1. Nonsense Syllable Confusions in Children with Reading Disabilities
Presented to the Executive Board
of The Reading Group
April 1, 2007

2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dr. Cynthia J. Johnson, presenting
Dr. Jont Allen1 and Dr. Cynthia J. Johnson2, Primary Investigators
Sandeep Phatak1, Sara Steele2, and Bryce Lobdell1, and Seok-Youn Yoon2 doctoral students
1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
2 Department of Speech and Hearing Science

3. Previous Studies
Language impairment (LI) may originate with difficulties in hearing speech sounds
Fellbaum et al., 1995
Ziegler et al., 2005
Merzenich et al., 1996
Tallal et al., 1996

4. Children with LI are at risk for developing reading disabilities (RD)
Catts et al., 2002
50% of kindergartners with specific language impairment eventually develop reading disabilities
Flax et al., 2003
68% of 2nd grade children with language impairments also have reading impairments

5. We reasoned that RD might be related to speech perception difficulties.

6. Much of the study of RD has focused on letter-sound correspondence in decoding or phonological awareness, rather than purely speech-perception abilities.
Our study focuses on speech-perception abilities, in children with reading disabilities and normal hearing.

7. The Research Question
Do children with RD due to decoding or comprehension difficulties confuse consonants and vowels more often than children without such reading difficulties?
Children in our study have a history of reading problems and varying reading profiles.

8. Method

9. Participants 7 children with RD (4 girls, 3 boys) 3rd and 4th grades
Ages 8;4 to 10;5
6 were receiving reading services at The Reading Group
The 7th was reading below grade level.

10. Control Group: 2 children whose diagnostic reports indicated RD primarily due to attentional, motivational, or school attendance problems due to health problems
RD Group: 5 children

11. Diagnostic Test Battery
Hearing Screening
Reading Profile
Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised
Word Recognition
Word Attack
Gray Oral Reading Test-4
Reading Comprehension
Fluency

12. Reports of reading assessments and Reading Group lesson progress

13. Language Profile Nonverbal cognition Listening vocabulary Grammar
Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test: Matrices subtest
Listening vocabulary
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III
Grammar
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-4

14. Phonological awareness Articulation
Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing
Articulation
Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation-2
15-20 minute sample of the child’s conversation.

15. Child’s Reading-Language Profile
Will be created from the tests and reports
Nonword Repetition Task (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998)
12 nonsense words
1-4 syllables long
Example: “chinotoib”
Speech perception, memory, production

16. Task 1: Syllable Confusion Oddball Task (SCO)
Measures ability to discriminate between 2 speech sounds
Syllables presented by the computer
Child listens with headphones
For 10 hourly sessions

17. Computer randomly selects 3 consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) syllables
Spoken by three different talkers
From a set of 18 talkers
Professionally recorded by the Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania

18. The child indicates the odd syllable.
2 syllables the same; 1 different
Different C or V
e.g., “da-da-fa”
The child indicates the odd syllable.
Children averaged 36 trials per sound.
Play several examples of the SCO trials.

19. Task 2: Nonsense Syllable Confusion Matrix Task (NSCM)
Measures ability to identify a speech sound
Syllables presented by the computer
Child listens with headphones
For 10 hourly sessions

20. The child listens to 1 CV or VC syllable at a time
The child repeats what he or she hears
Customized for each child
to provide more examples of high-error sounds on the SCO task.

21. Responses were phonetically transcribed by two examiners
The children averaged 61 trials per sound.
Play several examples of the SCO trials.

22. Preliminary Results: RD Group
4 of the 5 children with RD made numerous perceptual errors for consonants and vowels in the SCO and NSCM tasks.

23. “Laura’s” SCO Task Scored low for 38% of 24 consonants
For 4 types of consonants
/p/, 33 % correct
“ch”, 67% correct
13% of 15 vowels
“u” as in “cut”, 64%

24. “Laura’s” NSCM Task
Harder for her than the SCO task, primarily due to poor vowel identification
NSCM = 72%
SCO = 84% correct

25. “Laura’s” Reading-Language Profile
Difficulty segmenting words into phonemes, imitating sentences, and repeating nonwords
High listening vocabulary
PPVT-III: SS = 122

26. History of reading difficulties and services at The Reading Group to learn reading strategies
Currently reading at grade level, but with effort.

27. Preliminary Results: Control Group
2 controls and 1 boy in the RD group
Scored high on the SCO Task
> 75% correct on more than 91% of the sounds
Clearly, children in this age range can be highly successful on the SCO task.

28. Preliminary Results: Patterns for the RD Group
Some group patterns emerged for the 4 children with perceptual errors.
SCO task
3 children had a substantial number of consonant errors (≤ 75% correct)
on 8, 9, and 13 consonants (out of 24)
2 had a substantial number of vowel errors
on 7 and 11 vowels (out of 15)

29. NSCM Task (with 3 of the 4 children analyzed)
2 children performed worse on NSCM (Task 2) than SCO (Task 1).
Expected because NSCM emphasized SCO errors.
Surprisingly, consonants better than vowels (all 3 children)
Mean for consonants = 82% correct
Mean for vowels = 72% correct

30. Both Tasks, 2 or 3 children:
Erred on 3 vowels
Short “e” as in “pet”
“oo” as in “look”
Short “o” as in “pot”
Erred on 2 consonants
“th” as in “they”
“ng” as in “sing”

31. Interestingly, certain sounds were only problematic on one task but not the other (problematic for ≥ 2 children)
SCO Task
7 vowels, including:
“e” as in “see”
long “u” as in “tune”
short “o” as in “pot”
8 consonants, including “p, b, t, d”

32. NSCM Task 6 vowels 8 consonants, including: “f, v”
“th” as in “think”, th” as in “they”
“z”, “zh” as in “measure”
“J”
“ng” as in “sing”

33. Task 2 Confusion Matrices (NSCM Task)
Will be created for consonant and vowel for each child (as in Allen, 2005; Phatak & Allen, 2007)
Will show which kinds of sounds are confused with each other, for individual children and the RD Group
Example of a possible Confusion Matrix on the next slide.

34. Sound Child Repeated
Sound Child Heard
Long e
Short i
Long a
Short e
Short a
80%
10% 0% 4%
15%
72% 3% 5%
60%
13%
94%
30%
68%

35. Nonword Repetition Task (NRT)
Will be scored for the number of correct phonemes in 12 nonwords
3 nonwords at each of 4 levels
1 syllable, 2 syllable, 3 syllable (“chinotoib”), and 4 syllables long
Will be compare to speech perception (the SCO and NSCM scores).
To see if speech perception is related to phonological awareness, memory, and production for new words (NRT nonwords).

36. Reading Profiles Reading profiles will be prepared
to characterize children as having
Decoding difficulties (word recognition and attack)
Reading Comprehension difficulties
Reading Fluency difficulties
Vocabulary, Grammar, or Articulation difficulties related to reading.
Will be compared to speech perception (the SCO and NSCM scores).

37. Discussion
Many studies show that reading disability is related to poor phonological awareness, such as knowing rhymes and first sounds of words
Catts et al., 2006

38. Preliminary results suggest that our RD Group exhibited speech perception difficulties more peripheral (low level) in auditory processing of speech than previously reported.
4 of 7 children run so far.
The 8th child has just been enrolled.
A 9th child was unable to complete the study but had numerous perceptual confusions.

39. Preliminary results show some common confusions in the SCO discrimination and NSCM identification data among children with RD
We think there may be some auditory working memory challenges on the SCO task.
Some children appear to find it hard to remember the sequence of 3 syllables.