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Published on: September 17, 2019
Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Relations Between Early Rise Time Discrimination Abilities and Pre-School
Marina Kalashnikova1,2, Denis Burnham3, Usha Goswami4
1Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009 San Sebastian, Spain.
Insights
Infant rise time sensitivity at 10 months predicts later reading skills like rapid automatised naming (RAN) and letter knowledge. Poorer sensitivity at 60 months is linked to dyslexia risk and impacts phonological awareness.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Auditory Neuroscience
- Educational Psychology
Background:
- The Seeds of Literacy project tracks infants with and without family risk for dyslexia.
- Investigates the link between early auditory processing and later reading abilities.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess if infant auditory sensitivity (rise time discrimination) predicts reading achievement.
- To examine relations between early auditory skills and pre-reading behaviors at 60 months.
- To re-evaluate dyslexia risk at 60 months based on pre-reading measures.
Main Methods:
- Followed 44 children from 5 months, assessing rise time discrimination at 10 and 60 months.
- Administered pre-reading assessments at 60 months: phonological awareness, phonological memory, RAN, letter knowledge, language skills.
- Re-grouped children into dyslexia risk (60mDR) and no risk (60mNDR) at 60 months.
Main Results:
- Rise time sensitivity at 10 months correlated with RAN and letter knowledge at 60 months.
- Children classified as 60mDR showed poorer rise time sensitivity at 60 months.
- Rise time sensitivity at 60 months related to phonological awareness, RAN, and receptive vocabulary.
Conclusions:
- Infant rise time sensitivity is a significant predictor of pre-reading phonological abilities.
- Findings support Temporal Sampling theory regarding auditory processing and literacy development.
Background/Objectives:
The Seeds of Literacy project has followed infants at family risk for dyslexia (FR group) and infants not at family risk (NFR group) since the age of 5 months, exploring whether infant measures of auditory sensitivity and phonological skills are related to later reading achievement. Here, we retrospectively assessed relations between infant performance on a rise time discrimination task with new pre-reading behavioural measures administered at 60 months. In addition, we re-classified dyslexia risk at 60 months and again assessed relations to rise time sensitivity. Participants were re-grouped using the pre-reading behavioural measures as either dyslexia risk at 60 months (60mDR) or no dyslexia risk (60mNDR).
Methods:
FR and NFR children (44 English-learning children) completed assessments of rise time discrimination at 10 and/or 60 months, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid automatised naming (RAN), letter knowledge, and language skills (receptive vocabulary and grammatical awareness).
Results:
Longitudinal analyses showed significant time-lagged correlations between rise time sensitivity at 10 months and both RAN and letter knowledge at 60 months. Rise time sensitivity at 60 months was significantly poorer in those children re-grouped as 60mDR, and rise time sensitivity was significantly related to concurrent phonological awareness, RAN, letter knowledge, and receptive vocabulary, but not to tests of grammatical awareness.
Conclusions:
The data support the view that children's rise time sensitivity is significantly related to their pre-reading phonological abilities. These findings are discussed in terms of Temporal Sampling theory.
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