Presentation matters: Surface text features and text quality in written narratives of Dutch high school students with and without dyslexia.

Presentation features such as spelling, punctuation and handwriting can influence the evaluation of general text quality. High school students with dyslexia might therefore be at a disadvantage, as at least their spelling performance is typically poor(er). Furthermore, these students might show less sophisticated linguistic features of texts, such as word length and sentence complexity, that might also be related to text quality. We compared narratives written by Dutch high school students (mean age 13.7 years) with (n = 28) and without (n = 29) dyslexia. Students with dyslexia's texts contained more spelling errors and poorer handwriting quality, but not more punctuation errors. Teacher-rated general text quality was lower for the texts of students with dyslexia in uncorrected versions. When spelling and punctuation errors were corrected, no teacher-rated text quality differences emerged. No differences in linguistic text features were found. Furthermore, spelling, punctuation and, to a lesser extent, number of words per sentence clause were related to ratings of text quality across participants. These results confirm the influence of presentation features on text quality rating. They encourage teachers to be aware of this effect and emphasize the importance of spelling and writing support and interventions for students with dyslexia throughout education.

Statistical learning in children with a family risk of dyslexia.

The assumption that statistical learning is affected in dyslexia has generally been evaluated in children and adults with diagnosed dyslexia, not in pre-literate children with a family risk (FR) of dyslexia. In this study, four-to-five-year-old FR children (n = 25) and No-FR children (n = 33) completed tasks of emerging literacy (phoneme awareness and RAN). They also performed an online non-adjacent dependency learning (NADL) task, based on the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task paradigm. Children's accuracy (hits), signal sensitivity (d') and reaction times were measured. The FR group performed marginally more poorly on phoneme awareness and significantly more poorly on RAN than the No-FR group. Regarding NADL outcomes, the results were less straightforward: the data suggested successful statistical learning for both groups, as indicated by the hit and reaction time curves found. However, the FR group was less accurate and slower on the task than the No-FR group. Furthermore, unlike the No-FR group, performance in the FR group varied as a function of the specific stimulus presented. Taken together, these findings fail to show a robust difference in statistical learning between children with and without an FR of dyslexia at preschool age, in line with earlier work on older children and adults with dyslexia.

A stitch in time : Comparing late-identified, late-emerging and early-identified dyslexia.

When dyslexia is diagnosed late, the question is whether this is due to late-emerging (LE) or late-identified (LI) problems. In a random selection of dyslexia-diagnosis case files we distinguished early-diagnosed (Grade 1-3, n = 116) and late-diagnosed (Grade 4-6) dyslexia. The late-diagnosed files were divided into LE (n = 54) and LI dyslexia (n = 45). The LE group consisted of children whose national-curriculum literacy outcomes did not warrant referral for dyslexia diagnosis in Grades 1-2; the LI group of children whose literacy outcomes did, but who were referred for diagnostic assessment after Grade 3. At the time of diagnosis, the percentage of poor performers on word-level literacy measures generally did not differ between the groups. Only the LE group contained fewer poor performers than the early-diagnosed and LI group on some word-reading measures. All groups showed similar distributions of phonological difficulties. There were no indications of compensation through vocabulary, memory or IQ in either late-diagnosed group. Our diagnosis-based study confirms and extends previous research-based studies on LE dyslexia. Moreover, it shows that LI dyslexia exists, which can be regarded as the existence of instructional casualties. The findings speak to issues of identification, diagnosis and compensation and call for further efforts to improve the early identification of dyslexia.

The Same yet Different: Oral and Silent Reading in Children and Adolescents with Dyslexia.

Dyslexia is characterized by poor word reading. In research, education, and diagnosis, oral reading is commonly assessed, and outcomes are generalized to silent reading, although similarities and differences between oral and silent reading are poorly understood. We therefore compared oral word reading, oral text reading and silent text reading. Children (n = 40; aged 8-11) and adolescents (n = 54; aged 14-18) with dyslexia, and typical readers (n = 18, and n = 24 respectively), read a word-list and an age-appropriate text aloud, and silently read a text including instructions for simple tasks. Whereas oral and silent reading fluency were comparable for children, silent reading was more fluent than oral reading for adolescents. Importantly, the silent reading deficit of children and adolescents with dyslexia was as large as in oral reading or larger, highlighting the need for a focus on both reading modes in research, diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia.

Speech discrimination in infants at family risk of dyslexia: Group and individual-based analyses.

Deficiencies in discriminating and identifying speech sounds have been widely attested in individuals with dyslexia as well as in young children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia. A speech perception deficit has been hypothesized to be causally related to reading and spelling difficulties. So far, however, early speech perception of FR infants has not been assessed at different ages within a single experimental design. Furthermore, a combination of group- and individual-based analyses has not been made. In this cross-sectional study, vowel discrimination of 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old Dutch FR infants and their nonrisk (no-FR) peers was assessed. Infants (N = 196) were tested on a native English /aː/-/eː/ and non-native English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast using a hybrid visual habituation paradigm. Frequentist analyses were used to interpret group differences. Bayesian hierarchical modeling was used to classify individuals as speech sound discriminators. FR and no-FR infants discriminated the native contrast at all ages. However, individual classification of the no-FR infants suggests improved discrimination with age, but not for the FR infants. No-FR infants discriminated the non-native contrast at 6 and 10 months, but not at 8 months. FR infants did not show evidence of discriminating the contrast at any of the ages, with 0% being classified as discriminators. The group- and individual-based data are complementary and together point toward speech perception differences between the groups. The findings also indicate that conducting individual analyses on hybrid visual habituation outcomes is possible. These outcomes form a fruitful avenue for gaining more understanding of development, group differences, and prospective relationships.

Early and late diagnosed dyslexia in secondary school: Performance on literacy skills and cognitive correlates.

Although a diagnosis of dyslexia is often made during elementary school, severe and persistent literacy difficulties of a considerable group of students are only noticed during secondary school. The question arises whether the literacy(-related) deficits of these late identified students with dyslexia differ from those of early diagnosed students. To address this question, 10th Grade Dutch secondary school students with early (n = 35) and late (n = 19) identified dyslexia and their peers with average to good literacy abilities (n = 24) were compared on literacy skills and underlying cognitive skills. At the group level, both students with an early and late diagnosis performed more poorly than their typical peers, but they did not differ from each other on (pseudo-)word reading, spelling and underlying cognitive correlates (phonemic awareness, rapid automatized naming and visual attention span). The early and late group contained comparable percentages of students performing poorly on most measures. There were, however, more students in the early group who showed deficits in phonemic awareness. Our results indicate that students with early and late diagnosed dyslexia are highly comparable. Suggestions for fitting interventions are discussed.

Pathways Into Literacy: The Role of Early Oral Language Abilities and Family Risk for Dyslexia.

The present study investigated the role of early oral language and family risk for dyslexia in the two developmental pathways toward reading comprehension, through word reading and through oral language abilities. The sample contained 237 children (164 at family risk for dyslexia) from the Dutch Dyslexia Program. Longitudinal data were obtained on seven occasions when children were between 4 and 12 years old. The relationship between early oral language ability and reading comprehension at the age of 12 years was mediated by preliteracy skills and word-decoding ability for the first pathway and by later language abilities for the second pathway. Family risk influenced literacy development through its subsequent relations with preliteracy skills, word decoding, and reading comprehension. Although performance on language measures was often lower for the family-risk group than for the no-family-risk group, family risk did not have a specific relation with either early or later oral language abilities.

Effects of Vocabulary and Phonotactic Probability on 2-Year-Olds' Nonword Repetition.

This study investigates the relationship between nonword repetition (NWR) and vocabulary in 2-year-olds. Questions addressed are whether (1) NWR and vocabulary are associated, (2) phonotactic probability affects NWR, and (3) there is an interaction effect between phonotactic probability and vocabulary on NWR performance. The general aim of the study is to investigate whether NWR, as a task of phonological storage, assesses the quality of phonological representations in children as young as 2 years of age. 557 Dutch 2-year-olds performed a NWR task containing items of varying phonotactic probability as well as a receptive vocabulary task. The results showed a moderate, significant correlation between NWR and vocabulary. Phonotactic probability had an effect on NWR performance. Further analyses showed that there was a significant interaction between phonotactic probability and vocabulary for part of the items. These results support previously reported effects of vocabulary and phonotactic probability on NWR in older, English-speaking children for a large sample of Dutch-speaking 2-year-olds, and provide evidence that NWR assesses the quality of phonological representations already in very young children.

Past tense productivity in Dutch children with and without SLI: the role of morphophonology and frequency.

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the allomorph, token frequency and phonotactic probability (PP) of the novel verb form are considered. The results showed all groups were sensitive to the phonological cue. PP did not contribute to past tense inflection of novel verbs in any of the groups, but type frequency did in all three groups. Only the seven-year-old typically developing children relied on token frequency for inflection of regulars. The findings point to an important role of phonology and frequency in past tense acquisition for both TD children and children with SLI. We discuss how the SLI performance pattern relates to theories on SLI.

Characteristics of Children and Youth Referred for Language Assessment at Different Ages.

PURPOSE: Early detection of language delays is essential, as language is key for academic outcomes, well-being, and societal participation. Previous studies have focused on undetected delays in young children. Much less is known about referrals at older ages. In this study, we aimed to (a) establish how many children are referred at toddler age (2-3 years) and how many at lower elementary (4-7 years), upper elementary (8-12 years), and high school (13-16 years) age; (b) evaluate characteristics of the referred children and adolescents across age groups; and (c) assess whether the ensuing classification (no language disorder [LD], developmental LD, LD + additional problems) differed across age groups. METHOD: We used the 2010-2014 database of the Dutch federation of speech and hearing centers, containing 18,894 cases with target ages. We established the number of referrals in each age group (Q1) and assessed the composition of the age groups in terms of speech, language, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes (Q2), as well as in terms of classification (Q3). To answer Q2 and Q3, we conducted chi-squared analyses with the toddler group as reference group. RESULTS: Late-identified LDs exist: There were new referrals in all age groups. Compared to older age groups, the toddler group contained fewer girls and multilingual children. The toddler group also contained fewer children without an LD and more children with LD + additional problems. CONCLUSIONS: Reassuringly, children with multiple language problems are referred earliest. However, late-identified LDs exist, even at high school age. Girls and multilingual children tend to be missed at younger ages. More work on awareness and identification of language delays is needed, requiring awareness, knowledge, and tools for educational professionals.

Non-adjacent dependency learning in infants at familial risk of dyslexia.

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical relations (e.g. between 'is' and '-ing' in 'she is happily singing'). In a head-turn experiment with infants aged 1;6, family risk and typically developing infants were exposed to one of two novel languages containing dependencies of the type a-X-c, b-X-d or a-X-d, b-X-c, with fixed first and third elements and twenty-four different X elements. During test, typically developing children listened longer to ungrammatical strings (i.e. that did not correspond to their training language). However, family-risk children did not discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical strings, indicating deficient implicit learning. The implications of these findings in relation to dyslexia and other language-based disorders are discussed.

Non-adjacent dependency learning from variable input: investigating the effects of bilingualism, phonological memory, and cognitive control.

Introduction: One proposed advantage of bilingualism concerns the ability to extract regularities based on frequency information (statistical learning). Specifically, it has been proposed that bilinguals have an advantage in statistical learning that particularly holds in situations of variable input. Empirical evidence on this matter is scarce. An additional question is whether a potential bilingual advantage in statistical learning can be attributed to enhancements in phonological memory and cognitive control. Previous findings on effects of bilingualism on phonological memory and cognitive control are not consistent. Method: In the present study, we compared statistical learning from consistent and variable input in monolingual and bilingual children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2). We also explored whether phonological memory and cognitive control might account for any potential group differences found. Results: The findings suggest that there might be some advantage of bilinguals in statistical learning, but that this advantage is not robust: It largely surfaced only in t-tests against chance for the groups separately, did not surface in the same way for children and adults, and was modulated by experiment order. Furthermore, our results provide no evidence that any enhancement in bilinguals' statistical learning was related to improved phonological memory and cognitive control: bilinguals did not outperform monolinguals on these cognitive measures and performance on these measures did not consistently relate to statistical learning outcomes. Discussion: Taken together, these findings suggest that any potential effects of bilingualism on statistical learning probably do not involve enhanced cognitive abilities associated with bilingualism.

Perceived negative consequences of dyslexia: the influence of person and environmental factors.

Perceived negative consequences of dyslexia entail the degree to which an individual perceives negative outcomes, such as low academic achievement or feelings of anxiety and depression, and attributes these experiences to the disorder. In the current study, we examined how perceived consequences of dyslexia are influenced by person and environmental factors. Perceived consequences were evaluated for the academic domain and the domain of mental health (depression, anxiety). Participants were 123 Dutch students with dyslexia. Cognitive person factors (literacy skills and verbal IQ), socio-emotional person factors (self-perceived literacy skills and coping ability), and environmental factors (literacy demands, support from the institution, reactions of teachers and peers) were included as predictors. Results indicated that perceived negative consequences were not related to cognitive person factors. In contrast, better self-perceived literacy skills were associated with less perceived negative consequences in all domains (academic, depression, anxiety) and coping contributed to depression consequences. With respect to environmental factors, negative reactions in the academic environment contributed to perceived negative consequences of depression and anxiety. As such, findings indicate that individuals with dyslexia perceive negative consequences in the academic, anxiety, and depression domains which cannot be fully accounted for by their objective reading and writing problems. These factors should feature more prominently in future studies on dyslexia and should be addressed in treatment of dyslexia as well.

Non-word repetition and literacy in Dutch children at-risk of dyslexia and children with SLI: results of the follow-up study.

This study related the non-word repetition (NWR) abilities of 4-year-old children at-risk of dyslexia and children with specific language impairment (SLI) to their reading abilities at age eight. The results show that the SLI group obtained the lowest NWR score and the at-risk group performed in-between the control and SLI group. Approximately half of the at-risk and SLI group showed reading difficulties. Literacy and NWR abilities were correlated for the at-risk group, but not for the SLI group. The findings point toward differences between the groups and suggest that dyslexia and SLI should not be treated as a similar disorder.

Decreased sensitivity to phonemic mismatch in spoken word processing in adult developmental dyslexia.

Initial lexical activation in typical populations is a direct reflection of the goodness of fit between the presented stimulus and the intended target. In this study, lexical activation was investigated upon presentation of polysyllabic pseudowords (such as procodile for crocodile) for the atypical population of dyslexic adults to see to what extent mismatching phonemic information affects lexical activation in the face of overwhelming support for one specific lexical candidate. Results of an auditory lexical decision task showed that sensitivity to phonemic mismatch was less in the dyslexic population, compared to the respective control group. However, the dyslexic participants were outperformed by their controls only for word-initial mismatches. It is argued that a subtle speech decoding deficit affects lexical activation levels and makes spoken word processing less robust against distortion.

A step forward: Bayesian hierarchical modelling as a tool in assessment of individual discrimination performance.

Individual assessment of infants' speech discrimination is of great value for studies of language development that seek to relate early and later skills, as well as for clinical work. The present study explored the applicability of the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007) and the associated statistical analysis approach to assess individual discrimination of a native vowel contrast, /aː/ - /eː/, in Dutch 6 to 10-month-old infants. Houston et al. found that 80% (8/10) of the 9-month-old infants successfully discriminated the contrast between pseudowords boodup - seepug. Using the same approach, we found that 12% (14/117) of the infants in our sample discriminated the highly salient /aː/ -/eː/ contrast. This percentage was reduced to 3% (3/117) when we corrected for multiple testing. Bayesian hierarchical modeling indicated that 50% of the infants showed evidence of discrimination. Advantages of Bayesian hierarchical modeling are that 1) there is no need for a correction for multiple testing and 2) better estimates at the individual level are obtained. Thus, individual speech discrimination can be more accurately assessed using state of the art statistical approaches.

Phonology, Semantics, and the Comprehension-Expression Gap in Emerging Lexicons.

Purpose Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic neighborhood density, and word frequency (WF) significant predictors of the probability that words known (understood) by children would appear in their spoken lexicons? Method Monosyllabic words in the active (understood and said) and passive (understood, not said) lexicons of 201 toddlers were extracted from the Dutch Communicative Development Inventory (Zink & Lejaegere, 2002) parent-completed forms. A generalized linear mixed-effects model was applied to the data. Results Phonological neighborhood density and WF were independently and significantly associated with whether or not a known word would be in children's spoken lexicons, but semantic neighborhood density was not. There were individual differences in the impact of WF on the probability that known words would be said. Conclusion The novel findings reported here have 2 major implications. First, they indicate that the comprehension-expression gap exists partly because the phonological distributional properties of words determine how readily words can be phonologically encoded for word production. Second, there are likely subtle and complex individual differences in how and when the statistical properties of the ambient language impact on children's emerging lexicons that might best be explored via longitudinal sampling of word knowledge and use.

Reciprocal relationships between nonword repetition and vocabulary during the preschool years.

The aim of this longitudinal study is to evaluate 3 views on the relationship between nonword repetition and vocabulary: (i) the storage-based view that considers nonword repetition, a measure of phonological storage, as the driving force behind vocabulary development, (ii) the lexical restructuring view that considers improvements in nonword repetition as the result of vocabulary growth, and (iii) the "combined" view that assumes that both storage-based learning and lexical restructuring play a role, resulting in reciprocal relationships between nonword repetition and vocabulary during language development. Data are analyzed from 471 monolingual Dutch children who performed tasks assessing nonword repetition and vocabulary at yearly intervals, from ages 2 to 5. Latent Change Score (LCS) modeling of Item Response Theory-scaled scores was used to investigate the relationships between nonword repetition and vocabulary growth over time. Additionally, the statistical techniques used in earlier work-cross-lagged and latent growth modeling-were applied to see whether the results changed as a function of the analytical technique used. Results from a bivariate LCS model showed positive reciprocal influences from nonword repetition on vocabulary between 2 and 5 years. Such positive cross-influences also emerged from the cross-lagged and latent growth models. Predictive relationships from vocabulary to nonword repetition were stronger than vice versa. These results indicate that both storage-based learning and lexical restructuring play a role in vocabulary learning, at least in early stages of language development, with the clearest support found for lexical restructuring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Simulation of dyslexia. How literacy and cognitive skills can help distinguish college students with dyslexia from malingerers.

Academic accommodations associated with a diagnosis of dyslexia might be incentives for college students without reading or spelling difficulties to feign dyslexia and obtain the diagnosis unfairly. In the current study we examined malingering practices by comparing the performance of college students instructed to malinger dyslexia (n = 28) to that of students actually diagnosed with dyslexia (n = 16). We also included a control group of students without reading and spelling difficulties (n = 28). The test battery included tasks tapping literacy skills as well as underlying cognitive skills associated with literacy outcomes. These tasks are commonly used in diagnosing dyslexia. We examined patterns in the performance of malingerers across tasks and tested whether malingerers could be identified based on their performance on a limited number of tasks. Results indicated that malingerers scored significantly lower than students with dyslexia on reading and spelling skills; i.e., the core characteristics of dyslexia. Especially reading performance was extremely low and not in line with students' age and level of education. Findings for underlying cognitive skills were mixed. Overall, malingerers scored lower than students with dyslexia on tasks tapping mainly speed, whereas the two groups did not differ on tasks reflecting mainly accuracy. Based on word and pseudoword reading and letter and digit naming, the three groups could be distinguished with reasonable sensitivity and specificity. In all, results indicate that college students seem to understand on which tasks they should feign dyslexia, but tend to exaggerate difficulties on these tasks to the point where diagnosticians should mistrust performance.

Stress assignment in aphasia: word and non-word reading and non-word repetition.

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word reading and non-word repetition tasks. Unlike the non-brain-damaged group, the patients showed a strong regularization tendency in their repetition of irregular patterns. The patients' stress error patterns suggest an impairment in retention or retrieval of targets with irregular stress patterns. Limited verbal short-term memory is proposed as a possible underlying cause for the stress difficulties.