We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability (dyslexia) over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such difficulties. The evidence suggests that inadequate facility in word identification due, in most cases, to more basic deficits in alphabetic coding is the basic cause of difficulties in learning to read. We next discuss hypothesized deficiencies in readingrelated cognitive abilities as underlying causes of deficiencies in component reading skills. The evidence in these areas suggests that, in most cases, phonological skills deficiencies associated with phonological coding deficits are the probable causes of the disorder rather than visual, semantic, or syntactic deficits, although reading difficulties in some children may be associated with general language deficits. Hypothesized deficits in general learning abilities (e.g., attention, association learning, cross-modal transfer etc.) and low-level sensory deficits have weak validity as causal factors in specific reading disability. These inferences are, by and large, supported by research evaluating the biological foundations of dyslexia. Finally, evidence is presented in support of the idea that many poor readers are impaired because of inadequate instruction or other experiential factors. This does not mean that biological factors are not relevant, because the brain and environment interact to produce the neural networks that support reading acquisition. We conclude with a discussion of the clinical implications of the research findings, focusing on the need for enhanced instruction.

http://www.dr-hatfield.com/educ538/docs/Vellutino,+etal+2004.pdf

Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades?

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists have the skills and knowledge needed to play an important role in the early identification of children who are at risk for reading difficulties. Whereas resear...

Estimating the Risk of Future Reading Difficulties in Kindergarten Children: A Research-Based Model and Its Clinical Implementation.

To clarify the relationship between oral language and early reading development, the authors administered to 39 children a broad range of oral language measures in 3 areas (metalinguistics, structural language, and narrative discourse); measures of background variables (IQ, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, family literacy); and measures of reading ability (word recognition, pseudoword reading, passage comprehension) in kindergarten and in 1st and 2nd grades. The authors used regression analyses to identify parsimonious models that explained variance in early reading. The main finding of the study was that semantic abilities (i.e., oral definitions and word retrieval), not phonological awareness, predicted 2nd-grade reading comprehension. As expected, phonological awareness skill in kindergarten predicted single-word reading at 1st and 2nd grades. The finding that semantic skills predicted passage comprehension suggests that the importance of different oral language skills to early reading...

A Longitudinal Analysis of the Connection Between Oral Language and Early Reading

Promoting healthy child development lies at the heart of paediatric practice, yet a major challenge facing the field is applying evidence based standards. However, the evidence is clear as regards reading aloud to children. Ample research demonstrates that reading aloud to young children promotes the development of language and other emergent literacy skills,1–4 which in turn help children prepare for school.3 5

Reading aloud to children or shared bookreading has been linked to young children’s emergent literacy ability, which can be defined as the skills or knowledge that children develop before learning the more conventional skills of reading and writing6–8 which affect children’s later success in reading.9

During shared bookreading, children learn to recognise letters, understand that print represents the spoken word, and learn how to hold a book, turn the page and start at the beginning.10–12 Shared bookreading is also associated with learning print concepts11 and exposing children to the written language register, which is different from spoken language,13 as well as story structures (eg, stories have a beginning, middle and end) and literacy conventions such as syntax and grammar which are essential for understanding texts.14 These emergent literacy skills are important for later success in reading.2 15

Phonological awareness (the ability to manipulate the sounds of spoken language1 16–18) is another important prerequisite for learning to read. To read words, children need to know the rules for translating print into meaningful sounds.8 16 For example, preschoolers’ sensitivity to alliteration and rhyme at age 4–5 contributed to progress in reading and spelling at age 6–7.19 Children’s knowledge of nursery rhymes at age 3–4 is related to detecting alliteration and rhyme at ages 4–7.20 Many parents naturally promote awareness …

/pdf/reading-aloud-to-children-the-evidence-12jigq7nn7.pdf

Reading aloud to children: the evidence

The simple view of reading posits that reading comprehension can be decomposed into a print-specific component (concerning decoding and sight word reading) and a language comprehension component (concerning verbal and metalinguistic skills not related to print). One might properly consider lexical skills, indexed by vocabulary measures, part of the language component; however, vocabulary measures end up taking up substantial amounts of print-dependent reading comprehension variance, presumably because of the interrelations among semantic, orthographic, and phonological specification of lexical entries. In the present study we examined the role of vocabulary in the prediction of reading comprehension by testing alternative formulations within the context of the simple view. We used cross-sectional and (1-year) longitudinal data from 436 children in Grades 3–6 attending regular classrooms. We quantified the proportion of variance accounting for reading comprehension that could be attributed to vocabulary me...

/pdf/the-role-of-vocabulary-in-the-context-of-the-simple-view-of-9zgdzh8965.pdf

The Role of Vocabulary in the Context of the Simple View of Reading.

River deep, mountain high

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Mary Beith

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

River deep, mountain high