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    170 Part Il « Age Changes in Specific Subject Areas . . various researchers have doubted the existence of a mental parsep, cal whee aod prairie classes. Although these doubters have made some sood points. there is considerable evidence that syntactic knowledge is an important as. me of sentence comprehension (regardless of whether the parser relies on rules or oth ers kinds of representations). In the first place, there isthe syndrome called Broca' aphasia that results from injury to the Broca’s area of the cerebral cortex (located in the left frontal lobe). Individuals who have this disorder are able to comprehend the mean. ings of individual words, but have trouble with the syntax of sentences (Caplan & Waters, 1999; Just & Carpenter, 1987). For example, they see no difference between the follow. ing two sentences: 1. They fed her the dog biscuits. 2. They fed her dog the biscuits. Although these two sentences have the same words, they have different tree structures and, therefore, different meanings. In addition, there are many well-known “garden-path” sentences such as the following: 3. The old train the young. 4. Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him. 5. The horse raced past the barn fell. Note that there are no typos in the sentences 3 to 5. If you read a few wards of each and then said, “Huh?” at some point, that is because your syntax analyzer started to construct ‘one kind of structure until it met a particular word that violated expectations (e.g,, the seo- Cond the in sentence 3, and seems in sentence 4). A sentence such as, “The old train blew its whistle,” would probably be more consistent with expectations than that listed as sentence 3. in sentence 4, a comma after jogs would have helped you create the right tree structure. Further, there are studies that show how syntax affects both the meaning and pro- ‘nunciation of a word that is encountered. For example, read the following sentences: | Does sentence § mean that it can be a bother to go see your relatives, or that rela- tives who come to see you can be a bother? Theoretically, the only way someone could “see” the multiple readings of these sentences is if he or she constructed multiple syntac- tic structures for each one. In sum, then, syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic knowledge all contribute to the con- struction of a situation model. Once in place, this model prompts a reader to form expec- tations about what will occur next in the text. As each new segment of text is encountered, skilled readers interpret what is read in a way that makes it consistent with the current situation model. ‘The model of proficient reading in Figure 7.2 shows the two-way relationship be- tween the context processor and the meaning processor. The model implies that the prior context can influence the meaning assigned to a word and that current meanings influence the construction of a situation model. Thus, when skilled readers process the sentence, “John removed the thorn from the rose,” they assign a different meaning to rose than they would if they read the sentence, “The crowd rose to sing the national anther.” However, research has shown that the context-meaning effects are weak relative to the orthography-meaning effects. That is, readers are much better at predicting possible meanings of a word based on its perceived spelling than they are at predicting which word will follow a preceding context (Adams, 1990; Snow et al., 1998). When context-meaning links conflict with orthography-meaning links, the latter win out. Thus, skilled reading consists, first and foremost, of learning the cortespondences between written words and their meanings. Context effects occur after words are perceived and various possible mean- ings are accessed. But overall, context, orthography, meanings, and phonology all work in concert to help a reader construct the best possible interpretation of a text. The Simple View of Reading ‘The simple view of reading begins with the insight that reading comprehension and lis- tenii ion have much in common (Gough et al., 1996). For example, the same rds that are ambiguous in one lity (e.g., listening); both and on word order to com- ‘ledge supports the inter- ies suggest that reading can decoding or translating comprehension). nist model by noting that jonological processors of the ssible by “grafting” the or- is represented by the links ble Lecause a typical five- end spoken language but ich an individual can . a Student has to pan I « Age ChAnBES sfc Subject Areas ty + Age Chane in Speci at both decoding 172 . : and comprehending. To capture the fact that decoding ancy killed sit not individually sufficient for reading, Gough ic sie are io eee hypothesis. If reading skills (7) decoding seins Ge Jeagues skills can be placed on three hypothetical continua that range ime competending (re pas more skill would receive a score closer 101), reading mayo to 1 (eg. someone ind comprehension and not simply the addition of these con the product pt ean xc suggests. Both decoding and comprehending have nents 5 the form ing to take place. In their studies, Gough and colleagues oye a es between reading scores (r) and the product of scores for decoding gg that coring (d X c) were higher (r’s = 8410.91) than the individual correlation, comprehending (0 dreading or comprehension and réading. Decoding was measured by between decoding i seudowords. Listening Comprehension was measured by having ae having sey stones and answer questions about these stores, Reading was measung using standardized reading tests. Main Points Collectively, the definitions of reading evident in the conclusions of the National Research Council, connectionist models of reading, and the simple view of reading all emphasize the importance and integration of orthographic skills (including decoding), language com- prehension skills (phonological processing, semantics, syntax), and background knowl. edge. When do these skills emerge in development and when does their integration seem evident? It is to these questions that we turn to next. The Development of Skilled Reading Now that you know what skilled reading involves, you have sense of the end point of read- ing development (but, of course, reading always improves a little with continued practice and experience). The beginning point of reading development is that point in a child's life hat reading involves (, ion, we shall c ginning p ding deve! Chapter 7 + Beginning Reading 173 (p. 849). The construct of emergent literacy was originally proposed in the 1980s as an al- temative to the idea of reading readiness that has existed in educational circles at least since the early 1900s. According to the latter, it is not possible to teach reading to children until they are maturationally “ready” to benefit from this instruction. Some went so far as to use 1Q tests to determine when the brain was ready (Morphett & Washburn, 1931). Notwithstanding the merits of this brain-based proposal, a readiness conception implies an all-or-none dichotomy between readers (i.., first graders who are ready) and nonreaders (ie., preschoolers who are not ready). The emergent literacy conception, in contrast, im- plies a continuum of skills that have their origin well before formal reading instruction be- Bins in first grade (Teale & Sulzby, 1986). Some examples of such skills include knowing that (a) the words in @ book tell the story and the pictures are just an accompaniment to the words; (b) English readers read words from left to right and jines of words from the top of a page to the bottom; (c) written words correspond to spoken words; (d) one reads all of the words on a page before reading the words on the next page; (e) pages are read in a spe- cific order from the first to the last page; (f) there is someone (i.e, the author) who had the story in his or her mind and decided to write it down so that children could know the story too; and (g) writing is like speaking because it is way of communicating ideas (Clay, 1985; Sulzby, 1991; Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). The advocates of the emergent literacy perspective argue that such ideas are just as important as knowledge of the alphabetic principle for beginning reading. Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998) elaborated on the original conception of emergent ‘teracy to suggest that it also involves other kinds of skills such as an oral vocabulary, Knowledge of syntax, knowledge of letters of the alphabet, metalinguistic knowledge of Sounds in words. the alphabetic principle. pretend reading. reading motivation, and verbal Processing skills (¢,g., rapid naming and verbal working memory). Most of these factors are discussed in the next section, so they will not,be described further here, Predicting Reading Success From the standpoint of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, there are two main cat- the reading skills they need to be suc- B legislation is designed to pressure essful category. To accomplish this to answer the following question: of the unsuccessful students? When ¢ curriculum, it would seem that essful and unsuccessful students is ical race theory in Chapter 13 for a fering levels of reading achievement ves. To test this assumption, a stan- n when they are in preschool or who eventually becomes @ good id unsuccessful students differ as to elevate the performance of less few preliminary points about 11 « Age Changes in Specific Subject Areas Part I * A to- 1.0 indicating a stronger : rs closer {0 or+ 0 ee ee mber of books in a home is found to correlate r = ue, ans an increase in books is associated with higher rea, s he correlation is less than 1,0 means that there may be ga me but the child did not end up being inthe en =10and +1.0. wit mat If, for example, the nu Iter reading sUEESS, oe scores. However, the fact that the c n the hot SS aan eh end of first grade (and vice versa). egory os ata We old saying goes, “correlation does not imply causation.” Sim, mare omelation does not mean that one could make sure that ll children become ag cessful readers by increasing the level of the predictive factor. Continuing the previous ey. ample children’s reading achievement would not necessarily go up ifthe government were to buy lots of books for families that have very few. Other problems with correlational stud, ies include spurious correlations and age changes in the predictive power of certain fac. tors. A spurious correlation exists when two variables are linked through some other variable. In effect, the linkage is illusory. To illustrate such a correlation, consider the fac that there is an association between the number of physicians who work in a geographic area and the infant mortality rate in thet area (the more doctors there are, the higher the in. fant death rate). This spurious correlation can be explained as follows. There tend to be more physicians and more poor people living in urban areas than in rural areas. The infant ‘mortality rate tends to be much higher among the poor than among the rich, so the infant morality rate tends to be higher in the cities than elsewhere. Hence, the number of doc- tors has nothing to do with the infant morality rate, but a correlation computed between these two factors makes these variables appear to be related somehow. In this case, their apparent linkage is explained by other variables, such as a common geographic area and Poverty. Applied to the case of reading success, there are a number of factors that are cor related with reading success (discussed shortly). Before we can understand the differences between successful and unsuccessful readers, we will first need to determine which of these correlations are real and which are spurious, _ Besides spurious correlations, another interpretive problem has to do withthe fact that Predictive relationships may be more complicated than the “more of X yields more of Y” variety (e.g., more literacy experiences yield more readiness to benefit from instruction). ‘Some activities or skills may isite n yi as time goes on (de Jong & van der Lei vee reading scores may be low, but: Relatedly, some correlations level of some experience to h utes a day), Any amount over occurs, lower correlations e % x ¥ Raut | PT £ Chapter? + Beginning Reading 175 ol Readiness. There are widely used Sem number of Component skills such as Ree ee eee pers the ability to follow directions, and visual memory for Pie! Sue ian Readiness Test). There are also other more specie meacena See MeO into readiness to read. Five studies found fairly high comelations bere eee oe readiness measures and first-grade reading scores that ranged between 34 saa Tenney a correlation across these studies was r = 62 (Bolig & Fletcher, 1973; ee 1988: Nagle, 1979: Randel, Fry, & Ralls, 1977), In arelted way, twentyrene adic: cenng the more specific reading readiness measures generated an average corelation of t=. Se (Gnow et al, 1998). Thus, children who had higher. readiness scores in preschool showed the highest reading achievement scores at the end of first grade, Socioeconomic Status (SES). SES refers to such things as income level and parent ed- vcation, In their meta-analysis of the correlations between SES and various indices of school achievement, Iverson and Walberg (1982) reported an average correlation of = ST between SES and reading scores (across eight studies), Other researchers concur that children from higher SES households demonstrate higher levels of reading readiness and emergent literacy than children from lower SES households (Adams, 1990; Baker, Fernandez-Fein, Scher, & Williams, 1998; Bowey, 1995; Snow et al., 1998). Letter Knowledge. Starting with Chall (1967) and Bond and Dykstra (1967), a number of studies have shown that children’s knowledge of-letter names is a very good predictor of their beginning reading achievement (Adams, 1990). Thus, children who enter school knowing that B is called “bee” and T is called “tee” perform better than children who lack this knowledge on end-of-year reading achievement tests in first grade. The correlations tend to hover around r = 53 (Snow et al., 1998). ‘Across seven stud reading achieve~ {76 part It + Age Changes in Specific Subject Areas eness is the ability to reflect on, ma Phonemie Avera eee ean rparaosahecd’ byhutetg Chae dee discriminate amore Pid pink be pronounced ifthe last sound were eliminated?) gt sounds (@-8» Tras in a word, and so on. The average correlation between measures © number ot soreness and reading achievement is r= 42 (Adams, 1990: Snow etal. 954 phone mi man, & Nesdale, 1988; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1991). In recent formu san ten argued that phonemic awareness is just one of a set of phonological p ing or phonological sensitivity abilities that predict reading success (Anthony & Lonigan, 2604), Children who can recognize the global similarity between words such as beach ang aaah ce identify words that rhyme such as beach and reach are also more likely to be scaders than children who cannot perform these tasks well (Carroll & Snowling, 2001) ty. teresting a number of studies have also found cross-linguisic transfer in phonologieg| processing skills in bilingual children, For example, preschool children who have good pho. ological processing skills in their first language (e.g., Spenish) often become good read, ers in elementary school even when books are written in their newly acquired second language (e.g., English) (Chow et al., 2005; Lesaux & Siegel, 2003; Lindsey, Manis, & Bailey, 2003). lations, Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN). Measures of RAN ask children to name a series of enters or objects as quickly as they can (Compton, 2003). Typically, the score reflects the number of items correctly named in sixty seconds. Scarborough (1998) reported that the median correlation between RAN measures and subsequent reading measures is r = .40, Language Skills. Children enter first grade with a variety of oral language abilities. Studies have shown that correlations range between r = .24 andr = .49, depending on the language skill in question (Hammill & McNutt, 1980; Snow et al., 1998; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987). Across fifty-nine studies, Scarborough found that the average correlation was r = .38 between oral language skills and reading achievement in school. Whereas the most predictive language skill was the ability to name a series of pictures (r = .49), the least predictive skill was the ability to point to pictures named by the tester (r = 33). Thus, it or productive Vo mate Kae aarre rsa ee warrer Chipee 7 Sereming Raslng difference between an acceptable and u thet puable constructions are formed by fiotalaeaae ea Ae aked to listen t0ill-formed sentences such we or OT. Fo soaking so loudly?” and asked whether they rel 1988: Tunmer etal, 1988). The result fet grammatical violations as a preschooler grade reading scores. 177 ion. In most studies, un- “4 r example, a child "Made cookies eae Ww vane Intelligence. Recall that the readiness const one could use a child’s mental age on an IQ tes Just & Carpenter, 1987; Stanovich et al., 1984 js correlated with later reading success, this c thesis would predict. For example, the average comtlation i isis for children below the fourth gridelis shee 45 Gabe eucisei ie median correlation is r = .34 (Stanovich, 1988). Given that 1Q is moderately comelated with working memory span (see Chapter 3), itis possible thatthe correlation between 1Q and reading really reflects the working memory loads of 1Q tests. uct Was partially based on the finding that to predict readiness to read (Adams, 1990: ). While it s true that a child's preschool 1Q ‘orrelation is not as high as the mental age hy- Operativity. Finally, several studies have shown that concrete operational skills are cor- related with first-grade reading performance (Arlin, 1981; Tunmer et al., 1988). The kinds _of skills measured in these studies include classification, seriation, and conservation (see Piaget's theory in Chapter 2). The correlations betwéen operativity and reading skills range between .21 and .48 (mean = .33). Before making too much of any one of these correlations. we need to consider the extent to which they are inflated or even spurious. What we really want to know is whether 4 predictor remains a strong predictor after one controls for other variables. There are two approaches to test for the unique predictive value of a factor. One approach, called regres- sion, we gave just two mea- r dge. Then, we came ictional table below 78 fe Subject Areas part II » Age Changes i” ‘Specific Subject very child who has a high 1Q at five years of ie aot raat (like Matt above: read his data ae 1Q child should be a poor reader by the end of fist the top row).

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