1. Dyslexia & reading disorders
Aylin Küntay
Language and Communicative Disorders
Meeting 14

2. Reading DECODING: learning letter-sound correspondences
a-li t-t-t-o-pu a-a-at
especially difficult in languages such as English where there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes
bottom-up processes such as sounding out letters to make words, adding these together, etc.
COMPREHENSION: deriving meaning from the text as a whole
Osman kalede. Ali topu at!
top-down processes of integrating materials with previous knowledge
there are some controversies whether reading exercises that focus on decoding are important for acquisition of reading

3. Reading debates Reading Instruction: Whole Language vs Decoding?
The debate is not about the importance of comprehension
every beginning reading method in history has had reading for understanding as its goal
The real debate :
Does an early emphasis on word recognition and decoding (analysis of language) help in the acquisition of reading for understanding?

4. Central tenets of decoding approach
children must first learn to break words into syllables
and learn how syllables are made up of phonemes
do exercises
to gain phonological awareness
to increase orthographic (alphabetic) processing skills

5. Phonological Awareness / Sensitivity
the understanding that speech is composed of a sequence of sounds (e.g., phonemes) that are recombined to form other words
Spelling-to-sound decoding skills
Phonological awareness / phonological sensitivity tasks
Can you say “cat” without “c” sound? (“at”)
Which is the odd word? "cat, bat, pig”
Rhyming tasks
Say a word that rhymes with "cat”

6. Dyslexia--- delay in reading
Discussion whether there is a reading-specific deficit or delay--- lower end of the normal curve
Visual deficit???
Phonological deficit!!!
Earlier predictors in phonological skills such as phonological memory, phonological awareness, etc.

7. Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that manifests primarily as a difficulty with written language, particularly with reading and spelling.
distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as deficiencies in intelligence, a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction

8. Reading disorder
Some researchers advocate that the term “dyslexia” is replaced by reading disorder
Dyslexic individuals often have difficulty "breaking the code" of sound-letter association (the alphabetic principle), and
they may also reverse or transpose letters when writing or confuse letters such as b, d, p, q, especially in childhood.
However, dyslexia is not a visual problem that involves reading letters or words backwards or upside down, nor are such reversals a defining characteristic of dyslexia

9. Lyytinen et al.
Like Turkish, Finnish has a bidirectionally consistent orthography
28 signs for 20 consonants and 8 vowel; and soft g
Focus on reading fluency rather than on reading accuracy
Reading accuracy has been focused on in the context of English

10. How does reading develop?
Predictors
Phonological skills
By age 5, basic principles of phonology are acquired
Letter knowledge
Processing of sub-lexical units
Evde vs. evden; evi vs. evin
Children learn to become sensitivity to these “fine-grained” distinctions from very early on in highly inflected languages
Work by Aydın Durgunoğlu in Turkish suggests the same

11. Cross-linguistic differences
Transparency of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence system
Varies among alphabetic orthographies
English lags behing. Danish, French, and Portugese also later dev

12. Failing to read
A core phonological deficit underlies developmental dyslexia
In English, irregularly spelled words need visual lexical memory
Non-phonological, visual route might be disrupted

13. Support failers Support “self-teaching” mechanisms
Boosts reading fluency
Systematic phonics instruction
Synthesize the word through the building of its constituent sounds

14. The Finnish study of dyslexia
Predictors of reading acquisition
Very early speech perception abilities (using habituation)
Readiness to process speech signals in infancy
Receptive language
Maximum sentence length at 2
Inflectional skills at 2
Naming skills at 3
Letter knowledge before formal instruction ***
The strongest predictor
Low letter knowledge, low phonological awareness and/or rapid naming skill characterized children most severely delayed in reading acquisition

15. Projects
Please volunteer to do the first set of project presentations (on December 25) by next Tuesday (Dec, 18)
You will have a STRICTLY monitored 8 minutes to do your presentation
2 minutes for discussion, when needed
Important to present your findings and a good discussion of them
Final paper due by the day of the final, January 5, 2008