Orthography and modality influence speech production in skilled and poor readers

Meredith Sue Saletta, Purdue University

Abstract

The acquisition of literacy skills influences both the perception and production of spoken language. The connection between spoken and written language processing develops differently in individuals with varying degrees of reading skill. Some specific phonological and orthographic factors which play a role in this developmental course include neighborhood density, orthographic transparency, and phonotactic probability. In the current study, nonword stimuli which contain manipulations of the above factors were created. Participants repeated or read aloud the nonwords. Three groups of readers participated: adults with typical reading skills, children developing reading skills typically, and adults demonstrating low levels of reading proficiency. Analyses of implicit linguistic processing, including measures of segmental accuracy, segmental variability, and articulatory stability, were conducted. Results indicated that these three groups followed a consistent pattern on all three measures, in that the typical adults demonstrated the strongest performance, the children demonstrated the weakest performance, and the adults with low levels of reading skill demonstrated intermediate performance. All three groups improved in both phonological and motor learning with practice, but only the adults with low reading skills demonstrated learning as a direct consequence of orthographic transparency. Finally, reading skill was correlated with articulatory stability in both groups of adults. These data make an important contribution to the understanding of the typology of reading disorders, as well as the influence of orthographic factors on typical language and reading development.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Goffman, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Speech therapy|Literacy|Reading instruction

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