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Beyond phonemic awareness: What educational role for other phonological processes? KERRY HEMPENSTALL

Kerry Hempenstall. (2004) Beyond phonemic awareness: What educational role for other phonological processes? Australian Journal of Learning Disabilities 9(1). DOI:10.1080/19404150409546748 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233936509

ABSTRACT

A great deal of recent interest in finding ways of enhancing literacy outcomes across educational systems has been fuelled by demands for increasing accountability. Techniques and programs are being investigated intensively, both by governments through expert committees and through the research community. The findings of the National Reading Panel have resonated strongly and the intervention foci recommended have enjoyed unprecedented emphasis in reading program development. The strong emphasis on phonemic awareness as a precursor to the alphabetic principle appears to have been accepted as a fundamental element in beginning reading programs. There are other phonological processes that have been less stringently explored, such as rapid naming and working memory. They, too, may have educational implications, and their potential is explored in this paper.

Education is frequently criticised for remaining insufficiently attentive to the results of scientific research into teaching and learning (Carnine, 1995, 2000; Hempenstall, 1996; National Research Council, 2002: Stanovich & Stanovich, 2003). A defence, raised by some in the profession, has been that it is not immediately evident how the results of experimental studies can be transposed successfully to the classroom (Fister & Kemp, 1993). Besides, the argument continues, there are rarely definitive answers. For every study that points one way is another indicating the opposite. In recent years, several high status committees have been established in the literacy field by the National Research Council (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), and by the USA Congress (National Reading Panel, 2000). Partly driven by parent pressure, governments are seeking accountability from the purveyors of education for the student outcomes. The resultant reports have had a dramatic and controversial effect on the direction of literacy instruction. For example, the Report of the National Reading Panel emphasised the early direct teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension – not emphases strongly evident during the period dominated by the Whole Language movement (Hempenstall, 1996). Most of the areas now featured in these reports as critical for beginning reading instruction have been nominated recently by literacy experts as the “hottest” topics for 2003 (Cassidy & Cassidy, 2002).

One such area is phonemic awareness – sensitivity to the sound structure of the words we use in speech (Hempenstall, 1997). Its significance both as a predictor of reading success and as a causal element in reading development has been recognised in the empirical literature for some time (Adams, 1990; Badian, 1993; Cornwall, 1992; Crowder & Wagner, 1992; Felton & Brown, 1990; Torgesen, 1993; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987, Wagner, Torgesen, Laughon, Simmons, & Rashotte, 1993; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). Marilyn Adams, arguably the most influential researcher over the past twenty years, wrote “To my mind, the discovery and documentation of the importance of phonemic awareness ... is the single most powerful advance in the science and pedagogy of reading this century” (Adams, 1991, p. 392). The phonological basis of our spoken language enables the production and recognition of an enormous Vol.9 No. 1 March 2004 number of words through a process of the combination of a few meaningless segments known as consonants and vowels (Liberman, 1997). Similarly, the alphabetic nature of our written language provides a staggering generativity from a relatively small number of symbols can be produced an extraordinary number of words. This efficiency is only possible because of the language’s phonological underpinnings, and it must be appreciated by every successful beginning reader. Phonemic awareness is a fundamental component of the reader’s comprehension of the alphabetic principle. Recent years have seen a plethora of articles, books and curricula designed to assist teachers to implement the practices emanating from the empirical research on phonemic awareness. However, the impact at the classroom level has only become widespread since their support in the Report of the National Reading Panel (2000) and the strong recommendation in the No Child Left Behind Act, 2001 (US Department of Education, 2002). In Britain, the National Literacy Strategy (1998) mandated phonemic awareness (and phonics) instruction to all primary schools as a crucial element in reading instruction. So, phonemic awareness has become mainstream. Indeed, a recent Google web search produced more than 47,000 hits. However, there are also other phonological processes what are educators to make of them?

Phonemic awareness is only one member of a class of phonological processing skills, important in learning to read, that involve the sound-structure of oral language. A second skill implicated in reading progress is speed of lexical retrieval, also known as phonological recoding in lexical access, and less formally, as naming speed. It is usually assessed through tasks that measure the speed with which one can name familiar stimuli, such as colours, letters, numbers or objects grouped together - usually on paper. The task is not one of knowledge assessment – the individual must be able to name the stimuli already. It is a speed test, and is theoretically relevant to reading because it indicates how readily children can gain access to their stores of sounds, sound-sequences, and word meanings (Bowers & Swanson, 1991; Cornwall, 1992; Davis & Spring, 1990). Initial interest was sparked by studies employing the Rapid Automatized Naming test (Denckla & Rudel, 1974, 1976). They noted a correlation between the extent and stability of any naming deficit and the degree of a reading disability. They had discovered a relationship that had the potential to increase knowledge of the fundamentals of the reading process. Until recently, the seminal research of Denckla and Rudel did not provoke the degree of interest in the educational fraternity that the phonemic awareness research had done, perhaps because it was not clear what the implications might be for the classroom intervention. That deficits in such the area of naming speed might present a separate obstacle to reading progress (beyond that resulting from phonological insensitivity) is based partly upon the similarity between the processes involved in the naming tasks and those involved in reading. Both naming speed and sight word reading depend on automatic, rapid symbol retrieval, and Wolf (1991) and Wolf and Bowers (1999) have established a connection between naming speed for letters/numbers and fluent word recognition. Thus, here is a link of apparent significance.

WHAT IS INVOLVED IN SPEED OF NAMING?

Wolf et al. (2000) consider naming speed to be the culmination of basic perceptual, attentional, articulatory, and lexical-retrieval processes integrated with sophisticated cognitive and linguistic processes. They consider basic processing speed to be a central influence on the efficiency of each of these lower and higher order processes. When reading, one must employ these basic processes to convert print into one of two forms. The first entails a phonological representation constructed through reading-out-loud or through sub-vocalization. The decoding process allows appropriate selection of the word’s meaning through access to the phonologically coded lexicon, the brain’s store of meanings that has been developed initially through oral language experience. In the second option, a visual representation of the printed word enables direct access to the lexicon. This faster system represents the most common strategy employed by skilled readers, but is developed only if the earlier phonologically-based system has been practised sufficiently to enable routine automatic recognition of most words (Adams, 1990). An analogy might be the difference in the recognition speed of a rare stamp among a page of mundane stamps by a novice and an experienced philatelist. The novice must laboriously pore over the stamps, systematically absorbing each feature before accepting or rejecting it. To the expert, the rare stamp appears to leap into visual prominence as the discrimination process proceeds without conscious attention or effort.

The critical question involves how a student attains this orthographic stage, and the role of the phonological decoding stage in its attainment (Compton, 2002). It is common in the earliest stages of reading for a student to be partially reliant upon a non alphabetic visual strategy to identify words. Thus dog may be remembered because of its “tail”, and look by virtue of its “eyes”. However, the student needs to find a unique visual cue for each new word - a strategy doomed to failure as the vocabulary requirements become overwhelming, particularly later in primary school (Freebody & Byrne, 1988; Tunmer & Hoover, 1993). This primitive visual dominant strategy does not take advantage of the alphabetic principle, and should not be confused with the sophisticated orthographic processing mentioned above. Unfortunately, the teaching technique of basing instruction largely on word frequency rather than word construction (as in initially emphasising memorisation of the 100/200 most common words) may inadvertently promote this moribund strategy (Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1996), especially among struggling students. Another symptom of such processing can be observed when a student correctly reads a word in singular form, but is nonplussed when confronted by its plural. The use of such strategies is associated not only with difficulties in reading, but also with negative reading-related self perceptions, as early as in Year 1 (Chapman & Tunmer, 2003). Beginning readers are better served by the sounding-out option rather than by neglecting it in the erroneous anticipation of better progress through attention to alternative (contextual) cues or through a visual memorisation strategy (Compton, 2002; Hempenstall, 2002a; National Reading Panel, 2000). The strategy does require that strong letter-sound associations have been formed, and can be rapidly and effortlessly recalled. Students with slow naming speed may also be slow in identifying the sound of each letter in a written word. If so, they may be unable to maintain the sounds sufficiently long for blending into a known word to occur, and for the consequent gradual establishment of orthographic representations. Without such formation, subsequent reading fluency will be drastically compromised, as thereby will be comprehension (Bowers, Sunseth, & Golden, 1999; Manis, Doi, & Bhadha, 2000). Additionally, their comprehension of that which they have read may be compromised by the extended time taken to complete the sentence.

There has been some debate about the relationship between phonemic awareness and naming speed. Whereas Wagner and Torgesen (1987) considered them both a reflection of a unitary phonological process, other research has suggested that each of phonemic awareness and naming speed contributed uniquely to reading development (Badian, 1993; Blachman, 1984; Bowers, 1995; Cornwall, 1992; Felton & Brown, 1990; McBride-Chang & Manis, 1996; Manis et al., 2000; Wolf, Bowers, & Biddle, 2000). Studies by Torgesen, Wagner and colleagues (Torgesen et al., 1994; Wagner et al., 1993; Wagner et al., 1994) employed multiple measures across a range of phonological processing tasks in their longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. Multiple measures of each construct allow latent variables (representing the common variance among the measures) that are purer, through reduced task specific variance and error variance. Their confirmatory factor analysis revealed five distinct but correlated phonological processing abilities. There were two components of phonemic awareness (phonological analysis and phonological synthesis), phonetic recoding in working memory, and two components of phonological recoding in lexical access. The two barely correlated abilities comprising phonological recoding in lexical access arose from the type of naming speed tasks employed. The ability involved depended upon whether the presentation was in a serial-trial format or isolated-trial format, that is, whether response-time was to digits (or letters) flashed serially onto a screen, or the time required to name each of a group of digits (or letters) presented together on a card. The relative significance of the two abilities remains unclear; however, their overall results are consistent with other findings highlighting, at the least, a predictive capacity of naming speed tasks for later reading ability (Al Otaiba, 2001; Bowers, 1995; Bowers & Swanson, 1991; Catts, 1991; Cornwall, 1992; Davis & Spring, 1990; Felton, 1992; Speece, Mills, Ritchey, & Hillman, 2003; Tunmer & Hoover, 1993). For example, the Bowers (1995) study reported that naming speed displayed a strong predictive relationship with reading, and thus could become a useful component of an early identification screening battery. Speece et al. demonstrated how a letter-fluency task in kindergarten was able to reduce the number of false positive cases of predicted problems that occur when solely phonemic awareness screening was performed. Al Otaiba (2001) found that slow letter naming and poor phonological memory were each child characteristics predictive of unresponsiveness to intervention, and hence useful elements in determining the level of support needed by different students at a very early stage of their education. Given the now well-recognised importance of catching children before they fall (Torgesen, 1998), efforts to predict future membership of the cohort of low progress readers before they have experienced failure has become a major area of investigation. Any variable that can assist in prediction is worthy of further investigation.

The identification of those students at greatest risk during their first school year would enable existing and future high quality interventions to be appropriately and accurately targeted, conceivably enabling three out of four of the currently failing 20-30% of students to achieve reading success (Australian Government House of Representatives Enquiry, 1993; Lyon, 2000, cited in Landauer, 2000; Marks & Ainley, 1997). It is common in the earliest stages of reading for a student to be partially reliant upon a non-alphabetic visual strategy to identify words. Thus dog may be remembered because of its “tail”, and look by virtue of its “eyes”. A CAUSAL ROLE FOR SPEED OF NAMING? The interest in naming speed was further piqued through suggestions that it may have causal as well as predictive implications, just as phonemic awareness has been demonstrated to do. Wimmer, Mayringer, and Landerl (2000) found that early slowness in naming was related to subsequently under developed reading fluency. A further study (Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002) noted that slow naming speed alone (assessed at the commencement of schooling) was associated with subsequent dysfluency in reading, though not with spelling problems. They also noted that students’ spelling weakness followed simultaneous deficits in more than one phonological process. However, these studies did not employ a design capable of demonstrating a causal link. The suggestion of cumulative effects on reading, resulting from phonological weaknesses, has been investigated by Bowers and Wolf (Bowers & Wolf, 1993a; Wolf & Bowers, 1999). They proposed a Double-Deficit hypothesis to account for a role of naming speed deficits, either solely or in concert with phonemic awareness, in hindering reading progress. They consider that these two phonological processes (naming and awareness) are independent, and propose that the two may be responsible for discernibly different symptoms.

Some students have difficulty only in phonemic awareness, some only in naming-speed, whereas a third group may display a double-deficit. This third group is considered to comprise the most instructionally resistant students (Wolf et al., 2000), because they are left with fewer compensatory resources than the former groups. In the study by Stage, Abbott, Jenkins, and Berninger (2003) this prediction was clearly supported. All three groups are likely to display comprehension deficits (Bowers & Wolf, 1993b). In Bowers’ (1995) study, the double-deficit group was the most impaired on reading fluency and accuracy in both word and nonsense word reading. A similar finding for second grade students was observed by Manis et al. (2000) and also in a large study by Lovett, Steinbach, and Frijters (2000). Additionally, written expression was identified by Lovett et al. as an area of concern for the double-deficit group. However, when intensive phonologically-based instruction was implemented, even the Double Deficit students made progress commensurate with their less disabled single deficit peers. Without such carefully planned intervention, they tend to be the most severely disabled readers, and their difficulties are not relieved by maturation (Lovett et al., 2000; Wiig, Zureich, & Chan, 2000). Wagner et al. (1997) reported that any influence of naming speed might be age-limited. They argued that rapid naming was a valuable contributor to reading up to about third grade, but not beyond. That finding could be due to the greater importance assigned to comprehension, rather than decoding, in assessed reading progress from about fourth grade.

Lovett and Steinbach (1997) argued that phonological intervention should remain the intervention of choice at least up until sixth grade. Several studies (McCray, Vaughn, & Neal, 2001; Shankweiler, Lundquist, Dreyer, & Dickinson, 1996; Shaywitz et al., 1999) extended the influence of phonological processes through adolescence, while still others note that unresolved phonological deficits remain evident in adulthood, and should therefore remain an intervention focus (Greenberg, 1998; Greenberg, Ehri, & Perin, 1997). The relative contributions of naming speed and phonemic awareness to various aspects of reading was investigated by Pennington, Cardoso Martins, Green, and Lefly (2001). They noted that the contribution of naming was significant, but moderate when compared with that of phonemic awareness. Further, the effect was mostly evident in relation to fluency; whereas, the effects of phonemic awareness were directed towards facility with decoding. The question of a causal role for naming speed remains open, as the traditional means of establishing causality, through experimental rather than correlational studies, have not been definitively explored. Whether rapid naming capacity is directly amenable to treatment is unclear (Lovett et al., 2000). Though it is an intuitively attractive notion, simply because naming speed deficits appear to compromise reading progress does not necessarily imply that one can improve reading by, for example, providing lots of practice at naming various items quickly. Analogously, knowledge of letter names is highly predictive of future reading progress, yet an emphasis on teaching letter names (as opposed to letter sounds) to students at risk has not been shown to be of benefit to the target students’ reading progress. Letter name knowledge is most likely only a marker, indicative of a range of helpful literacy experiences that a child with such letter name knowledge has experienced. Learning letter names at school, while helpful, does not replicate all the additional experiences that may comprise the real determinants of a student’s progress. Additionally, a focus on “underlying process variables” (Blachman, 1994) in attempts to resolve reading difficulties has not been very fruitful in the past (Arter & Jenkins, 1979). Some researchers have argued that rapid naming may not be amenable to intervention (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994).

Even in studies of successful phonologically based intervention, during which students with a double deficit make excellent progress in reading, naming speed may remain low (Miller & Felton, 2001). Others, however, have noted naming speed increases. In a small study involving both good and poor readers, teaching phonemic awareness skills effectively to all the third grade children simultaneously improved their naming ability (Rubin, Rotella, Schwartz, & Bernstein, 1991). Though this study has no direct implications for improved reading, it does support the view of Wagner, Torgesen and colleagues (Torgesen, 1998; Torgesen et al., 1994; Wagner et al., 1993; Wagner et al., 1994) that the five phonological processing variables are related. Some subsequent phonologically-based intervention studies have noted similar naming speed improvements (Hempenstall, 2002b), and this broader issue of obliquely addressing naming speed deficits is considered later. Might there be an even deeper, generalised, extra-phonological cause that hinders those phonological processes, such as phonemic awareness and rapid naming? It is intuitively attractive (in a reductionist sense) to hypothesise a subservience of several reading related features, such as naming speed, to speed of general underlying processing. So, the search for an understanding of general processing speed has attracted interest from researchers (Tallal, 2000). For example, in describing the rationale for a relatively new program known as Fast ForWord (Scientific Learning Corporation, 1996), Tallal asserts that some children display difficulties in the processing of any rapidly changing sequential information. In this view, phonological problems are the outward manifestation of an underlying problem (temporal perception) that will also affect other processes, such as in the visual domain. To ameliorate this problem for reading-affected students, she employed acoustically modified (slowed) speech, believing that such speech signal manipulations will ultimately enable the brain to be reconfigured for more rapid processing.

The intended outcome is that students will process temporal aspects of speech (such as sound order, gaps between sounds, speech rhythm) more effectively, thereby improving speech perception and language comprehension. The approach is controversial and the results equivocal. Breznitz and Share (2002) raise doubts about the replicability and interpretations made in the supportive research. In reviewing a number of studies on Fast ForWord, Gillam, Frome Loeb, and Friel-Patti (2001) concluded that the reported language improvements for participants were similar to those noted in other more traditional language intervention programs. However, changes in temporal processing did not appear to be an outcome of the program’s intensive application. Further, in their longitudinal study, Share, Jorm, Maclean and Mathews (2002) found that any auditory temporal deficits noted among reading disabled students should not be assigned causal status, a view offered support in an investigation by Chiappe, Stringer, Siegel, and Stanovich (2002). In the Chiappe et al. study, reading-disabled adults did not differ in temporal processing from their normal-reading age peers. When compared with reading-level matched children, they displayed the typical phonological and pseudo-word reading deficits, yet were able to manage the timing tasks more successfully than the children. Finally, they noted that naming speed deficits were not the result of temporal processing deficits – the timing measures contributing nothing to the variance in rapid naming. Perhaps the more appropriate quest may not involve attempts to directly or indirectly improve naming speed per se, but rather, to focus on instruction designed to improve the reading of children who have problems in rapidly accessing phonological information from their mental lexicon.

ANOTHER PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING VARIABLE: WORKING MEMORY

Working memory is a short-term holding system that enables the storage and manipulation of small amounts of information needed to complete a task (Baddeley, 1995). Phonetic recoding in working memory is a phonological ability. The beginning reader has to be able to decode a series of graphemes, and temporarily order them in a sound based store in order to carry out the cognitively expensive task of blending. That capacity is also required to perform blending in a purely oral task. The efficiency with which the storage is performed optimises or diminishes the attentional capacity available for blending and subsequent word pronunciation, word-comprehension, and sentence-comprehension tasks. Gathercole, Willis, and Baddeley (1991) argue that the efficiency of the short-term phonological store is the major determinant of the ease or otherwise of retrieval of a sound sequence from long-term memory. Their study also replicated a previous finding (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989) that phonological memory skills were significantly associated with vocabulary knowledge in reading. In related vein, the Wagner et al. (1994) longitudinal study found that the rate of development of phonological memory paralleled that of vocabulary development in the first three years of schooling. Thus, it appears to have wide-ranging and extended influence on development. Indeed, Shankweiler and his colleagues (Shankweiler et al., 1995) have proposed that phonological processing limitations can subvert higher order language abilities.

As the executive element of working memory relays information through the cognitive system, any lower-order limitations can hinder the growth of syntactic abilities, vocabulary, phonological awareness, reading, and language comprehension. Wagner and Torgesen (1987), in their review of research, argued that the major memory problem for poor readers is in the coding of items phonetically. For these researchers, the deficit is a specific auditory working memory problem not a general one (Smith-Spark, Fisk, Fawcett, & Nicolson, 2003). Whether encoding or retrieval is the issue, the view that phonetic recoding in working memory is an important element of early reading success has been strongly supported (Catts, 1991; Felton, 1992; Hurford et al., 1993; Lindamood, Bell, & Lindamood, 1992; Shapiro, Nix, & Foster, 1990; Shaywitz, 2003; Webster & Plante, 1992). The studies of Wagner, Torgesen and colleagues (Wagner et al., 1993; Wagner et al., 1994; Torgesen et al., 1994) used digit span (oral and visual), sentence memory, and a distractor memory task to assess this ability. In contrast, Gathercole et al. (1991) suggest that non-word repetition may be a purer measure of working memory, as it avoids the possibility of using lexical and semantic cues to assist recall. Indeed, the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) employs both in their composite working memory score. As with phonological coding in lexical access (naming speed), it is not yet apparent how, if at all, weaknesses in this area might be addressed directly. Wagner and colleagues concluded that attempts to improve this skill through memory training or mnemonic strategies have not been fruitful, and are unlikely ever to be so. They raised the interesting possibility that phonetic As with phonological coding in lexical access (naming speed), it is not yet apparent how, if at all, weaknesses in this area might be addressed directly. recoding in working memory may improve in concert with general reading skill improvement. Their longitudinal study (Wagner et al., 1994) failed to find such a trend, although some reading intervention studies (Bowey, 1996; Hempenstall, 2002b) noted such an outcome. Wagner et al. reported that the rates of development across the phonological processing abilities were somewhat uneven over the first three years of schooling, phonological memory being the slowest of them. There was considerable stability across all the variables over the three years - lending support to the view that the phonological processes are causal to beginning reading, and not ephemeral individual differences soon submerged under the effects of schooling. This is not to argue that reading itself plays no role in enhancing phonological processing only that it is not a unidirectional role (Wagner et al., 1993). There has been a concern expressed about attempting direct intervention in working memory. It relates to the possibility that assessed problems with working memory represent a domain-general rather than reading specific deficit, and hence are independent of the reading problem (Swanson & Sachse-Lee, 2001). The other two phonological abilities (those most strongly related to later reading skill) can be considered as special cases of phonemic awareness. They are phonological analysis (or segmentation), and phonological synthesis (or blending). In an explicit phonics approach, the processes of blending (“What word do these sounds make when we put them together mmm-aaa-nnn?”), and segmenting (“Sound out this word for me”) are directly taught. It is of little value knowing what are the building blocks of our language’s structure if one does not know how to put those blocks together appropriately to allow the commencement of written communication, or know how to separate the blocks to enable decoding of a letter grouping.

It has been argued (Torgesen et al., 1992; Yopp, 1992) that synthesis develops earlier than analytic skills. Solomons (1992) and Caravolas and Bruck (1993) consider segmentation quite difficult for children younger than 5 or 6 years, and Bryen and Gerber (1987) suggest that only by age 6 years can 70% of children succeed in phonemic segmentation tasks. Certainly in the Torgesen et al. comparison of two phonemic awareness training programs, blending skills (“What word is this: /k/ /a/ /t/?”) were more readily taught to first year students than were segmentation skills (“Which of these three words begins the same as cat?”). Their intervention study highlighted the need to teach both skills given that promotion of decoding is the objective. A further feature of most successful reading programs is their emphasis on directly teaching both blending and segmenting skills within the context of letters (Gustafson, Samuelsson, & Ronnberg, 2000; Spector, 1995). The importance of segmenting and blending as a major instructional focus is made clear in the Ehri et al. (2001) summary of the National Reading Panel’s reading research meta-analysis. Similar findings emanate from the Scottish Clackmannanshire study (Watson & Johnston, 1998). The Dixon, Stuart, and Masterson (2002) study noted that the capacity to develop detailed orthographic representations (a hallmark of skilled reading) was strongly dependent on students’ first developing strong segmentation skills.

PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Perfetti (1991, 1992), supported by Elbro (1996), has argued that low scores on tests of phonological processing reflect problems with the clarity of the representation of spoken words in the reader’s lexicon. This has become known as the phonological distinctness model. When representations of words are unstable (or stable but ill-defined), matching a stimulus word with the correct phonemically stored counterpart is likely to be a slow and error prone process as the child rejects competing phonemically similar, but semantically nonsensical, responses. In normal circumstances, children’s accumulating experience with words leads the representations to become increasingly segmented finer grained. Initially, the words are stored as undetailed, single-unit representations requiring storage space for each. Experience enables a more economical storage in which words sharing the same sound part can be partly assembled from the shared re-usable components. Gradually, the child becomes more analytic, refining the phonological representation from that of whole words to intraword parts, such as syllables and eventually, phonemes. A slightly different interpretation of the effect is described by Metsala and Walley (1998) within the lexical restructuring model, although the differences may not have instructional consequences. These phonological representations of the written word are acquired through phonemic mappings to letters but some degree of awareness that words are constructed of manipulable, meaningless speech segments is a prerequisite. If the level of awareness remains shallow and does not penetrate down to the smallest segment, the phoneme, then the representations will not be precisely delineated.

Liberman (1997) argued for the presence of a specialised phonological module in which the clarity of phonological representations determines a child’s ability to comprehend and apply the alphabetic it is not the temporal order of the tonal stimuli that presents the difficulty, but rather a problem in discriminating between highly similar auditory stimuli. See Eden and Moats (2002) for a review of this topical area. principle. In Liberman’s view an unconscious phonetic module acts upon articulatory gestures rather than upon acoustics. In this perspective, it is the articulatory feedback from the formation and production of sounds, rather than a sensitivity to the sonic value of the sounds themselves that builds links between words and their constituent phonemes. An alternative explanation - that poor performance on phonological tasks is caused by inadequate auditory discrimination of speech sounds has not received strong research support (Cornelissen, Hansen, Bradley, & Stein, 1996; Gibbs, 1996). If these phonological representations, whether purely sounds-based or kinaesthetic, are imprecise then tasks such as phonological recoding in lexical access and phonological recoding in working memory may also present problems for such students, and there is ample evidence that they do (Gang & Siegel, 2002; Rubin et al., 1991). For example, if the phonological representation of “dog” is poorly encoded or unreliable then the association between the spoken name of the animal and its meaning will be vague. A picture of a dog may quickly evoke its meaning but the phonologically assembled label is slowed because other similar labels (e.g., god, dock, bog) may need to be rejected.

Scrolling through a range of possibilities requires more time than accessing a clear uniquely described form, and hence task performance will be slower than for a student with a clear phonological representation. There remains debate whether the fundamental problem resides in the inaccurate initial encoding of speech or whether the phonological representations for words stored in the lexicon lack adequate aural resolution (Brady, 1997). Perhaps the use of modern brain imaging techniques will help shed some light upon conflicting foci on a metalinguistic deficit and its relationship to the phonological module proposed by Liberman (1997) as opposed to a temporal processing deficit in the auditory system, such as that emphasised by Tallal and colleagues (Tallal et al., 1996). Studdert-Kennedy and Mody (1995) and Studdert-Kennedy (2002) argued that the phonological representation explanation better accounts for observed problems than does Tallal’s temporal processing deficits. They consider that for the disabled reader Tasks involving short-term auditory memory may be difficult for some because the orally presented stimuli are not effortlessly and instantly encoded as unique phonological forms, or alternatively because of deficits in phonological rehearsal capacity (Gang & Siegel, 2002). The process of storage and retrieval is then inefficient, reflected in lower performance.

Not every test may be equally able to detect this quality. In digit span forward tests continuous oral or silent rehearsal may partly compensate for a memory deficit. In a digit span reversed test this strategy is unavailable and this test format may better reflect the deleterious effects of phonologically inadequate representations. Lindamood (1994) described “comparator function” as a critical variable in reading skill, one in which (for example, in blending) a stimulus or sequence must be retained in working memory whilst part of it is manipulated. Phoneme deletion (one of the most complex of phonological awareness tasks) also requires just this capacity, at least in non-spellers. Those adept at spelling are able to bypass the phonological demands by first visualising the letters and then mentally subtracting a letter or letter grouping. Another form of assessment requires the repetition of orally presented pseudowords. Such tests either have increasing numbers of syllables, for example, burloogugendaplo (Wagner et al., 1999), or increasing numbers of single syllable pseudowords presented in a stream (Gathercole & Adams, 1993). Ehri (1994) suggests that when alphabetic readers practise reading specific words by phonologically recoding the words, they form access routes for those words into memory. Readers gradually build these access routes by using their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to amalgamate letters-in-spellings to phonemes-in-pronunciations of the words. The letters are processed as visual symbols for the phonemes and the sequence of letters is retained in memory as an alphabetic, phonological representation of the word. Empirical support for this view development of sophisticated can be found in the Dixon et al. (2002) study in which phoneme segmentation ability was strongly associated with the construction of accurate orthographic representations. Shaywitz (2003) employs the term ‘neural model’ to describe the inner representation.

Neural models may correspond with printed words to a greater or lesser extent; however, after students have read the word accurately a number of times, their neural model forms an exact correspondence with the printed word. The relatively effortless, automatic, rapid response to text that is the hallmark of skilled reading requires an orthographic lexicon at once comprehensive, and instantly and accurately accessible. Perfetti (1991, 1992) also argued that the development of the orthographic lexicon in reading has its basis in phonological representations, rather than in a visual store of whole words. If one accepts this view, establishing and cementing the connections between word spellings and these phonological representations become crucial instructional elements in orthographic knowledge development. It is therefore unsurprising that spelling has sometimes been used as a proxy for the quality of phonological representations (Perfetti, 1992). Lindamood (1994) also noted that children who have difficulty in appreciating the sound structure of words tend to be poor spellers. Landerl, Frith, and Wimmer (1996) noted that, in normal readers, coactivation of orthographic knowledge occurs in phonological tasks (that is, knowledge of a word’s spelling is used to make judgements about the sounds in a word), whereas for disabled readers this coactivation is much less evident. They argue that there is only a weak link between the phonological and orthographic representations in reading-disabled students such that hearing a word does not evoke its spelling, and seeing a word fails to bring forth its sound segments. An inability to establish such reliable links has dire consequences for skilled reading and spelling, and may be due to the imprecision with which sounds are encoded in the phonological representation store. Elbro et al. (1994) suggest that inadequate phonological representations impede the overcome the limits placed on children’s reading development by problems at the level of phonology. phonemic awareness and further that it is at the individual phoneme level that this failure of differentiation may occur. Perhaps the most refractory to phonemic awareness training and to phonics instruction are those to whom Elbro et al. refer. If that is so, some argue, then specialised and intensive phoneme awareness instruction may be beneficial. For example, in the Lindamood (1969) program considerable emphasis is devoted to kinaesthetic (in addition to auditory) cues to assist the recognition of and discrimination between phonemes. Hence, children are taught lip and tongue positions and how the breath is used - the purpose being to increase the salience of the sonic differentiation. This is a strategy offered theoretical support by Liberman (1997) through the emphasis on the role of articulatory gesture. There may be students who require such specialised intervention, although as yet there is doubt as to how to identify them.

Parsimony suggests that, at least for students beyond beginner age, systematic, synthetic phonics programs should first be attempted (Wagner et al., 1999), with the caveat that close and continuous monitoring of progress occurs. In a large-scale study, a combination of alphabetic instruction combined with phonemic awareness training was more beneficial than either alone (Foorman et al., 2003). Snowling, Goulandis, and Defty (1996) also argue that slowness in reading development of reading disabled students is due to delayed development of clear phonological representations at the beginning reading stage. Others (e.g., Bruck, 1990, 1992; Shankweiler et al., 1996) have noted that delay may be an inappropriate description, as untreated, such problems remain in evidence through to adulthood. In the self-teaching hypothesis described by Share (1995) and Share & Stanovich (1995), rapid, whole word reading (enabled through direct lexical access) develops through the effects of practice, benefits accumulating each time the phonological coding of words occurs. This sequence (of reliable phonological representations allowing phonological decoding, a skill further promoting direct lexical access) provides both an explanation and an intervention focus to This position finds significant support (Apel & Swank, 1999; Ehri, 1995, 1998; Gaskins et al., 1996; Williams, 1991). A study by Monaghan and Ellis (2002) adds weight to the crucial role of clear phonological representations. They noted that forging strong grapheme-phoneme linkages derives from multiple practice opportunities. Strong connections allow effortless translation of written words to meaningful language. The unclear representations hinder the development of these links leading to hesitancy and a failure to appreciate the alphabetic principle. In summary, the theory of phonological representation implies that phonological processes are dependent upon the clarity or accessibility of such representations. If phonological processes improve during an intervention program, is it because of better clarity of representations? Several studies have noted improvements in other phonological processes when phonemic awareness development approaches are adopted.

INTERVENTION STUDIES

Lovett et al. (1994) noted improved phonological processing skills (both speech and print based) in reading disabled children following an intervention program adapted partly from Direct Instruction phonics programs. The improvements were noted in measures of blending, segmenting, reading and spelling. Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, and Fletcher (1997) reported a study that compared such a Direct Instruction model to both an incidental phonics method and a Whole Language approach. The students in the Direct Instruction group demonstrated significantly greater gains in word reading, phonological processing and spelling than did either of the other two groups. Torgesen et al. (1994) studied 244 students from kindergarten through to the second grade, and noted that there were reciprocal effects between letter-sound knowledge and subsequent phonological development of their students. That is, the two areas were mutually supportive. The authors noted the effects of such knowledge were strongest on phonemic awareness, moderate on rapid naming and no discernible effects were observed for phonological memory. The most common interpretation of such findings is that instructional emphasis on the structure of spoken words increases the quality or accessibility of phonological representations, and such change is represented in improved performance on the other phonological variables. If, as they relate to reading, naming and working memory are reflective of an underlying variable (representation), there may be little value in attempting to influence these two variables through direct training of them. If these two phonological processes are simply marker variables for representation, their usefulness is not markedly diminished, as they are likely to play an important role in increasing the precision with which prediction of students at-risk can be achieved (Badian, 1994; Hurford, Schauf, Bunce, Blaich, & Moore, 1994). Already, combinations of tests emphasising phonological processes, given prior to reading instruction, have been at least moderately successful in predicting reading progress (Badian; Hurford et al.; Majsterek & Ellenwood, 1995; Scarborough, 1998; Spector, 1992; Stuart, 1995; Torgesen, 1998).

When phoneme oddity is assessed with such tasks as in the Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA) (Torgesen & Bryant, 1994), the memory load is reduced through the provision of pictures to remind students of each of the four words presented. Nevertheless, in order to note which two words (in the end sound-same subtest) or three words (end-sound-different subtest) share the same final phoneme they must be able to keep the representations active in working memory for sufficient time to note and compare the final phonemes. Hence, it seems likely that phonological working memory plays at least some part in successfully completing the TOPA, and additionally, in the tasks of sequencing and blending is important in decoding unfamiliar words, or pseudo-words (Troia, Roth, & Yeni Komshien, 1996). Swanson and Alexander (1997) in their study of learning disabled readers reported that working memory contributed only 4% to pseudo-word decoding. Brady (1991) pondered whether there is a threshold phonological working memory capacity necessary for success at such tasks. For children who struggle with tasks requiring phonological awareness, blending, and sequencing, and who also perform poorly on short-term memory tasks, the question remains as to the optimum foci for intervention. If it were true that phonological working memory underpins the other tasks, then it could be an intervention target in its own right. During the 1960’s and 1970’s the approach known as the ability training model espoused training memory (along with other presumed underlying processes such as visual perception and motor skills). Despite much research energy expended in this field, results were disappointing (Arter & Jenkins, 1979). Whilst performance on those specifically taught tasks did improve, there was little or no transfer to the reading task.

A salutary lesson was learned during those years. In many classrooms, struggling students were inveigled into time-consuming visual motoric-perceptual activities that proved to be of no value to their literacy progress. The activities also wasted time that could have been productively deployed for directly teaching the students those skills necessary for reading. Educators were misled by those who had confused speculation with empiricism, and correlation with causation. The chimera was overlayed by an aura of sophistication - of the apparent tapping of fundamental psychological processes. Many believed that reading was a natural process, but one that could become blocked in its normal progression. The plumbing analogy allowed for the expectation that a few arcane physical activities would remove the blockage, and the natural flow released (batteries not included). This is a more attractive belief option than one requiring carefully designed curricula, a great deal of instructional time, ample student practice with teacher feedback, and continuous assessment of progress. Educators are as prone to the promise of the latest labour-saving device as are most consumers. Even today, there are many practices, such as brain-based learning, that have been uncritically adopted despite a dearth of evidence supporting their use (Bruer, 1997). On the other hand, when there is evidence that a specific intervention actually causes the desired effects, and there is a theoretical rationale as to why it should do so, one should pay attention. The empirical literature is replete with examples in which the training of phoneme awareness subsequently aided skills crucial for literacy. For example, Gillam and Van Kleeck (1996) reported a study in which pre-school aged children with speech and language disorders improved both in phonemic awareness and phonological working memory following a phonemic awareness training program. Further, they noted that children with poor initial phonological working memory were as responsive to the intervention as were those with better phonological working memory.

These findings provide support for the notion that a better understanding of the structure of words (perhaps producing improved representational clarity) has a positive impact across the range of phonological processes. It also suggests that students with an under developed phonological working memory should not be precluded from participating in phonemic awareness programs or phonics-based instruction. There have been those who have argued for a whole word, visual recognition approach on the faulty assumption that students with limited short-term auditory memory are unable to derive benefit from a sounds-based approach. A study by Gang and Siegel (2002) found that sound-symbol association training with primary school reading-disabled students led to improvements in reading and also in phonological memory, effects similarly evident in normally progressing readers. If one accepts the relatively small direct contribution of phonological recoding in working memory (Swanson & Alexander, 1997) towards developing word attack skills, compared with that of phonemic awareness (Bowey, 1996), then instructional emphasis on directly stimulating phonemic awareness, and thereby the clarity of phonological representation, may present a more productive target than attempting to address working memory directly.

How best and most efficiently stimulate phonemic awareness in all students has been a major question. Some students have no difficulty at all - sometimes arriving at school with such skills already well developed through home-based activities and a ready proclivity. Some, without early experiences but with an ear, quickly discover the logic in spoken and (later) written word construction - whether the rationale is explained or not. Their attention to written word-parts can transfer to word-part exploration in oral language, and you may hear them playing word-construction games, such as Spoonerisms or Pig Latin. Others have their phonological awareness readily stimulated by even the minimal attention to word parts offered in implicit phonics reading programs. Still others have their phonemic awareness stimulated only by the more explicit and systematic phonemic awareness activities often included in synthetic phonics programs (National Reading Panel, 2000). There are also those who argue that phonemic awareness is not, of itself, the important issue. Their assertion is that learning letter sounds and the capacity to blend the sounds associated with those letters, along with learning how to segment written words into their constituent sounds – embodies all the important phonological skills necessary to initiate successful decoding (Watson & Johnston, 1998). Longitudinal studies in Clackmannanshire, Scotland have provided some supporting evidence for this perspective (Johnston & Watson, 2003). Note that the interaction of the teacher and curriculum become of increasing importance to student progress when the student’s contribution to phonemic awareness development is minimal. At the most extreme level are those students who do not bring phonemic awareness to the reading task, and who also appear resistant to developing such awareness even when provided with appropriately designed and presented phonics activities.

It is those students for whom a dedicated phonemic awareness program, carefully structured and systematically presented, may be particularly beneficial as a precursor or concomitant to intensive and probably extended synthetics phonics teaching. Even then, it seems that to features of text; whereas, the occipito-temporal system becomes important in enabling the effortless fluent word recognition in skilled readers. Brain function differences are also evident in orally presented phonological tasks, prior to any contact with print, and eventually imaging may be employed as a means of predicting potential reading problems. Importantly, when the struggling students were taught phonological processing skills (for example, over a 15 two-hour sessions), the brain energy expenditure levels and the locations of relevant brain activities came to resemble those of good readers (Richards et al., 2000). Lyon and Fletcher (2001) reported similar neuro-imaging changes when a 10 year-old student with severe reading disabilities was provided with 60 hours of intensive phonics instruction that also elevated his word-reading ability into the average range. In a case study involving a student with phonemic awareness and rapid naming difficulties, Miller and Felton (2001) noted strong reading gains when they provided instruction in phonemic awareness, decoding and encoding of single syllable and multi-syllabic words, automatic recognition of irregular sight words, and fluency in reading decodable text. Of course, these are also among the foci that are helpful in fomenting early reading growth in all students (National Reading Panel, 2000). A valuable aspect of the Miller and Felton study was the recognition that intervention with an older student (seventh grade) may demand high levels of intensity and extended duration (even up to four years duration) to ensure adequate progress. promote generalisation to the reading task, relating the sounds in spoken words to their letter correspondences is important (Foorman et al., 2003; Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis, 1994, 1995; Schneider, Roth, & Ennemoser, 2000). The National Reading Panel’s phonemic awareness research meta analysis (National Reading Panel, 2000) noted that a focus on segmenting and blending phonemes produced stronger effects on students’ subsequent reading progress than did teaching three or more phonemic awareness skills.

In support, a recent large scale intervention study of almost 5000 kindergarten students in high poverty schools noted the advantages for these students when phonemic awareness instruction is carefully integrated with phonics instruction (Foorman et al., 2003). “What seems to matter are activities where phonemes are blended and segmented in speech, then connected explicitly and systematically to graphemes in print, through phonics instruction” (Foorman et al., p. 317). Recent studies employing sophisticated brain imaging tools (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, proton echo-planar spectroscopic imaging) have added to the knowledge about what actually occurs at the cellular level during successful intervention (Richards et al., 1999, 2000). It has been noted that struggling readers tend to have a significant amount of brain activity in Broca’s area (an area important for speech) and also within the brain’s right hemisphere. This is indicative of using less appropriate brain structures for the task – structures better suited to visualisation tasks. The consequence (Richards et al., 1999) is that the poorer readers may expend four to five times as much energy to complete a reading task when compared to good readers. Facile readers display vigorous activity in both the left temporo parietal and left temporo-occipital areas of the brain (Fletcher et al., 2000). This area enables the association of sounds to words and word parts – the phonological centre. The conversion of print to sound involves the angular gyrus (visual association) linking with the superior temporal gyrus (area for language). Pugh et al. (2002) assert that the temporo-parietal region is initially crucial in integrating the phonological and orthographic Unfortunately, efforts too often are prematurely discontinued for those students in greatest need (Torgesen, 1998).

Progress may be slow and hard earned, but attention to detail in instruction and vastly increased opportunities for practice can make a great difference to the prognosis. The lesson to be learned from assessment of student’s phonological processing is not simply about identifying learner characteristics to account for lack of progress, but rather to assist the discerning of which students demand of us our cutting-edge best interventions and for how long. Are there any implications for students whose phonemic awareness is adequate, and who present with only naming speed deficits? Deeney, Wolf, and Goldberg O’Rourke (2001) recommend a focus on phonology, automaticity, and fluency. Wolf, Miller, and Donnelly (2000) have developed a program known as RAVE-O (Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary Elaboration, Orthography) that attempts to address the needs of second and third grade students identified as having phonological processing deficits, in particular, naming speed. The program emphasises the rapid and integrated use of phonological, orthographic and semantic information about words, thereby evoking sufficient fluency in word recognition to support comprehension. The approach is intended to accompany a phonological analysis program grounding it by tying the phonological analysis to our print conventions. Sound to print is a linkage acknowledged as enabling the strongest gains in reading following phonological programs (Hatcher et al., 1994). Most fluency programs address the issue at the lexical level, through variations of repeated reading activities, wide reading and multiple practice opportunities with text, and these approaches do have research support (Bowers & Newby Clark, 2002; National Reading Panel, 2000). RAVE-O adds to this word level emphasis an additional focus on underlying (sublexical) process skills such as speed of left-to-right visual scanning, letter recognition, orthographic pattern recognition and phoneme identification (Wolf et al., 2000).

Systematically introduced game like activities stress both accuracy and speed in each reading outcome and in each underlying component skill, such as letter and letter-pattern recognition, auditory discrimination of phonemes, lexical retrieval, and vocabulary growth. Within the component skills, orthographic pattern recognition is particularly emphasized through a specially designed computer game called Speed Wizards (Wolf & Goodman, 1996). The RAVE-O program represents one-half of our intervention package, which moves daily from a phonological analysis and blending program based on Lovett’s findings (Lovett et al., 1994) to emphases on automaticity in the underlying processes. The major, theoretically based objective, is to help children more automatically activate phonological, orthographic, and semantic information about words in order to facilitate fluency in word recognition and comprehension. (Deeney et al., 2001, p.147). The embedded beginning reading program is one of the Direct Instruction programs - Reading Mastery I/II Fast Cycle (Engelmann & Bruner, 1988). It is presented for a half hour per day, followed by the RAVE-O activities for a similar period. Early evaluations of the 70 hour program are promising, though additional independent studies are required. The contribution made by the emphasis on process speed, as opposed to that by the word level focus, has yet to established. It is well recognised that reading fluency is a vital element in skilled reading (National Reading Panel, 2000). It appears that fluency in the underpinnings, such as phonological processing, may be also significant. “Fluency as represented by accuracy and rate pervades all levels of processing involved in reading, and that fluency on early foundational skills can be used to predict proficiency on subsequent skills in reading” (Good, Simmons, & Kame’enui, 2001, p. 264).

They may also represent an important intervention focus – in particular for those students resistant to even well designed and targeted instruction (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997). Binder, Haughton, and Bateman (2002) make the general point that expertise involves unhesitatingly accurate performance not simply accuracy alone. In the Precision Teaching model (Binder, 1988; Binder & Watkins, 1990), teachers schedule daily fluency practice (words correct per minute) and assessment across a range of educational skills, with rate targets being constantly updated. They argue that the overarching benefits from attaining fluency include improved retention and subsequent maintenance of knowledge and skills, improved capacity to focus attention on a task for long periods, and superior capacity to apply that which has been learned to future novel situations. In phonological skills, they suggest targets for blending of 10-12 words per minute; for segmenting, 40-50 sounds /min, and making new words through phoneme substitution 15-20 phonemes per minute. In a similar vein, Kaminski and Good (1998) have established student performance standards to assist in the determination of which students may be at-risk through their DIBELS assessment battery (Good, Kaminski, Laimon, & Johnson, 1992). Among the brief tests are the directly phonological assessments - Phoneme Segmentation Fluency and Phoneme Onset Fluency. It is worth noting that phonological fluency measures may relate to naming speed measures, but differ in that naming speed measures provide relatively few items (already known to the student) from a given domain that are repeated over and over, usually in a stimulus sheet (for example, six different letters employed in a 50 letter naming task). By contrast, fluency measures usually include more or less completely the whole domain (for example, all the letters of the alphabet). A fluency focus also differs from the sort of intervention established by Tallal and colleagues (Tallal et al., 1996) that attempts to influence auditory processing speed in a general sense. What are the implications for the education system of these research findings?

The consensus that phonological processes form the cornerstone of initial reading development is well established in the empirical literature, and (in some countries) enshrined in law. However, the impact at the level of the classroom in Australia has not been profound. One can readily gauge the approach to instruction in those schools that provide information to parents such as that below. From X Park Primary School, 2002. It is inappropriate for your child to be directed to ‘sound-out’ words using individual letter sounds, as many words cannot be identified in this manner. When a child gets stuck ask him to have a guess, or look at the picture, add a word that makes sense. Does it ‘look right’? If a mistake makes sense it doesn’t necessarily need to be corrected. The problem at a system level is to determine which students require greater or lesser levels of assistance. Assessment of phonological processes can assist in this decision-making. Phonemic awareness screening of young students has been shown to be predictive of future reading success or failure (Badian, 1994; Hurford et al., 1994; Chapman & Tunmer, 2003), at least when standard classroom reading approaches are employed. Not all students who don’t do well on such tests genuinely require phonemic awareness assistance, but nor are they harmed by it. Besides, the cost of over-inclusiveness is not nearly as serious as that of under inclusiveness. So, provide a phonemic awareness activities program in preschool or kindergarten to all, or at a minimum, to those adjudged as possibly at risk, and be vigilant especially towards those displaying a resistance to skill development. Those few may well require more systematic instruction than that provided by most published phonemic awareness and implicit phonics/balanced reading programs (Snider, 1995). For some design principles, see Chard and Dickson (1999).

CONCLUSION

It is probably too early to make educational decisions based only upon the research into working memory and naming speed, apart from their potential supporting role in screening assessment. For students who don’t progress quickly under the influence of phonemic awareness activities, or for those with a family history of reading problems, or where other environmental or biological risk factors are evident, there may be value in formal assessment of the other phonological processes. Those students with deficits in more than one area may be more resistant to progress than those with one problem area (Bowers & Wolf, 1993). Such knowledge can sensitise educators to be prepared for intensive systematic assistance (rather than a cursory curriculum addition) over a longer period of time with these students (Torgesen et al., 1994). Torgesen and Burgess (1998) argue that selecting the lowest 20% of students on only phonemic awareness and letter-name knowledge in the first year at school is sufficient to feel confident that all at risk students have been identified. Others have argued that those students with only a deficit in naming speed will not be identified by phonemic awareness screening, yet they are likely to present subsequently with reading fluency and comprehension difficulties if early assistance (both phonological and fluency oriented) is not provided (Deeney et al., 2001; Wolf et al., 2002). If there is a common theme throughout the work on phonological processing thus far, it is the centrality of the structure of spoken and written words in the development of literacy for all students. That there may be individual differences in the ease with which children acquire literacy is not new. The research described here, while attempting to locate underlying sources of difficulty, has highlighted the critical role of insistent and well-focussed teaching in precluding and resolving problems in learning to read.

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Contemporary Trends in Phonological Awareness Studies (2025)

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Rapid automatized naming: What it is, what it is not, and why it matters (2025)

“Rapid automatized naming (RAN) has surged in popularity recently as an important indicator of reading difficulties, including dyslexia. Despite an extensive history of research on RAN, including recent meta-analyses indicating a unique contribution of RAN to reading above and beyond phonemic awareness, questions remain regarding RAN’s relationship to reading. Specific questions exist regarding how PA mediates that relationship and how best to use data from RAN measures to identify risk for reading failure. Through multiple studies, we demonstrate that RAN is not merely subsumed by skills typically assessed when conducting universal screening for reading difficulties (i.e., phonemic segmentation fluency and letter naming fluency), but contributes unique information above and beyond these measures. Additionally, we discuss the process for the development of cut points for risk for Acadience RAN, along with guidance regarding how educators can interpret RAN scores as an indicator of risk for future reading difficulties. The results presented here support the idea that difficulties associated with RAN are not merely reflections of difficulties with other early literacy skills typically assessed during universal screening, but constitute separate and distinct difficulties that may precipitate later reading problems.”

Gray, J.S., Powell-Smith, K.A. Rapid automatized naming: what it is, what it is not, and why it matters. Ann. of Dyslexia 75, 1–18 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-024-00312-z

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The relationships between language, working memory and rapid naming in children with mild to moderate hearing loss. (2022)

“The results suggest that the language, verbal working memory, and rapid naming skills of children with MMHL (mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss) are closely related. It is recommended that the relationship between verbal short-term memory, verbal working memory, rapid naming skills, and language skills should be considered in therapeutic and educational settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationships between verbal-short-term -working memory, duration of rapid automatized naming, and language skills in children with MMHL.”

Merve İkiz, Esra Yücel, (2022). The relationships between language, working memory and rapid naming in children with mild to moderate hearing loss. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, Volume 158, 111156, ISSN 0165-5876, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2022.111156. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165587622001173

The contribution of orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and phonological working memory (2025)

“The present study examined the effects of orthographic knowledge (OK), phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and phonological working memory (PWM) on the reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension of elementary school students. Results from a sample of 176 typically developing children in the second through fourth grades (mean age = 8.9 years) revealed that the correlation between reading and the other variables (PWM, PA, RAN, and OK) was significant. In Persian, which has an abjad writing system and opaque orthography, OK and RAN were the best predictors of reading. The relationship between reading skills and other factors was most evident in the fourth grade. We also found that female students in the fourth grade performed significantly better than male students on reading, RAN and OK. This study highlights of the fact that rapid naming and orthographic processing are more important than phonological processing for predicting reading skills in Persian.”

Mohammadi Najafabadi, F., Soleymani, Z., Zadehlabbaf, F., & Kohansal, A. (2025). The contribution of orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and phonological working memory to the reading skills of typically developing children. Applied Neuropsychology: Child, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622965.2024.2443745

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Impact of phonological awareness intervention combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (2025)

• “Phonological processing difficulties, including reduced phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and verbal short-term memory are the leading cause of dyslexia.
• Phonological awareness training is beneficial to improve automatized naming and verbal short-term memory abilities in dyslexia.
• Transcranial direct current stimulation is an adjunctive method applied in reading studies to improve performance.
• This study showed the effectiveness of phonological awareness training on rapid automatized naming and verbal short-term memory abilities, but transcranial direct current stimulation did not have an additional effect on this improvement in the present study.
• Because of the limited effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation as adjunctive intervention in the treatment of dyslexia, rehabilitation professionals should use it conservatively.
• Rehabilitation professionals should use phonological awareness training to improve rapid automatized naming and verbal short-term memory instead of separate treatment of these deficits.”

Mirahadi, S. S., Arshi, B., Nitsche, M. A., & Mohamadi, R. (2025). Impact of phonological awareness intervention combined with transcranial direct current stimulation on rapid automatized naming and verbal short term memory in developmental dyslexia: a randomized controlled trial. Disability and Rehabilitation, 1-12.

A New Tele-Rehabilitation Approach in Children with Language and Learning Disorders (2022)

“Executive function deficits are documented in many neurodevelopmental disorders and may contribute to clinical complexity or rehabilitation resilience. The present research was primarily aimed at presenting and evaluating the feasibility and effectiveness of a telerehabilitation program used during the pandemic period. MemoRAN (Anastasis), a computerised cognitive training to improve executive control during visual-verbal integration tasks was used in a sample of 42 children (5–11 years old) with specific learning or language disorders. The MemoRAN training was based on exercises of inhibition, cognitive flexibility and updating in working memory for three months, with a frequency of approximately three sessions per week. Afterwards, a comparison between a subgroup of children using Memo-RAN and an active control group, using a tele-rehabilitation program directed on reading was conducted. Effect size analysis in pre-post measurements suggests an average effect of MemoRAN in measurements that require control processes, such as accuracy in dictation, reading, inhibition and working memory testing. Comparison with the active control group and the clinical utility implications of these types of treatment will be discussed.    at the educational and scholastic level, the integration of typical learning activities could be combined with activities on inhibition processes, working memory and rapid automatized naming, to verify if learning is thus more effective and generalised for the children of the first years of primary school and in particular for children with SLD or previous LD.”

Capodieci, A., Romano, M., Castro, E., Di Lieto, M. C., Bonetti, S., Spoglianti, S., & Pecini, C. (2022). Executive Functions and Rapid Automatized Naming: A New Tele-Rehabilitation Approach in Children with Language and Learning Disorders. Children, 9(6), 822. https://doi.org/10.3390/children9060822

tele-rehabilitation; executive function; rapid automatized naming; computerised cognitive training; working memory; learning disabilities; language disorder

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Rapid Automatic Naming as a Sight Word Fluency Intervention (2025)

“The importance of reading fluency is cemented in the 5 pillars of reading and in the multiple learning standards which address this misunderstood reading skill. Fluency studies have traditionally focused on upper elementary grades and on oral reading of passages. Furthermore, little is known about the types of dysfluency behaviors that may accompany slow reading speeds, such as hesitations and vocalizations. The purpose of the present study was to place the spotlight on fluency at the sight word level and dysfluency behaviors using a controversial intervention. Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) is trusted and respected as an assessment with predictive capabilities. Used to predict reading failure and low fluency rates, some would posit another use for RAN. Rapid Automatic Naming practice as an intervention has been suggested by some reading specialists as a way to increase the automaticity of the neurological processes underlying rapid naming and fluency, though not all experts agree and the current research on the topic is inconsistent. The present study puts this idea to the test by providing practice with RAN object naming and determining its efficacy through analysis of sight word fluency scores and dysfluency frequencies. For the participants of the current study, sight word fluency increased over the course of the intervention and insight was gained into frequency of dysfluency behaviors. The current study contributes to the body of knowledge on fluency assessment at the sight word level, dysfluent behaviors in early readers, and the use of rapid automatic naming practice as an intervention strategy.”

Alderson, J. A. (2025). Rapid Automatic Naming as a Sight Word Fluency Intervention (Doctoral dissertation, Piedmont University). Alderson, J. A. (2025). Rapid Automatic Naming as a Sight Word Fluency Intervention (Doctoral dissertation, Piedmont University).

Verbal working memory as emergent from language comprehension and production (2020).

“This article reviews current models of verbal working memory and considers the role of language comprehension and long-term memory in the ability to maintain and order verbal information for short periods of time. While all models of verbal working memory posit some interaction with long-term memory, few have considered the character of these long-term representations or how they might affect performance on verbal working memory tasks. Similarly, few models have considered how comprehension processes and production processes might affect performance in verbal working memory tasks. Modern theories of comprehension emphasize that people learn a vast web of correlated information about the language and the world and must activate that information from long-term memory to cope with the demands of language input. To date, there has been little consideration in theories of verbal working memory for how this rich input from comprehension would affect the nature of temporary memory. There has also been relatively little attention to the degree to which language production processes naturally manage serial order of verbal information. The authors argue for an emergent model of verbal working memory supported by a rich, distributed long-term memory for language. On this view, comprehension processes provide encoding in verbal working memory tasks, and production processes maintenance, serial ordering, and recall. Moreover, the computational capacity to maintain and order information varies with language experience. Implications for theories of working memory, comprehension, and production are considered.”

Schwering, S. C., & MacDonald, M. C. (2020). Verbal working memory as emergent from language comprehension and production. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 14, 68.

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Effect of reciprocal teaching on comprehension, attention, rapid naming and working memory (2024).

“This study aims to evaluate word callers attending the fourth grade of primary school in terms of rapid naming, verbal working memory, and attention skills, and to examine the effect of the reciprocal teaching approach on the development of word callers' reading comprehension skills. The study group consisted of 25 word callers and 21 independent readers. Fourth-grade students who are at the independent level in word recognition skills and at the level of frustration in reading comprehension skills are defined as word callers. On the other hand, students who are at the independent level in both word recognition and reading comprehension skills are defined as independent readers. According to the findings, difficulties in rapid naming, verbal working memory and attention skills are common characteristics of word callers. On the other hand, with the reciprocal teaching approach applied for 12 weeks, significant improvements were achieved in the reading comprehension skills of word callers. In this direction, it can be interpreted that the reciprocal teaching approach eliminated the difficulties experienced by word callers.”

Öksüz, H. İ., & Akyol, H. (2024). Effect of reciprocal teaching on comprehension, attention, rapid naming and working memory. Turkish Journal of Education, 13(3), 180-198.

Mediators of working memory and reading (2024)

“Working memory (WM) has been consistently linked to reading. However, the mechanism(s) linking WM to reading remain unclear. WM may indirectly exert an effect onto reading through mediators such as phonemic awareness (PA) and/or rapid automatized naming (RAN). In a sample of children with reading difficulty (n = 117), separate mediation analyses tested direct and indirect (through PA and RAN) effects of WM on untimed word decoding and recognition (i.e., basic reading skills) and timed word decoding and recognition (i.e., reading fluency). WM exerted a direct effect on basic reading skills and reading fluency. For basic reading skills, there was a significant indirect effect of WM on reading through the mediation of PA (but not through RAN). By contrast, for reading fluency, there was a significant indirect effect of WM on reading through the mediation of RAN (but not through PA). Findings reinforce the importance of WM, PA, and RAN for broad reading skills, while offering a mechanistic explanation for why poor PA and/or RAN may differentially lead to reading difficulty.”

Guerin, J. M., Droder, S., Turkelson, L., & Mano, Q. R. (2024). Mediators of working memory and reading in a sample of children with reading difficulty: The roles of phonemic awareness and rapid automatized naming. Dyslexia, 30(3), e1774. https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1774