Neuroscientific and educational research have the potential to interact productively, because neuroscience investigates processes underlying core educational aims like knowledge acquisition. Combining these research areas therefore appears beneficial, but differences in experimental approach and limitations of neuroscience tools in terms of ecological validity hamper translation. Hence, a common approach that takes these differences into account is needed. Here, we will set out how neuroscience research on long-term memory formation, integration, and consolidation may be informative for education and we will speculate on links with literacy development. Because memory formation is a constructive process, newly learned memories are continuously related to and integrated with previously learned knowledge to form extensive knowledge structures. This integration process is suggested to strengthen memories and make them less vulnerable to forgetting. Education may therefore profit greatly from understanding the neural processes underlying optimal integration to achieve optimal building of knowledge structures, making learning more efficient and evidence based.
Reading is a cultural invention that needs to recruit cortical infrastructure that was not designed for it (cultural recycling of cortical maps). In the case of reading both visual cortex and networks for speech processing are recruited. Here I discuss current views on the neurobiological underpinnings of spoken language that deviate in a number of ways from the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. More areas than Broca’s and Wernicke’s region are involved in language. Moreover, a division along the axis of language production and language comprehension does not seem to be warranted. Instead, for central aspects of language processing neural infrastructure is shared between production and comprehension. Arguments are presented in favor of a dynamic network view, in which the functionality of a region is co-determined by the network of regions in which it is embedded at particular moments in time. Finally, core regions of language processing need to interact with other networks (e.g. the attentional networks and the ToM network) to establish full functionality of language and communication. The consequences of this architecture for reading are discussed.
Good reading skills are crucial for success in the modern world. Reading disability (RD) is characterized as a brain-based difficulty in acquiring fluent decoding skill, usually associated with problems in operating on the phonological structures of language. In this chapter we briefly review recent findings from our lab and others which indicate that atypically developing children fail to organize a coherent attention and reading “circuits” that in typically developing (TD) readers comes online to support skilled processing. New discoveries on how gene-brain-behavior pathways in young children interact with environment and how all this impacts language development and reading outcomes. We also provide a brief overview of the latest research from our lab and others on the brain basis of treatment and remediation of language, attention and literacy challenges.
I examine the central ideas of the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH), reviewing the early studies that motivated them, and discussing more recent research that further supports and refines them. This research shows the specific importance of the reader’s knowledge of word meanings in comprehension, the effects of spelling knowledge on word reading, and the fine-grain consequences for text reading when LQ has been experimentally manipulated during word learning. Studies of word-to-text integration provide a paradigm case for observing the reader’s use of word meaning knowledge during on-line comprehension. As a theoretical framework, the LQH has proved valuable for framing theoretical and practical questions about word knowledge and its role in reading.
We present here a review of recent research on the role of metalinguistic and socio-cognitive factors in reading skill. We first review research on how morphological awareness and orthographic processing impact the acquisition of reading skill. We show that the first might account for change over time, and the second may not. We then turn to our new studies examining the interplay between these two factors in reading development. In each of these domains, we test predictions of theories of reading development. Finally, we turn to research on a very different set of variables, which we term socio-cognitive. We explore the factors that support academic outcomes for university students with a history of reading difficulties, including the role of a range of coping strategies and support services. Together, we hope that this review inspires new inquiry into understanding the factors that underlie successful reading acquisition.
In this chapter, we describe how research and knowledge from cognitive and educational sciences can be combined to address the question of how to improve comprehension in struggling readers. First, we provide an overview of cognitive processes in reading comprehension. Second, we describe a program of research in which we combined information from cognitive and educational sciences to develop a reading comprehension intervention, and present the results of a series of studies designed to examine the effects of the intervention on comprehension of struggling readers. Third, we discuss several thematic questions that emerged from our research. Throughout the chapter we discuss implications for theory, practice, and future research.
A recurring claim in developmental models of written composition is that text quality depends to a large extent on efficient word-level writing skills (handwriting and spelling), at least in the early grades. In this chapter, we show that this assumption has a weak empirical basis because of (1) the unsystematic way in which the quality of written texts has been assessed, and (2) the inconclusiveness of findings about the word-text writing relationship in developmental studies of writing. We claim that the demands of transcription have been overestimated, while the explanatory power of high-level components has been majorly overlooked. We conclude that it is the command of high-level text features and skills what makes learning to write a complex, life-long process.
The current chapter describes a psycholinguistic study of the development of conjunct constructions, a multi-functional coordinated syntactic structure that lies at the heart of complex Hebrew syntax, which can express variegated content in syntactically complex structures. Conjunct constructions in narratives written by 150 Hebrew-speaking children, adolescents and adults were analyzed in terms of syntactic structure and function, lexical semantics, and discourse functions. Results indicate that this construction emerges as a simplex event-telling form, gaining in complexity and fulfilling more functions with age and schooling level, with a concomitant increase in the interface with other forms of complex syntax. The chapter concludes with an illustration of these developments in two narratives and a discussion of the role of language-specific constructions in language acquisition.
In this chapter, I argue that certain facts about early and later first language development, second language learning, and literacy development can only be understood if we acknowledge the role of motivation and engagement. Young children are naturally motivated to engage in the social interactions with adults that give them access to language, and develop language forms to satisfy their needs for attention and, ultimately information. Literacy development is much more likely to be successful among learners who have had positive affective experiences with books as young children, and among adolescents, access to engaging content and opportunities to debate and discuss are prime supports to ongoing literacy learning.
The present chapter gives an overview of the literature on hypertext comprehension, children’s hypertext comprehension and individual variation therein, ending with a perspective for future research. Hypertext comprehension requires the reader to make bridging inferences between the different parts of the text, which requires more background knowledge than when reading a linear text. Especially readers low in prior knowledge thus experience problems in the comprehension of hypertext, but these are also the ones who benefit from a hierarchical structure or a graphical overview. This is also the case for children. Future research should address the comprehension of networked hypertexts, also in groups of children with comprehension problems. For these groups, intervention research is needed to arrive at methods to improve hypertext comprehension.
As individuals develop literacy in two (or more) languages, how are the proficiencies across languages interrelated? In this chapter, the recent findings on cross-language transfer are summarized and areas that need more research are identified. The reviewed studies support the idea that cross language transfer can be considered a metalinguistic/metacognitive ability that is observed under certain contexts, such as when the first language has a strong foundation due to the presence of some of the following factors: formal educational experiences, learner aptitude, and facilitative sociocultural context. Also, readers’ resources in one language are more likely to be recruited when resources in the other language are unavailable or weak, and the existing resources are perceived to be relevant. These patterns have implications for developing educational programs using L1 as a foundation.
The simple view of reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that decoding and language comprehension are pivotal for reading comprehension. Vocabulary breadth is a frequently used measure of language comprehension in studies of second language (L2) and multilingual children including those carried out within the SVR framework. The general objective of this chapter is discuss complementary perspectives on vocabulary skills in second language (L2) and multilingual children. These include the notion of inter-lingual transfer and a distinction between vocabulary breadth and depth, lexical inferencing, and attending to conjunctions – a special category of vocabulary that deals with higher-order language. The chapter highlights some of the ways that vocabulary can be challenging to multilingual learners. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for future directions for research.
This longitudinal study tested whether contributions of phonological awareness and morphological awareness to Chinese vocabulary and character reading measured one year later were similar for monolingual Chinese-speaking children in China and Chinese-English bilingual children in Canada. Participants included 79 Canadian and 93 Chinese children in kindergarten or Grade 1 at Time 1. Hierarchical regression models revealed that across groups, morphological awareness accounted for similar portions of significant variance in vocabulary and character reading. However, phonological awareness showed stronger relations to character reading among the monolinguals than the bilinguals. The findings highlight both the universal and context-dependent aspects of Chinese language and literacy development.
In general, stories written by children in which many details are used are perceived as being more attractive. However, the use of stylistic elements in children’s writings has scarcely been described. We investigated stories written by 320 elementary school children from grades 3 to 6, focusing on the qualifiers they used to describe persons, objects and actions: names, relationships, intensifiers, adjectives and adverbs, sizes, prices, colors, details, and words to express modality, place and directions. The results showed a significant growth from grade 3 to 6 in the number of qualifiers. Dutch-L1 outperformed Dutch-L2 children in almost all these qualifiers. Girls used significantly more names, intensifiers, adjectives and adverbs in their description of persons, objects and actions than boys.
This chapter reviews research on how individual differences in linguistic and cognitive abilities influence syntactic processing in the second language (L2). We briefly discuss individual variability in L2 syntactic processing through the lens of behavioral measurements, followed by a more extensive review of electrophysiological (i.e., Event-Related Potentials, ERP) studies on L2 syntactic processing. Relative to the behavioral literature, fewer ERP studies have examined individual variability in L2 syntactic processing and the large majority of these studies focused on only two factors: Age of Acquisition and L2 proficiency. We also discuss studies that used correlational and regression analyses and oscillatory neural dynamics and complex network analysis. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of studies that examined inter-individual variation in ERP response profiles associated with L2 and L1 syntactic processing in L2 learners, and the application of the Response-Dominance Index to quantify individual variability in ERP response profiles.
The effectiveness of the Dutch reading and spelling didactic ‘How to teach children reading and spelling’ (HTCRS), developed by Schraven (1994/2013) was empirically tested in children attending special education. HTCRS is based on the principles of direct and classroom instruction, and the task analysis of reading and spelling. Reading and spelling performance of first-grade pupils from three different schools was longitudinally tested from the beginning until the end of the first school year. There were no differences in literacy skills at the beginning, but at the end of the year substantially better performance emerged for those pupils who received instruction according to the HTCRS approach. Theoretically-based principles underlying HTRCS are presented as well as the main aspects of the didactics.
A proficient reader is skilled at interpreting and comprehending text at multiple levels of language and discourse. This chapter describes two technologies that are designed to help adult readers who have reading difficulties at various levels. One technology (called AutoTutor) has two computer agents (a tutor and peer) that engage the adult reader in conversational trialogues designed to improve reading comprehension skills at multiple levels of language and discourse. A second technology (called Coh-Metrix) automatically scales texts on discourse formality as well as more specific levels, such as word abstractness, syntactic complexity, discourse cohesion, and narrativity (versus informational discourse). Scaling texts on difficulty is important for adults to read texts at an appropriate level of difficulty – not too easy or difficult.
This study aimed to test whether adults with dyslexia are impaired at non-adjacent dependency learning, and whether potential learning difficulties are domain-specific or not. Participants were familiarised with one of two artificial languages containing dependencies between the first and third element of a string of nonsense words, e.g. “tep wadim lut”. Dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults were equally good at learning the dependencies, although a trend towards a group difference was found when test sentences contained novel middle words, requiring generalisation of the pattern. The groups did not differ on learning dependencies between unfamiliar shapes in a visual experiment. These results provide tentative support for a domain-specific learning deficit for adults with dyslexia, suggesting that they may be poorer at generalizing from language input.
To be diagnosed as a specific learning disorder, the influence of ineffective instruction has to be excluded in dyslexia. Because the quality of ‘instruction-as-usual’ shows great variation, early intervention has been advocated as a tool to study dyslexia. There are two contrasting views. The first view is that early intervention sheds light on the causal relationship between targeted cognitive precursors and dyslexia. In contrast, the response-to-intervention approach (RTI) advocates that intervention is a way to exclude poor instruction as a cause of dyslexia. Family risk intervention studies are described as exponent of the first approach, followed by some examples of RTI. It is concluded that the cause-excluding approach is more supported by the evidence than the cause-supporting view.
Since the first descriptions of children with congenital word blindness or dyslexia, the proper criteria for diagnosis of dyslexia have been debated. Issues in this debate concern, among others, the role of underlying causes of reading and spelling and the use of a discrepancy between reading ability and intelligence. This chapter will consider recent evidence from family risk studies of dyslexia that speaks to these issues. We conclude that current evidence on the etiology of developmental disorders neither supports a specific underlying cognitive profile (e.g., phonological deficits), nor the requirement of a discrepancy with intelligence. Deciding factors in diagnosis should be lack of learning opportunity, other exclusion factors, and naturally the degree of reading and spelling difficulties.
This chapter describes dual coding theory (DCT) and also refers to theories of embodied cognition and multimedia applications. It is suggested that these multiple coding (i.e., verbal and imagery coding) theories should be embedded in education, rather than focusing on verbal coding alone. Imagery coding seems to be an understudied and underestimated component in education, in particular in diagnosing and remediating poor literacy development. Suggestions for measurements of verbal and imagery abilities and styles are made. In the middle and final sections of this chapter DCT applications to reading models and reading disabilities are discussed. Suggestions for improvement of education and reading interventions are made.
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who are high functioning often perform in the normal range on standardized language measures, but they show impairments in the social use of spoken language, especially in more naturalistic situations. As they enter school, literacy, that is, learning to read and write, becomes the principal linguistic challenge; in this chapter, we look at written personal narratives from school-age children with ASD. The narrative texts are analyzed for both structural aspects of language as well as social discourse, i.e., narrative structure. Our findings indicate that children with ASD write shorter narratives, make more morphological errors, and use fewer and less diverse complex sentences than the typically developing children. They also show impoverished use of some social discourse elements in their written narratives. Our results are discussed in light of potential explanations including Frith’s (1989) theory of “Weak Central Coherence”.
The two most common congenital motor disorders Cerebral Palsy (CP) and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) collectively represent about 6–10% of the child population. These disorders have profound developmental consequences for the child and place him/her at a significant disadvantage or risk, particularly in view of recent societal changes to the educational system and the health care system. Moreover, these children face challenges in daily life beyond their compromised motor ability and that are related to cognitive skills and scholastic performance. In light of current societal changes, there is a pressing need to optimize therapeutic approaches such that motor function and cognitive skills of this vulnerable group of children is promoted. The major challenge is to study and develop alternative cost-effective and evidence-based treatment methods for these children.
This chapter discusses the Communicative Competence Profile (CCP); a socio-neurocognitive assessment method which provides a reasoning and explanatory model to guide clinical decision making for goal setting in intervention on communicative competence for children with severe developmental disorders (SDD). The central underlying notion of the CCP is that information on the development and organization of communication and language competence in the brain provides insight in the overall development and learning capacity, more specifically language and literacy acquisition. The CCP helps to disentangle a combination of mutually reinforcing disorders. Research evidence is gathered from socio-neurocognitive studies, affording reasoning and explanatory schemes to substantiate goal setting for intervention. A clinical case study illustrates the application of the CCP.
Neuroscientific and educational research have the potential to interact productively, because neuroscience investigates processes underlying core educational aims like knowledge acquisition. Combining these research areas therefore appears beneficial, but differences in experimental approach and limitations of neuroscience tools in terms of ecological validity hamper translation. Hence, a common approach that takes these differences into account is needed. Here, we will set out how neuroscience research on long-term memory formation, integration, and consolidation may be informative for education and we will speculate on links with literacy development. Because memory formation is a constructive process, newly learned memories are continuously related to and integrated with previously learned knowledge to form extensive knowledge structures. This integration process is suggested to strengthen memories and make them less vulnerable to forgetting. Education may therefore profit greatly from understanding the neural processes underlying optimal integration to achieve optimal building of knowledge structures, making learning more efficient and evidence based.
Reading is a cultural invention that needs to recruit cortical infrastructure that was not designed for it (cultural recycling of cortical maps). In the case of reading both visual cortex and networks for speech processing are recruited. Here I discuss current views on the neurobiological underpinnings of spoken language that deviate in a number of ways from the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. More areas than Broca’s and Wernicke’s region are involved in language. Moreover, a division along the axis of language production and language comprehension does not seem to be warranted. Instead, for central aspects of language processing neural infrastructure is shared between production and comprehension. Arguments are presented in favor of a dynamic network view, in which the functionality of a region is co-determined by the network of regions in which it is embedded at particular moments in time. Finally, core regions of language processing need to interact with other networks (e.g. the attentional networks and the ToM network) to establish full functionality of language and communication. The consequences of this architecture for reading are discussed.
Good reading skills are crucial for success in the modern world. Reading disability (RD) is characterized as a brain-based difficulty in acquiring fluent decoding skill, usually associated with problems in operating on the phonological structures of language. In this chapter we briefly review recent findings from our lab and others which indicate that atypically developing children fail to organize a coherent attention and reading “circuits” that in typically developing (TD) readers comes online to support skilled processing. New discoveries on how gene-brain-behavior pathways in young children interact with environment and how all this impacts language development and reading outcomes. We also provide a brief overview of the latest research from our lab and others on the brain basis of treatment and remediation of language, attention and literacy challenges.
I examine the central ideas of the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH), reviewing the early studies that motivated them, and discussing more recent research that further supports and refines them. This research shows the specific importance of the reader’s knowledge of word meanings in comprehension, the effects of spelling knowledge on word reading, and the fine-grain consequences for text reading when LQ has been experimentally manipulated during word learning. Studies of word-to-text integration provide a paradigm case for observing the reader’s use of word meaning knowledge during on-line comprehension. As a theoretical framework, the LQH has proved valuable for framing theoretical and practical questions about word knowledge and its role in reading.
We present here a review of recent research on the role of metalinguistic and socio-cognitive factors in reading skill. We first review research on how morphological awareness and orthographic processing impact the acquisition of reading skill. We show that the first might account for change over time, and the second may not. We then turn to our new studies examining the interplay between these two factors in reading development. In each of these domains, we test predictions of theories of reading development. Finally, we turn to research on a very different set of variables, which we term socio-cognitive. We explore the factors that support academic outcomes for university students with a history of reading difficulties, including the role of a range of coping strategies and support services. Together, we hope that this review inspires new inquiry into understanding the factors that underlie successful reading acquisition.
In this chapter, we describe how research and knowledge from cognitive and educational sciences can be combined to address the question of how to improve comprehension in struggling readers. First, we provide an overview of cognitive processes in reading comprehension. Second, we describe a program of research in which we combined information from cognitive and educational sciences to develop a reading comprehension intervention, and present the results of a series of studies designed to examine the effects of the intervention on comprehension of struggling readers. Third, we discuss several thematic questions that emerged from our research. Throughout the chapter we discuss implications for theory, practice, and future research.
A recurring claim in developmental models of written composition is that text quality depends to a large extent on efficient word-level writing skills (handwriting and spelling), at least in the early grades. In this chapter, we show that this assumption has a weak empirical basis because of (1) the unsystematic way in which the quality of written texts has been assessed, and (2) the inconclusiveness of findings about the word-text writing relationship in developmental studies of writing. We claim that the demands of transcription have been overestimated, while the explanatory power of high-level components has been majorly overlooked. We conclude that it is the command of high-level text features and skills what makes learning to write a complex, life-long process.
The current chapter describes a psycholinguistic study of the development of conjunct constructions, a multi-functional coordinated syntactic structure that lies at the heart of complex Hebrew syntax, which can express variegated content in syntactically complex structures. Conjunct constructions in narratives written by 150 Hebrew-speaking children, adolescents and adults were analyzed in terms of syntactic structure and function, lexical semantics, and discourse functions. Results indicate that this construction emerges as a simplex event-telling form, gaining in complexity and fulfilling more functions with age and schooling level, with a concomitant increase in the interface with other forms of complex syntax. The chapter concludes with an illustration of these developments in two narratives and a discussion of the role of language-specific constructions in language acquisition.
In this chapter, I argue that certain facts about early and later first language development, second language learning, and literacy development can only be understood if we acknowledge the role of motivation and engagement. Young children are naturally motivated to engage in the social interactions with adults that give them access to language, and develop language forms to satisfy their needs for attention and, ultimately information. Literacy development is much more likely to be successful among learners who have had positive affective experiences with books as young children, and among adolescents, access to engaging content and opportunities to debate and discuss are prime supports to ongoing literacy learning.
The present chapter gives an overview of the literature on hypertext comprehension, children’s hypertext comprehension and individual variation therein, ending with a perspective for future research. Hypertext comprehension requires the reader to make bridging inferences between the different parts of the text, which requires more background knowledge than when reading a linear text. Especially readers low in prior knowledge thus experience problems in the comprehension of hypertext, but these are also the ones who benefit from a hierarchical structure or a graphical overview. This is also the case for children. Future research should address the comprehension of networked hypertexts, also in groups of children with comprehension problems. For these groups, intervention research is needed to arrive at methods to improve hypertext comprehension.
As individuals develop literacy in two (or more) languages, how are the proficiencies across languages interrelated? In this chapter, the recent findings on cross-language transfer are summarized and areas that need more research are identified. The reviewed studies support the idea that cross language transfer can be considered a metalinguistic/metacognitive ability that is observed under certain contexts, such as when the first language has a strong foundation due to the presence of some of the following factors: formal educational experiences, learner aptitude, and facilitative sociocultural context. Also, readers’ resources in one language are more likely to be recruited when resources in the other language are unavailable or weak, and the existing resources are perceived to be relevant. These patterns have implications for developing educational programs using L1 as a foundation.
The simple view of reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that decoding and language comprehension are pivotal for reading comprehension. Vocabulary breadth is a frequently used measure of language comprehension in studies of second language (L2) and multilingual children including those carried out within the SVR framework. The general objective of this chapter is discuss complementary perspectives on vocabulary skills in second language (L2) and multilingual children. These include the notion of inter-lingual transfer and a distinction between vocabulary breadth and depth, lexical inferencing, and attending to conjunctions – a special category of vocabulary that deals with higher-order language. The chapter highlights some of the ways that vocabulary can be challenging to multilingual learners. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for future directions for research.
This longitudinal study tested whether contributions of phonological awareness and morphological awareness to Chinese vocabulary and character reading measured one year later were similar for monolingual Chinese-speaking children in China and Chinese-English bilingual children in Canada. Participants included 79 Canadian and 93 Chinese children in kindergarten or Grade 1 at Time 1. Hierarchical regression models revealed that across groups, morphological awareness accounted for similar portions of significant variance in vocabulary and character reading. However, phonological awareness showed stronger relations to character reading among the monolinguals than the bilinguals. The findings highlight both the universal and context-dependent aspects of Chinese language and literacy development.
In general, stories written by children in which many details are used are perceived as being more attractive. However, the use of stylistic elements in children’s writings has scarcely been described. We investigated stories written by 320 elementary school children from grades 3 to 6, focusing on the qualifiers they used to describe persons, objects and actions: names, relationships, intensifiers, adjectives and adverbs, sizes, prices, colors, details, and words to express modality, place and directions. The results showed a significant growth from grade 3 to 6 in the number of qualifiers. Dutch-L1 outperformed Dutch-L2 children in almost all these qualifiers. Girls used significantly more names, intensifiers, adjectives and adverbs in their description of persons, objects and actions than boys.
This chapter reviews research on how individual differences in linguistic and cognitive abilities influence syntactic processing in the second language (L2). We briefly discuss individual variability in L2 syntactic processing through the lens of behavioral measurements, followed by a more extensive review of electrophysiological (i.e., Event-Related Potentials, ERP) studies on L2 syntactic processing. Relative to the behavioral literature, fewer ERP studies have examined individual variability in L2 syntactic processing and the large majority of these studies focused on only two factors: Age of Acquisition and L2 proficiency. We also discuss studies that used correlational and regression analyses and oscillatory neural dynamics and complex network analysis. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of studies that examined inter-individual variation in ERP response profiles associated with L2 and L1 syntactic processing in L2 learners, and the application of the Response-Dominance Index to quantify individual variability in ERP response profiles.
The effectiveness of the Dutch reading and spelling didactic ‘How to teach children reading and spelling’ (HTCRS), developed by Schraven (1994/2013) was empirically tested in children attending special education. HTCRS is based on the principles of direct and classroom instruction, and the task analysis of reading and spelling. Reading and spelling performance of first-grade pupils from three different schools was longitudinally tested from the beginning until the end of the first school year. There were no differences in literacy skills at the beginning, but at the end of the year substantially better performance emerged for those pupils who received instruction according to the HTCRS approach. Theoretically-based principles underlying HTRCS are presented as well as the main aspects of the didactics.
A proficient reader is skilled at interpreting and comprehending text at multiple levels of language and discourse. This chapter describes two technologies that are designed to help adult readers who have reading difficulties at various levels. One technology (called AutoTutor) has two computer agents (a tutor and peer) that engage the adult reader in conversational trialogues designed to improve reading comprehension skills at multiple levels of language and discourse. A second technology (called Coh-Metrix) automatically scales texts on discourse formality as well as more specific levels, such as word abstractness, syntactic complexity, discourse cohesion, and narrativity (versus informational discourse). Scaling texts on difficulty is important for adults to read texts at an appropriate level of difficulty – not too easy or difficult.
This study aimed to test whether adults with dyslexia are impaired at non-adjacent dependency learning, and whether potential learning difficulties are domain-specific or not. Participants were familiarised with one of two artificial languages containing dependencies between the first and third element of a string of nonsense words, e.g. “tep wadim lut”. Dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults were equally good at learning the dependencies, although a trend towards a group difference was found when test sentences contained novel middle words, requiring generalisation of the pattern. The groups did not differ on learning dependencies between unfamiliar shapes in a visual experiment. These results provide tentative support for a domain-specific learning deficit for adults with dyslexia, suggesting that they may be poorer at generalizing from language input.
To be diagnosed as a specific learning disorder, the influence of ineffective instruction has to be excluded in dyslexia. Because the quality of ‘instruction-as-usual’ shows great variation, early intervention has been advocated as a tool to study dyslexia. There are two contrasting views. The first view is that early intervention sheds light on the causal relationship between targeted cognitive precursors and dyslexia. In contrast, the response-to-intervention approach (RTI) advocates that intervention is a way to exclude poor instruction as a cause of dyslexia. Family risk intervention studies are described as exponent of the first approach, followed by some examples of RTI. It is concluded that the cause-excluding approach is more supported by the evidence than the cause-supporting view.
Since the first descriptions of children with congenital word blindness or dyslexia, the proper criteria for diagnosis of dyslexia have been debated. Issues in this debate concern, among others, the role of underlying causes of reading and spelling and the use of a discrepancy between reading ability and intelligence. This chapter will consider recent evidence from family risk studies of dyslexia that speaks to these issues. We conclude that current evidence on the etiology of developmental disorders neither supports a specific underlying cognitive profile (e.g., phonological deficits), nor the requirement of a discrepancy with intelligence. Deciding factors in diagnosis should be lack of learning opportunity, other exclusion factors, and naturally the degree of reading and spelling difficulties.
This chapter describes dual coding theory (DCT) and also refers to theories of embodied cognition and multimedia applications. It is suggested that these multiple coding (i.e., verbal and imagery coding) theories should be embedded in education, rather than focusing on verbal coding alone. Imagery coding seems to be an understudied and underestimated component in education, in particular in diagnosing and remediating poor literacy development. Suggestions for measurements of verbal and imagery abilities and styles are made. In the middle and final sections of this chapter DCT applications to reading models and reading disabilities are discussed. Suggestions for improvement of education and reading interventions are made.
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who are high functioning often perform in the normal range on standardized language measures, but they show impairments in the social use of spoken language, especially in more naturalistic situations. As they enter school, literacy, that is, learning to read and write, becomes the principal linguistic challenge; in this chapter, we look at written personal narratives from school-age children with ASD. The narrative texts are analyzed for both structural aspects of language as well as social discourse, i.e., narrative structure. Our findings indicate that children with ASD write shorter narratives, make more morphological errors, and use fewer and less diverse complex sentences than the typically developing children. They also show impoverished use of some social discourse elements in their written narratives. Our results are discussed in light of potential explanations including Frith’s (1989) theory of “Weak Central Coherence”.
The two most common congenital motor disorders Cerebral Palsy (CP) and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) collectively represent about 6–10% of the child population. These disorders have profound developmental consequences for the child and place him/her at a significant disadvantage or risk, particularly in view of recent societal changes to the educational system and the health care system. Moreover, these children face challenges in daily life beyond their compromised motor ability and that are related to cognitive skills and scholastic performance. In light of current societal changes, there is a pressing need to optimize therapeutic approaches such that motor function and cognitive skills of this vulnerable group of children is promoted. The major challenge is to study and develop alternative cost-effective and evidence-based treatment methods for these children.
This chapter discusses the Communicative Competence Profile (CCP); a socio-neurocognitive assessment method which provides a reasoning and explanatory model to guide clinical decision making for goal setting in intervention on communicative competence for children with severe developmental disorders (SDD). The central underlying notion of the CCP is that information on the development and organization of communication and language competence in the brain provides insight in the overall development and learning capacity, more specifically language and literacy acquisition. The CCP helps to disentangle a combination of mutually reinforcing disorders. Research evidence is gathered from socio-neurocognitive studies, affording reasoning and explanatory schemes to substantiate goal setting for intervention. A clinical case study illustrates the application of the CCP.