College 4: Development of Reading and Math

• Phonological awareness


  • Understanding the structure of words
  • Key for learning to read
  • Understanding and manipulating the component sounds of words
• Phonological awareness; becoming aware of:


  1. Sentences [The sun shines brightly]

  2. Words [sun]

  3. Syllables [sun; sun-shine; sun-ny]

  4. Onset-rime /s/ /un/; /s/ /unshine/; /s/ /unny/

  5. Phonemes /s/ /u/ /n/
• Syllable awareness can be assessed through tapping, counting and deletion tasks
• Syllable awareness can be demonstrated across different languages
• Onset and rime awareness can be assessed through:

  • Spoken rhyme recognition: Do these words rhyme?
  • Spoken rhyme production: Tell me a word which rhymes with cat?
  • Onset-rime blending: Which word is this? F-ish
  • Rhyme oddity tasks: Which word does not belong?
• Phoneme:

  • The smallest unit of language that can be used to make one word different from another word
  • Not a natural speech unit: only becomes important when you start reading
• Phoneme awareness


  1. boot

  2. |b| |oo| |t|

  3. ball

  4. |b| |a| |l|

  5. |l|
• Phoneme awareness can be assessed through counting tasks
• Orthographic transparency varies across languages, affecting letter-sound recoding abilities in the first year of schooling
• In the EU study, children in the first year of schooling showed varying levels of accuracy in reading simple familiar words and nonwords
• Languages differ in their phonemic structure, with some having more complex structures than others
• Individual differences in phonological awareness can be studied through intervention studies
• Phonological awareness intervention studies can compare a group receiving training to a control group
• Phonological awareness at age 4 can have a causal relation to later reading and spelling abilities
• Developmental dyslexia:

  • Core problem: phonological awareness
  • Cross cultural: poor performance in phonological awareness tasks in all languages
  • Normal to high IQ and often have a wide vocabulary
  • Heritable: Between 35 - 65% diagnosed as dyslexic when parent has dyslexia
• Neuroimaging studies have found differences in brain function and structure between individuals with and without dyslexia
• Neuroimaging studies have also examined the effects of intervention on brain activity in individuals with dyslexia
• Components in dyslexia treatment protocols

  • sound/sign link
  • phonemic awareness
  • time-controlled visual word recognition
  • systematic repetition
  • linking written language to spoken language
  • the accuracy and pace of reading
  • phonological awareness
  • visualizing sounds in order to get to know the sound and rule structure
• The triple code model describes different representations and processes involved in mathematics
• Number sense: analog magnitude representation; coding quantity in an approximate way -> Weber's law

  Subitizing: Distinguishing between the numerosity of very small sets of numbers without counting
• Number sense appears to be innate and present in some animals
• Counting involves core principles:

  • Cardinality: all sets with the same number are qulitatively equivalent
  • Ordinality: Numbers come in an ordered scale of magnitude
• Dyscalculia involves difficulties in the transition from intuitive (non-symbolic) to cultural (symbolic) number representations, as well as more general magnitude processing deficits
• Three types of tasks to research developmental dyslexia

  • Phonological awareness tasks
  • Tasks requiring phonological short term memory
  • Rapid automatized naming tasks
• Triple code model

  1. Visually based coding for Arabic numerals in the fusiform gyrus
  2. Language based system for facts in the left angular gyrus (language area)
  3. General number sense in the parietal lobe and intraparietal sulces (IPS)