Deconstructing phonological tasks:the contribution of stimulus and response type to the prediction of early decoding skills

Abstract

Abstract Phonological tasks are highly predictive of reading development but their complexity obscures the underlying mechanisms driving this association. There are three key components hypothesised to drive the relationship between phonological tasks and reading; (a) the linguistic nature of the stimuli, (b) the phonological complexity of the stimuli, and (c) the production of a verbal response. We isolated the contribution of the stimulus and response components separately through the creation of latent variables to represent specially designed tasks that were matched for procedure. These tasks were administered to 570 6 to 7-year-old children along with standardised tests of regular word and non-word reading. A structural equation model, where tasks were grouped according to stimulus, revealed that the linguistic nature and the phonological complexity of the stimulus predicted unique variance in decoding, over and above matched comparison tasks without these components. An alternative model, grouped according to response mode, showed that the production of a verbal response was a unique predictor of decoding beyond matched tasks without a verbal response. In summary, we found that multiple factors contributed to reading development, supporting multivariate models over those that prioritize single factors. More broadly, we demonstrate the value of combining matched task designs with latent variable modelling to deconstruct the components of complex tasks.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-852671
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology
College of Health & Life Sciences > Clinical and Systems Neuroscience
College of Health & Life Sciences
College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Optometry > Vision, Hearing and Language
College of Health & Life Sciences > Aston Institute of Health & Neurodevelopment (AIHN)
Additional Information: © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funding: ESRC (ES/H031685/1).
Uncontrolled Keywords: latent variable modelling,phonological awareness,decoding,task,reading,measurement,Linguistics and Language,Cognitive Neuroscience,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Language and Linguistics,Developmental and Educational Psychology
Publication ISSN: 1873-7838
Last Modified: 04 Mar 2024 08:14
Date Deposited: 16 Jul 2015 12:05
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2015-10
Published Online Date: 2015-07-10
Accepted Date: 2015-06-26
Submitted Date: 2014-08-06
Authors: Cunningham, Anna J.
Witton, Caroline (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-5610-4234)
Talcott, Joel B. (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-7958-8369)
Burgess, Adrian P. (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-0977-8105)
Shapiro, Laura R. (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-3276-457X)

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