Is your child a poor reader? Maybe he or she just needs a memory upgrade

Martin Beaudoin, Ph.D.University of Alberta

Suzanne Sauvé, MSc-SLP, R. SLP(C)

Goals of the talk

• Summarize the demographics of French Schools of Alberta

• Dual-route model of reading• Describe prereading skills• Show examples of tests from the battery• Demonstrate a demo of the web version• Next steps…

A map of Canada…

Demographics of French schools in Alberta

• Alberta is 1.9% French-speakers, compared to 23% for Canada as a whole; all are bilinguals

• 35 French schools across the province• 6 428 children registered in 2012-13• Large proportion of recent immigrants and

refugees in some schools (up to 95%)• These children arrive at any age and are integrated

in schools by age, not educational background• Imagine the language and ethnic soup!

Reading-aloud from a cognitive perspective

Hillis, A.E. (2001). Cognitive Neuropsycholigical Approaches to Rehabilitation of Language Disorders: Introduction. In Chapey, R. Language Intervention Strategies inAphasia and Related Neurogenic Communication Disorders. pp 513-523.

Prereading skills

• Many skills are involved in reading, depending on the type of reading

• The best known are phonological and phonemic awareness

• Lexical access and verbal memory are also fairly well known

• However, many others are important for some of the subtasks involved in reading

• Also, dyscalculia is closely related to most forms of dyslexia

General characteristics of test battery

• All responses by children are spoken (thus recorded)• Only reading tests involve written words/nonwords• Time is measured or limited in a number of tests• Minimal visual distractors on screen• Computer-testing limits error potential and allow

schools to run the battery without a specialist• Tests are marked by trained technician and reviewed by

SLP with consideration of child history• Entire test battery takes about 30-40 minutes

Basic reading tests (not actual order)

• Reading-aloud speed test (# words in 1 minute)• Regular-words reading (lexical access)• Irregular-words reading (lexical and non-lexical

access)• Nonword reading (lexical and non-lexical

access)• Syllable inversion (phonological awareness)• Initial phoneme deletion (phonemic awareness)

Nonword reading

More specific tests

• Morpholexical decision (morpho. awareness)• Sentence repetition (verbal memory and

syntactic awareness)• Immediate and delayed auditory recall (short-

term verbal memory)• Rapid-Access-Naming of animal (lexical access)• Rapid-Access-Naming of letters (graphemic

access)

RAN (animals)

Numeracy tests

• Rapid-Access-Naming of digits (numerical access and visual accuracy)

• Digit sequence repetition (verbal and numerical memory)

• Inverted digit sequence repetition (working verbal and numerical memory)

Demo of web version of battery

Password protected site with registration:

http://prereading.dlinkddns.com/login.jsp

Future steps…

• Norming (maybe Fall 2014)• Translation to English and Spanish (2014-15)• Automatic speech recognition (?)