Probing the neurocognitive trajectories of children’s reading skills

• Published in: Neuropsychologia Vol. 51; no. 3; pp. 472 - 481
• Main Authors: Talcott, Joel B., Witton, Caroline, Stein, John F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2013; Elsevier
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Age Factors; Analysis of Variance; Awareness; Biological and medical sciences; Case-Control Studies; Child; Child development; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive; Development; Developmental psychology; Discrimination (Psychology) - physiology; Dyslexia; Dyslexia - diagnosis; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Language and communication disorders; Literacy skills; Male; Medical sciences; Neuropsychological Tests; Orthography; Perceptual Disorders - etiology; Phonetics; Phonological awareness; Photic Stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reading; Sensory; Vocabulary; Reading; Literacy skills; Development; Phonological awareness; Dyslexia; Cognitive; Orthography; Sensory; Human; Reading disorder; Central nervous system; Cognition; Experimental study; Literacy; Language disorder; Preadolescent; Encephalon; Communication disorder; Verbal ability; School age; Metalinguistics; Language; Language development; Child
• ISSN: 0028-3932; 1873-3514
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.11.016

Emerging evidence of the high variability in the cognitive skills and deficits associated with reading achievement and dysfunction promotes both a more dimensional view of the risk factors involved, and the importance of discriminating between trajectories of impairment. Here we examined reading and component orthographic and phonological skills alongside measures of cognitive ability and auditory and visual sensory processing in a large group of primary school children between the ages of 7 and 12 years. We identified clusters of children with pseudoword or exception word reading scores at the 10th percentile or below relative to their age group, and a group with poor skills on both tasks. Compared to age-matched and reading-level controls, groups of children with more impaired exception word reading were best described by a trajectory of developmental delay, whereas readers with more impaired pseudoword reading or combined deficits corresponded more with a pattern of atypical development. Sensory processing deficits clustered within both of the groups with putative atypical development: auditory discrimination deficits with poor phonological awareness skills; impairments of visual motion processing in readers with broader and more severe patterns of reading and cognitive impairments. Sensory deficits have been variably associated with developmental impairments of literacy and language; these results suggest that such deficits are also likely to cluster in children with particular patterns of reading difficulty. ► Different developmental trajectories are associated with deficits in phonological and orthographic decoding skills. ► Deficits restricted to orthographic processing associated with developmental delay. ► Deficits in phonological skills are associated with atypical developmental trajectories. ► Deficits in visual and auditory processing are associated with different developmental profiles of poor reading skills.