Search

Phonological awareness (PA) is at the foundation of reading development: PA is introduced before formal reading instruction, has predictive value for later reading abilities, is a primary target for early intervention, and is considered one of the core mechanisms in developmental dyslexia. Conventional approaches to assessing PA are time-consuming and resource intensive: assessments must be individually administered, require expertise, and scoring verbal responses is challenging and subjective. Therefore, we introduce a rapid, automated, online measure of PA — The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading - Phonological Awareness (ROAR-PA) — that can be widely implemented in classrooms and research studies without a test administrator. We explored whether this gamified, online task, that relies on touchscreen/click responses, can serve as an accurate and reliable measure of PA and as a good predictor of reading development. We found that ROAR-PA is well correlated with standardized measures of PA (CTOPP-2, r = .80) and reading (Woodcock-Johnson, r = .50), for children from Pre-K through fourth grade and achieves exceptional reliability (𝜶 = .96) in a 12-minute automated, online assessment. Furthermore, validation in 50 first and second grade classrooms shows reliable implementation in large, public school classrooms with predictive value of future reading development.

Education has faced unprecedented disruption during the COVID pandemic. Understanding how students have adapted as we have entered a different phase of the pandemic and some communities have returned to more typical schooling will inform a suite of policy interventions and subsequent research. We use data from an oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment—a rapid assessment taking only a few minutes that measures a fundamental reading skill—to examine COVID’s effects on children’s reading ability during the pandemic. We find that students in the first 200 days of the 2020–2021 school year tended to experience slower growth in ORF relative to prepandemic years. We also observe slower growth in districts with a high percentage of English language learners and/or students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. These findings offer valuable insight into the effects of COVID on one of the most fundamental skills taught to children.

Reading requires the correct identification of letters and letter positions within words. Selective attention is, therefore, required to select chunks of the text for sequential processing. Despite the extensive literature on visual attention, the well-known effects of spatial cues in simple perceptual tasks cannot inform us about the role of attention in a task as complex as reading. Here, we systematically manipulate spatial attention in a multi-letter processing task to understand the effects of spatial cues on letter encoding in typical adults. Overall, endogenous (voluntary) cue benefits were larger than exogenous (reflexive). We show that cue benefits are greater in the left than in the right visual field and larger for the most crowded letter positions. Endogenous valid cues reduced errors due to confusing letter positions more than misidentifications, specifically for the most crowded letter positions. Therefore, shifting endogenous attention along a line of text is likely an important mechanism to alleviate the effects of crowding on encoding letters within words. Our results help set the premise for constructing theories about how specific mechanisms of attention support reading development in children. Understanding the link between reading development and attention mechanisms has far-reaching implications for effectively addressing the needs of children with reading disabilities.

Research on educational technologies for reading instruction is disproportionate to the myriad applications in the marketplace. Here we assess a web-based reading tool, Sound it Out, that assists struggling readers in decoding by annotating vowels with small icons indicating the associate phoneme. Created as a collaboration between researchers and technology developers, the phonemic-image cue was designed to scaffold letter-sound correspondence. Study 1 examined whether Sound it Out provides an immediate benefit to reading performance in thirty struggling readers (ages 8-10) randomly assigned to counterbalanced groups in a single-session. Results showed that, without a period of practice, children were not able to capitalize on the cues for improved text reading. Study 2 utilized a repeated measures randomized controlled trial design to determine if an extended practice period (1 month) produced gains and whether a caregiver supervised practice (“dyadic reading”) enhanced benefits. Seventy-six struggling readers (ages 7-13) were randomly assigned to two intervention groups (independent and dyadic reading) and one control group. Results showed significant, dose-response benefits to decoding accuracy and passage reading accuracy for the combined intervention groups in comparison to controls. Moreover, supervised dyadic reading enhanced the effect of practice. These results highlight the potential for an evidenced-based supplemental learning technology to support both independent and shared reading for struggling readers.

The speed-accuracy tradeoff suggests that responses generated under time constraints will be less accurate. While it has undergone extensive experimental verification, it is less clear whether it applies in settings where time pressures are not being experimentally manipulated (but where respondents still vary in their utilization of time). Using a large corpus of 29 response time datasets containing data from cognitive tasks without experimental manipulation of time pressure, we probe whether the speed-accuracy tradeoff holds across a variety of tasks using idiosyncratic within-person variation in speed. We find inconsistent relationships between marginal increases in time spent responding and accuracy; in many cases, marginal increases in time do not predict increases in accuracy. However, we do observe time pressures (in the form of time limits) to consistently reduce accuracy and for rapid responses to typically show the anticipated relationship (i.e., they are more accurate if they are slower). We also consider analysis of items and individuals. We find substantial variation in the item-level associations between speed and accuracy. On the person side, respondents who exhibit more within-person variation in response speed are typically of lower ability. Finally, we consider the predictive power of a person's response time in predicting out-of-sample responses; it is generally a weak predictor. Collectively, our findings suggest the speed-accuracy tradeoff may be limited as a conceptual model in its application in non-experimental settings and, more generally, offer empirical results and an analytic approach that will be useful as more response time data is collected.

An accurate model of the factors that contribute to individual differences in reading ability depends on data collection in large, diverse and representative samples of research participants. However, that is rarely feasible due to the constraints imposed by standardized measures of reading ability which require test administration by trained clinicians or researchers. Here we explore whether a simple, two-alternative forced choice, time limited lexical decision task (LDT), self-delivered through the web-browser, can serve as an accurate and reliable measure of reading ability. We found that performance on the LDT is highly correlated with scores on standardized measures of reading ability such as the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification test administered in the lab (r = 0.91, disattenuated r = 0.94). Importantly, the LDT reading ability measure is highly reliable (r = 0.97). After optimizing the list of words and pseudowords based on item response theory, we found that a short experiment with 80 words (2-3 minutes) provides a reliable (r = 0.95) measure of reading ability. Thus, the self-administered, rapid online assessment of reading ability (ROAR) developed here overcomes the constraints of resource-intensive, in-person reading assessment, and provides an efficient and automated tool for effective online research into the mechanisms of reading (dis)ability.

Interacting with a cluttered and dynamic environment requires making decisions about visual information at relevant locations while ignoring irrelevant locations. Typical adults can do this with covert spatial attention: prioritizing particular visual field locations even without moving the eyes. Deficits of covert spatial attention have been implicated in developmental dyslexia, a specific reading disability. Previous studies of children with dyslexia, however, have been complicated by group differences in overall task ability that are difficult to distinguish from selective spatial attention. Here, we used a single-fixation visual search task to estimate orientation discrimination thresholds with and without an informative spatial cue in a large sample (N = 123) of people ranging in age from 5 to 70 years and with a wide range of reading abilities. We assessed the efficiency of attentional selection via the cueing effect: the difference in log thresholds with and without the spatial cue. Across our whole sample, both absolute thresholds and the cueing effect gradually improved throughout childhood and adolescence. Compared to typical readers, individuals with dyslexia had higher thresholds (worse orientation discrimination) as well as smaller cueing effects (weaker attentional selection). Those differences in dyslexia were especially pronounced prior to age 20, when basic visual function is still maturing. Thus, in line with previous theories, literacy skills are associated with the development of selective spatial attention.

Reading is a complex process that involves low-level visual processing, phonological processing, and higher-level semantic processing. Given that skilled reading requires integrating information among these different systems, it is likely that reading difficulty—known as dyslexia—can emerge from impairments at any stage of the reading circuitry. To understand contributing factors to reading difficulties within individuals, it is necessary to diagnose the function of each component of the reading circuitry. Here, we investigated whether adults with dyslexia who have impairments in visual processing respond to a visual manipulation specifically targeting their impairment. We collected psychophysical measures of visual crowding and tested how each individual’s reading performance was affected by increased text- spacing, a manipulation designed to alleviate severe crowding. Critically, we found that many individuals with dyslexia showed elevated crowding, and that these individuals read faster when text was rendered with increased letter-, word- and line-spacing. Our findings point to a subtype of dyslexia involving elevated crowding and demonstrate that individuals with dyslexia benefit from interventions personalized to their specific impairments.