Orthographic awareness,phonemic awareness,syntactic processing,and working memory skill in hyperlexic children

Children classified as hyperlexic learn to readwords spontaneously before age five, areimpaired in both reading and listeningcomprehension, and exhibit word recognitionskills above their linguistic and cognitiveabilities. Despite their strong wordrecognition skills, previous studies have shownthat the phonemic awareness skills ofhyperlexic children are low and notcommensurate with their word reading skill, inpart because of their limited comprehension of phonemic awareness tasks. Heretofore, a verylimited number of studies have investigateddirectly the orthographic processing, syntacticprocessing, and working memory skills ofchildren with hyperlexia. In the presentstudy, measures of orthographic processing,syntactic processing, and working memory skillwere administered to three hyperlexic childrenand three normally achieving readers; inaddition, measures of phonemic awareness,academic achievement, and cognitive abilitywere also administered. Results showed thatthe hyperlexic children performed aboveexpectations on the orthographic processingmeasures based on their cognitive andlinguistic abilities. The children withhyperlexia did not exhibit orthographic skillsthat were superior to the normally achievingreaders, although ceiling effects on theorthographic tasks may not have allowed them todemonstrate this skill. The three children withhyperlexia achieved lower scores than thenormally achieving readers on the syntacticprocessing measures and had great difficulty onthe phonemic awareness measures. Only one ofthe three hyperlexic children performed at alevel consistent with that of normallyachieving readers on the working memorymeasures. Findings suggest the hyperlexicchildren had levels of orthographic processingsimilar to that of normally achieving readers,read words using strategies similar to those ofnormal readers, and had phonemic awarenessskill that appears to be adequate for wordanalysis but could not be demonstrated ontraditional phonemic awareness measures.     

Metrical stress sensitivity in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness and reading

This paper reports two studies of young English‐speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words, including words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed. The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways. The second study was a cross‐sectional comparison of 31 5, 6 and 7‐year‐old children's performance on the metrical stress reversal condition of the mispronunciation task. Measures of the children's written language skills and phonological awareness were also taken. The 7‐year‐old children outperformed the 5‐year‐olds on the metrical stress task. Performance on this measure was associated with most of the measures of phonological awareness and literacy, and was associated with rhyme awareness and spelling ability after age had been taken into account. Moreover, metrical stress sensitivity could account for variance in spelling ability after phonological awareness had been taken into account, and after vocabulary had been taken into account. This suggests that stress sensitivity may influence spelling development in a way that is independent of its contribution to phonological representations.