Meltini Fragkioudaki, Eftychia-Sapfo Chatziprokopiou, and Konstantinos Economou University of Essex, UK Three ...
The aim of the present study is to examine the validity of the tree-pruning hypothesis (TPH) put forward by [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y.(1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and... more
The aim of the present study is to examine the validity of the tree-pruning hypothesis (TPH) put forward by [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y.(1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425]. The TPH ...
... UCL classification: UCL > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences >Psychology and Language Sciences (Division of) > Linguistics UCL > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain... more
... UCL classification: UCL > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences >Psychology and Language Sciences (Division of) > Linguistics UCL > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Psychology and Language Sciences (Division ...