An experimental comparison of additional training in phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and decoding for struggling beginner readers.

BACKGROUND: Despite evidence that synthetic phonics teaching has increased reading attainments, a sizable minority of children struggle to acquire phonics skills and teachers lack clear principles for deciding what types of additional support are most beneficial. Synthetic phonics teaches children to read using a decoding strategy to translate letters into sounds and blend them (e.g., c-a-t = "k - ae - t" = "cat"). To use a decoding strategy, children require letter-sound knowledge (LSK) and the ability to blend sound units (phonological awareness; PA). Training on PA has been shown to benefit struggling beginning readers. However, teachers in English primary schools do not routinely check PA. Instead, struggling beginner readers usually receive additional LSK support. AIMS: Until now, there has been no systematic comparison of the effectiveness of training on each component of the decoding process. Should additional support for struggling readers focus on improving PA, or on supplementary LSK and/or decoding instruction? We aim to increase understanding of the roles of LSK and PA in children's acquisition of phonics skills and uncover which types of additional training are most likely to be effective for struggling beginner readers. SAMPLE AND METHOD: We will compare training on each of these components, using a carefully controlled experimental design. We will identify reception-age children at risk of reading difficulties (target n = 225) and randomly allocate them to either PA, LSK or decoding (DEC) training. We will test whether training type influences post-test performance on word reading and whether any effects depend on participants' pre-test PA and/or LSK. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Two hundred and twenty-two participants completed the training. Planned analyses showed no effects of condition on word reading. However, exploratory analyses indicated that the advantage of trained over untrained words was significantly greater for the PA and DEC conditions. There was also a significantly greater improvement in PA for the DEC condition. Overall, our findings suggest a potential advantage of training that includes blending skills, particularly when decoding words that had been included in training. Future research is needed to develop a programme of training on blending skills combined with direct vocabulary instruction for struggling beginner readers.

Tracking vocabulary and reading growth in children from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds during the transition from primary to secondary education.

We examined the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), vocabulary, and reading in middle childhood, during the transition from primary (elementary) to secondary (high) school. Children (N = 279, 163 girls) completed assessments of everyday and curriculum-related vocabulary, (non)word reading, and reading comprehension at five timepoints from age 10 to 13. Piecewise linear mixed-effects models showed significant growth in everyday vocabulary and word reading between every time point. Curriculum vocabulary and reading comprehension showed significant growth during the school year, but not during the summer holidays. There were significant effects of SES on all measures except word reading; yet, SES differences did not widen over time. Our findings motivate targeted reading and vocabulary support for secondary school students from lower SES backgrounds.

Learning new words through reading: do robust spelling-sound mappings boost learning of word forms and meanings?

High-quality lexical representations depend on robust representations of written form (orthography), spoken form (phonology) and meaning (semantics), and strong bonds between them. Quality of lexical representations may be affected by amount of print exposure and the form of individual words. Words that are harder to decode (print-to-sound) may lead to fuzzy representations of the orthographic and phonological forms, potentially creating less stable foundations for semantic knowledge. These factors are difficult to disentangle in natural language research; in this registered report, we experimentally manipulated decoding ease and exposure at the item level. Adults read paragraphs describing invented meanings of pseudowords. Pseudowords appeared two or six times in a paragraph, and had easy (e.g. bamper) or hard (e.g. uzide) to decode spelling-sound mappings. Post-tests assessed word-form knowledge, orthography-semantic mappings and semantic-phonology mappings. Results showed that greater decoding ease improved learning of word forms and consequently also impacted on word meanings. Higher exposure frequency improved learning of word forms but not meanings. Exposure frequency also modulated the effect of decoding ease on word-form learning, with a stronger effect of decoding ease for fewer exposures. Disentangling effects of decoding ease from print exposure has important implications for understanding potential barriers to vocabulary learning.

The Role of Mealtimes in Fostering Language Development and Aligning Home and School Learning: Protocol for a Multi-Method Study of Preschool Children in Rural Kenya and Zambia.

BACKGROUND: The association between school and home is fundamental to sustainable education: parents' understanding of the school's priorities and teachers' understanding of their pupils' home environment are both vital for children to remain in school and succeed academically. The relationship between parents and teachers is closest in preschool settings, providing a valuable opportunity to build bridges between home and school. In this protocol paper, we outline our planned methods for identifying beneficial home and school behaviors. OBJECTIVE: Our project aims to identify culture-specific structures and behaviors in home and school settings, which influence the quantity and quality of child-directed speech and identify positive experiences that can help improve children's linguistic development and nutrition. METHODS: Using a mixed methods approach and focusing on early language learning, nutrition, and responsive caregiving, we will video-record and analyze mealtime language and eating behaviors at home and in school, targeting 80 preschool children and their families in rural Kenya and Zambia. In addition, we will assess children's language skills through audio recordings and use questionnaire-based interviews to collect extensive sociodemographic and dietary data. RESULTS: Between the start of our project in January 2020 and the end of December 2021, we had collected complete sets of sociodemographic, observational, and food recall data for 40 children in Kenya and 16 children in Zambia. By the end of May 2022, we had started data collection for an additional 24 children in Zambia and transcribed and coded approximately 85% of the data. By the end of September, 2022, we plan to complete data collection, transcription, and coding for the entire sample of 80 children across both countries. From September 2022 onwards, we will focus on analyzing our language data, and we hope to have results ready for publication in early 2023. By relating children's language outcomes and nutritional intake to the observed mealtime behaviors, we hope to identify practices that increase the quantity and quality of child-directed speech and improve children's nutritional intake. CONCLUSIONS: Good nutrition and the promotion of language learning are key issues in early childhood development. By using a cross-cultural approach, combining a variety of methods, and working closely with stakeholders and policy makers throughout the project, we hope to find and share best practices for improving children's linguistic outcomes and nutrition and lay the foundation for the development of practitioner networks and parent outreach programs. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/36925.

Reading fiction and reading minds in early adolescence: A longitudinal study.

Reading fiction is argued to have benefits for our understanding of others' thoughts, feelings and desires, referred to as 'theory of mind'(ToM). We aimed to test this assumption by examining whether children's reading experience is longitudinally associated with later ToM. We examined reading experience and ToM in 236 children between the ages of 11-13 years. Participants were asked to report on their time spent reading both fiction and non-fiction at ages 11 and 13, ToM was measured at age 13. Verbal ability, reading comprehension, and reading motivation were included as control variables in all analyses. Results showed that children's self-reported fiction, but not their non-fiction reading was associated with ToM. Further, the association was concurrent but not longitudinal: fiction reading and ToM at age 13 were associated but fiction reading at age 11 did not predict ToM at age 13. Our findings motivate further research on what types of reading materials might be beneficial, and the level of exposure to fiction that is needed for measurable benefits for later ToM.

Qualitative Accounts of School-Aged Children's Diets during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Rural, Central, Kenya.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption to food security in many countries, including Kenya. However, the impact of this on food provision to children at an individual level is unknown. This small study aimed to provide a qualitative snapshot of the diets of children during the COVID-19 pandemic. During completion of 24-h food recalls, with 15 families with children aged 5-8 years, caregivers were asked about changes they had made to foods given to their children due to the pandemic. Food recalls were analysed to assess nutrient intakes. Qualitative comments were thematically analysed. Most of the families reported making some changes to foods they provided to their children due to COVID-19. Reasons for these changes fell into three themes, inability to access foods (both due to formal restriction of movements and fear of leaving the house), poorer availability of foods, and financial constraints (both decreases in income and increases in food prices). The COVID-19 pandemic has affected some foods parents in rural Kenya can provide to their children.

An infant-led approach to complementary feeding is positively associated with language development.

The timing and strategy with which parents first introduce their infants to solid foods may be an important predictor of subsequent developmental outcomes. Recent years have seen a decline in the prevalence of traditional parent-led feeding of soft, puréed food and a rise in the prevalence of infant-led complementary feeding. Although there has been some research espousing the benefits of infant-led complementary feeding for improving food fussiness and self-regulation, there has been little exploration of this approach that may impact on other developmental outcomes in children. The current study explores whether aspects of the infant-led approach, specifically the child eating unaided and consuming finger foods and eating with the family, are related to child language outcomes. One hundred thirty one parents of children aged 8-24 months completed questionnaires about their approach to complementary feeding, their current feeding practices, their child's experiences with family foods and child language comprehension/production. The findings suggest that an approach to complementary feeding which promotes infant autonomy in feeding (i.e., eating finger foods rather than puréed foods) and consuming more family foods is related to more advanced child language production and comprehension. Specifically, the prevalence of eating family foods mediated the relationship between eating unaided at the onset of the complementary feeding period and later language outcomes. This study is the first to find a significant relationship between different approaches to introducing solid foods and child language outcomes and these findings highlight the potential for different complementary feeding approaches to influence behaviour beyond mealtimes.

Dynamic relationships between phonological memory and reading: A five year longitudinal study from age 4 to 9.

We reconcile competing theories of the role of phonological memory in reading development, by uncovering their dynamic relationship during the first 5 years of school. Phonological memory, reading and phoneme awareness were assessed in 780 phonics-educated children at age 4, 5, 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that phonological memory loaded onto two factors: verbal short-term memory (verbal STM; phonological tasks that loaded primarily on serial order memory) and nonword repetition. Using longitudinal structural equation models, we found that verbal STM directly predicted early word-level reading from age 4 to 6, reflecting the importance of serial-order memory for letter-by-letter decoding. In contrast, reading had no reciprocal influence on the development of verbal STM. The relationship between nonword repetition and reading was bidirectional across the 5 years of study: nonword repetition and reading predicted each other both directly and indirectly (via phoneme awareness). Indirect effects from nonword repetition (and verbal STM) to reading support the view that phonological memory stimulates phonemically detailed representations through repeated encoding of complex verbal stimuli. Similarly, the indirect influence of reading on nonword repetition suggests that improved reading ability promotes the phoneme-level specificity of phonological representations. Finally, the direct influence from reading to nonword repetition suggests that better readers use orthographic cues to help them remember and repeat new words accurately. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE.

Auditory frequency discrimination in developmental dyslexia: A meta-analysis.

Auditory frequency discrimination has been used as an index of sensory processing in developmental language disorders such as dyslexia, where group differences have often been interpreted as evidence for a basic deficit in auditory processing that underpins and constrains individual variability in the development of phonological skills. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the cumulative evidence for group differences in frequency discrimination and to explore the impact of some potential moderator variables that could contribute to variability in effect-size estimations across studies. Our analyses revealed mean effect sizes for group differences on frequency discrimination tasks on the order of three-quarters of a standard deviation, but in the presence of substantial inter-study variability in their magnitude. Moderator variable analyses indicated that factors related both to participant variability on behavioural and cognitive variables associated with the dyslexia phenotype, and to variability in the task design, contributed to differences in the magnitude of effect size across studies. The apparently complex pattern of results was compounded by the lack of concurrent, standardised metrics of cognitive and reading component skills across the constituent studies. Differences on sensory processing tasks are often reported in studies of developmental disorders, but these need to be more carefully interpreted in the context of non-sensory factors, which may explain significant inter- and intra-group variance in the dependent measure of interest.

Differing effects of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading development.

BACKGROUND: Synthetic phonics is the widely accepted approach for teaching reading in English: Children are taught to sound out the letters in a word then blend these sounds together. AIMS: We compared the impact of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading. SAMPLE: Children received Letters and Sounds (L&S; 7 schools) which teaches multiple letter-sound mappings or Early Reading Research (ERR; 10 schools) which teaches only the most consistent mappings plus frequent words by sight. METHOD: We measured phonological awareness (PA) and reading from school entry to the end of the second (all schools) or third school year (4 ERR, 3 L&S schools). RESULTS: Phonological awareness was significantly related to all reading measures for the whole sample. However, there was a closer relationship between PA and exception word reading for children receiving the L&S programme. The programmes were equally effective overall, but their impact on reading significantly interacted with school-entry PA: Children with poor PA at school entry achieved higher reading attainments under ERR (significant group difference on exception word reading at the end of the first year), whereas children with good PA performed equally well under either programme. CONCLUSIONS: The more intensive phonics programme (L&S) heightened the association between PA and exception word reading. Although the programmes were equally effective for most children, results indicate potential benefits of ERR for children with poor PA. We suggest that phonics programmes could be simplified to teach only the most consistent mappings plus frequent words by sight.

Predicting dyslexia using prereading skills: the role of sensorimotor and cognitive abilities.

BACKGROUND: It is well established that phonological awareness, print knowledge and rapid naming predict later reading difficulties. However, additional auditory, visual and motor difficulties have also been observed in dyslexic children. It is examined to what extent these difficulties can be used to predict later literacy difficulties. METHOD: An unselected sample of 267 children at school entry completed a wide battery of tasks associated with dyslexia. Their reading was tested 2, 3 and 4 years later and poor readers were identified (n = 42). Logistic regression and multiple case study approaches were used to examine the predictive validity of different tasks. RESULTS: As expected, print knowledge, verbal short-term memory, phonological awareness and rapid naming were good predictors of later poor reading. Deficits in visual search and in auditory processing were also present in a large minority of the poor readers. Almost all poor readers showed deficits in at least one area at school entry, but there was no single deficit that characterised the majority of poor readers. CONCLUSIONS: Results are in line with Pennington's () multiple deficits view of dyslexia. They indicate that the causes of poor reading outcome are multiple, interacting and probabilistic, rather than deterministic.

Deconstructing phonological tasks: The contribution of stimulus and response type to the prediction of early decoding skills.

Phonological tasks are highly predictive of reading development but their complexity obscures the underlying mechanisms driving this association. There are three key components hypothesised to drive the relationship between phonological tasks and reading; (a) the linguistic nature of the stimuli, (b) the phonological complexity of the stimuli, and (c) the production of a verbal response. We isolated the contribution of the stimulus and response components separately through the creation of latent variables to represent specially designed tasks that were matched for procedure. These tasks were administered to 570 6 to 7-year-old children along with standardised tests of regular word and non-word reading. A structural equation model, where tasks were grouped according to stimulus, revealed that the linguistic nature and the phonological complexity of the stimulus predicted unique variance in decoding, over and above matched comparison tasks without these components. An alternative model, grouped according to response mode, showed that the production of a verbal response was a unique predictor of decoding beyond matched tasks without a verbal response. In summary, we found that multiple factors contributed to reading development, supporting multivariate models over those that prioritize single factors. More broadly, we demonstrate the value of combining matched task designs with latent variable modelling to deconstruct the components of complex tasks.

Separating the influences of prereading skills on early word and nonword reading.

The essential first step for a beginning reader is to learn to match printed forms to phonological representations. For a new word, this is an effortful process where each grapheme must be translated individually (serial decoding). The role of phonological awareness in developing a decoding strategy is well known. We examined whether beginning readers recruit different skills depending on the nature of the words being read (familiar words vs. nonwords). Print knowledge, phoneme and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological short-term memory (STM), nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, auditory skills, and visual attention were measured in 392 prereaders 4 and 5 years of age. Word and nonword reading were measured 9 months later. We used structural equation modeling to examine the skills-reading relationship and modeled correlations between our two reading outcomes and among all prereading skills. We found that a broad range of skills were associated with reading outcomes: early print knowledge, phonological STM, phoneme awareness and RAN. Whereas all of these skills were directly predictive of nonword reading, early print knowledge was the only direct predictor of word reading. Our findings suggest that beginning readers draw most heavily on their existing print knowledge to read familiar words.

A peak-clustering method for MEG group analysis to minimise artefacts due to smoothness.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive technique for characterizing brain electrical activity, is gaining popularity as a tool for assessing group-level differences between experimental conditions. One method for assessing task-condition effects involves beamforming, where a weighted sum of field measurements is used to tune activity on a voxel-by-voxel basis. However, this method has been shown to produce inhomogeneous smoothness differences as a function of signal-to-noise across a volumetric image, which can then produce false positives at the group level. Here we describe a novel method for group-level analysis with MEG beamformer images that utilizes the peak locations within each participant's volumetric image to assess group-level effects. We compared our peak-clustering algorithm with SnPM using simulated data. We found that our method was immune to artefactual group effects that can arise as a result of inhomogeneous smoothness differences across a volumetric image. We also used our peak-clustering algorithm on experimental data and found that regions were identified that corresponded with task-related regions identified in the literature. These findings suggest that our technique is a robust method for group-level analysis with MEG beamformer images.

Evidence of a transition from perceptual to category induction in 3- to 9-year-old children.

We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with perceptual distractors at different levels of featural similarity. An additional 52 children were given the same training followed by an induction task with alternative stimuli. Categorization performance was consistently high; however, we found a gradual transition from a perceptual bias in our youngest children to a category bias around 6 or 7 years of age. In addition, children of all ages were equally distracted by higher levels of featural similarity. The transition is unlikely to be due to an increased ability to inhibit perceptual distractors. Instead, we argue that the transition is driven by a fundamental change in children's understanding of category membership.

Development of reasoning: Behavioral evidence to support reinforcement over cognitive control accounts.

Abstract Speed's theory makes two predictions for the development of analogical reasoning. Firstly, young children should not be able to reason analogically due to an undeveloped PFC neural network. Secondly, category knowledge enables the reinforcement of structural features over surface features, and thus the development of sophisticated, analogical, reasoning. We outline existing studies that support these predictions and highlight some critical remaining issues. Specifically, we argue that the development of inhibition must be directly compared alongside the development of reasoning strategies in order to support Speed's account.

Classroom implications of recent research into literacy development: from predictors to assessment.

We outline how research into predictors of literacy underpins the development of increasingly accurate and informative assessments. We report three studies that emphasize the crucial role of speech and auditory skills on literacy development throughout primary and secondary school. Our first study addresses the effects of early childhood middle ear infections, the potential consequences for speech processing difficulties and the impact on early literacy development. Our second study outlines how speech and auditory skills are crucially related to early literacy in normally developing readers, whereas other skills such as motor, memory and IQ are only indirectly related. Our third study outlines the on-going impact of phonological awareness on reading and wider academic achievement in secondary-school pupils. Finally, we outline how teachers can use the current research to inform them about which assessments to conduct, and how to interpret the results.

Therapeutic potential of a fully human monoclonal antibody against influenza A virus M2 protein.

Influenza is one of the most prevalent viral diseases in humans. For some high-risk human populations, including the infant, the elderly, and the immunocompromised, who may not benefit from active immunization, passive immunotherapy with antibodies reactive with all influenza A strains may be an alternative. In this study, we characterized several fully human monoclonal antibodies (MAb) reactive with M2e, which were generated from transchromosomic mice engineered to produce fully human antibodies following immunization with a consensus-sequence M2e peptide. The MAbs showed strong binding to M2e peptide and to virus infected MDCK cells. One MAb recognizing the highly conserved N-terminal portion of consensus M2e displayed high binding to the majority of M2e variants from natural viral isolates, including highly pathogenic avian strains, which were recently reported to infect humans. Passive immunotherapy with this MAb in mice resulted in significant reduction in virus replication in the lung and protection from lethal infection when administered either prophylactically or therapeutically. These results suggest the potential of the anti-M2e human MAb with broad binding spectrum as a universal passive immunotherapeutic agent to infection by influenza A virus.

Delivering phonological and phonics training within whole-class teaching.

BACKGROUND: Early, intensive phonological awareness and phonics training is widely held to be beneficial for children with poor phonological awareness. However, most studies have delivered this training separately from children's normal whole-class reading lessons. AIMS: We examined whether integrating this training into whole class, mixed-ability reading lessons could impact on children with poor phonological awareness, whilst also benefiting normally developing readers. SAMPLE: Teachers delivered the training within a broad reading programme to whole classes of children from Reception to the end of Year 1 (N=251). A comparison group of children received standard teaching methods (N=213). METHOD: Children's literacy was assessed at the beginning of Reception, and then at the end of each year until 1 year post-intervention. RESULTS: The strategy significantly impacted on reading performance for normally developing readers and those with poor phonological awareness, vastly reducing the incidence of reading difficulties from 20% in comparison schools to 5% in intervention schools. CONCLUSIONS: Phonological and phonics training is highly effective for children with poor phonological awareness, even when incorporated into whole-class teaching.