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What’s in a name? Preschoolers’ noun learning performance in relation to their risk for reading disability

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Abstract

This paper reports the findings of an investigation aimed at gaining a clearer understanding of the nature of vocabulary difficulties associated with dyslexia and associated risk status. Three studies were conducted to examine preschoolers’ access and mastery of syntactic- and phonological-based processes believed to support word learning. Results are reported for 82 participants whose (reading) risk status was assessed from a composite of measures known to be related to reading development. As expected, risk status correlated positively with participants’ ability to recall the phonological form of novel nouns. No relationship was found between risk status and participants’ use of syntactic form-class cues in interpreting the noun class of novel names in isolation. However, the ability to use form-class cues was impaired for at-risk participants on a task that required them to learn both the phonological form and noun class. Findings are discussed in relation to the suggestion that limitations in processing resources such as working memory rather than in the availability of language structures may be at the root of the reported poor performance by at-risk children on vocabulary and other linguistic measures.

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Notes

  1. Sentence examples are referenced by number throughout text.

Abbreviations

FCC:

Form class cue

WM:

Working memory

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Acknowledgments

The research in this article was funded by the Australian Research Council, grant A00104266. We thank the children and their parents for participation and the staff of the schools in which we collected the data. We benefitted from valuable discussions with Annie Carn, Stephen Crain, Helen Fraser, Bruce Stevenson, Rosalind Thornton, and Roger Wales.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia

    Megan Louise Gilliver & Brian Byrne

  2. National Acoustic Laboratories, 126 Greville St, Chatswood, NSW, 2067, Australia

    Megan Louise Gilliver

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  1. Megan Louise Gilliver
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  2. Brian Byrne
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Correspondence to Megan Louise Gilliver.

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Gilliver, M.L., Byrne, B. What’s in a name? Preschoolers’ noun learning performance in relation to their risk for reading disability. Read Writ 22, 637–659 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-008-9155-5

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