Reading and spelling skills are important to communicate in today's literate society, however, the underlying processes of spelling skills are under‐researched compared to reading skills. Our goals were to (a) study how the component skills of phonological, orthographic and morphological awareness are different in adults with and without reading difficulties, and (b) characterize the relationship between the component skills and reading and spelling performance in both skilled and poor readers. Participants (N = 37, N = 15 with reading impairments and N = 22 skilled readers) took part in the study where they completed several literacy‐based measures. We performed a series of mixed ANOVAs to study the between‐group differences in performance and the relationship between different literacy outcomes, respectively. We found evidence for poor phonological and morphological awareness in the poor readers compared to the skilled readers. We also found differential relationships between the component skills and reading and spelling behavior. Specifically, sound awareness was significantly related to reading and spelling measures in the skilled readers, whereas morphological and sound awareness played an important role in the same skills in the poor readers. We discuss these findings in the context of potential remediation strategies for adults with persistent literacy impairments.
Objective:
There is a strong relationship between reading and articulation (Lervåg & Hulme, 2009; Pan et al., 2011). Given the tight coupling of these processes, innovative approaches are needed to understand the intricacies associated with print-speech connections. Here we ran a series of tightly controlled experiments to examine the impact of mouth perturbations on silent reading.
Method:
We altered the mouth, via somatosensory feedback, in several ways: (a) a large lollipop in the mouth (E1), (b) a candy stick (bite bar) held horizontally between the teeth (E2), and (c) lidocaine that served to numb the mouth (E3). Three tasks were completed: (a) picture categorization, (b) “spell” lexical decision (Spell-LDT; “does the letter string spell a real word, yes or no?”), and (c) “sound” lexical decision (Sound-LDT; “does the letter string sound like a real word, yes or no?”). Participants (N = 97; E1 = 27; E2 = 32; E3 = 38) completed each of the tasks two times: once with a somatosensory perturbation (lollipop, bite bar, or lidocaine) and once without.
Results:
For each experiment, a linear mixed effects analysis was run. Overall, we found that the lollipop (E1) and lidocaine (E3) had some specific effects on word recognition (e.g., for “no” responses), particularly in the Spell-LDT, whereas the bite bar (E2) had no effect on word recognition. The picture categorization task was not impacted by any perturbations.
Conclusion:
These findings provide evidence that sensorimotor information is connected to reading. We discuss how these findings advance our understanding of a print-to-speech framework.
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