Complex phonological tasks predict reading in 7 to 11 years of age typically developing Russian children

Abstract

Background: The important role of phonological processing for reading has been demonstrated by many studies. The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of phonological processing for reading in Russian. Specifically, we tested whether the overall complexity of a phonological task predicts reading fluency and reading comprehension. Method: We used seven phonological tests ranked according to the number of linguistic processes involved in each task. We examined the relative difficulty of the tests and the relationship between phonological processing and reading skills (reading fluency and comprehension of simpler and more difficult texts) in 90 typically developing 7 to 11 years-of-age Russian-speaking children.

Benchmark measures of eye movements during reading in Russian children

“…Previous behavioral studies of reading consistently found that better phonological processing skills were associated with faster reading (e.g., Del Campo et al, 2015;Dorofeeva et al, 2020;Wagner & Torgesen, 1987) and might predict reading development at school (Catts et al, 2001;Lonigan et al, 2000;Parrila et al, 2004;Schatschneider et al, 2004). Specifically, Dorofeeva et al (2020) showed that more complex tasks (involving more linguistic processes) predicted reading fluency better than less complex tasks. For example, for Russian primary-school students, the task that required replacing a specific phoneme in a pseudoword with another phoneme explained reading fluency better than phoneme discrimination or lexical decision tasks.…”

“…In addition to the eye-tracking reading task, 217 participants performed the changing sound in a pseudoword task from the Russian Test of Phonological Processing (RuTOPP, Dorofeeva et al, 2020). This task involves five processes: phonological decoding, phonological working memory, phonological analysis, operation with phoneme sequences, and phonological retrieval and articulation.…”

“…This task involves five processes: phonological decoding, phonological working memory, phonological analysis, operation with phoneme sequences, and phonological retrieval and articulation. This task was the best predictor of oral reading fluency in Russian typically-developing schoolchildren (Dorofeeva et al, 2020). In the task, the children were asked to replace a specific phoneme in an auditorily presented pseudoword (N=24) with another phoneme (e.g., in the trial "Replace the sound /b/ with /p/ in the "mimiba" the correct response is "mimipa").…”

“…We tested 174 children in the laboratories in Moscow and Sirius (Sochi, Russia) and 48 children at schools in Moscow and Sochi. First, we conducted behavioral testing that included the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices (Raven, 2004), the Standardized Assessment of Reading Skills, text 1 'Kak ja lovil rakov' [How I caught crayfish] (Kornev & Ishimova, 2010), and the phonological processing task (Dorofeeva et al, 2020). The behavioral testing lasted about 15 minutes.…”

Global reading processes in children with high risk of dyslexia: a scanpath analysis

“…Additionally, we assessed children's phonological awareness using the Russian Test of Phonological Processing (RuTOPP, Dorofeeva et al, 2020) (see Table 1 for average scores for performance on reading assessment and phonological awareness tasks). In the phoneme detection task, the children heard a phoneme followed by a word and were asked to decide whether the phoneme was present in the word by pressing yes/ no keys on the tablet.…”