Hollis S. Scarborough

Haskins Laboratories · Reading

Purpose The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) is widely used to measure syntax production in young children. The goal of this article is to promote greater clarity and consistency in machine and hand scoring by presenting a revised version of the IPSyn (IPSyn-R) and comparing it with the original IPSyn (IPSyn-O). Method Longitu...

To obtain a fuller picture of the efficacy of reading instruction programs for adult literacy learners, gains by individual students were examined in a sample (n = 148) in which weak to moderate gains at the group level had been obtained in response to tutoring interventions that focused on strengthening basic decoding and fluency skills of low lit...

Skilled reading depends upon successfully integrating orthographic, phonological, and semantic information; however, the process of becoming a skilled reader with efficient neural circuitry is not fully understood. Short-term learning paradigms can provide insight into learning mechanisms by revealing differential responses to training approaches....

To compare the efficacy of instructional programs for adult learners with basic reading skills below the seventh grade level, 300 adults were randomly assigned to one of three supplementary tutoring programs designed to strengthen decoding and fluency skills, and gains were examined for the 148 adult students who completed the program. The three in...

In this study, confirmatory factor analyses were used to examine the interrelationships among latent factors of the simple view model of reading comprehension (word recognition and language comprehension) and hypothesized additional factors (vocabulary and reading fluency) in a sample of 476 adult learners with low literacy levels. The results prov...

Reading comprehension scores from the Wechsler Individual Achievement Tests, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, and the Gray Oral Reading Test were examined in relation to measures of reading, language, and other cognitive skills that have been hypothesized to contribute to comprehension and account for comprehension differences. In a sample of 97...

For children whose everyday speech differs greatly from the School English (SE) they encounter in academic materials and settings, it was hypothesized that greater familiarity with SE would be associated with more successful early reading acquisition. Sentence imitation and reading skills of 217 urban African American students in kindergarten throu...

Most cases of reading difficulties can be predicted. This chapter provides a survey and a discussion of the research evidence. Across more than 60 samples, there is considerable agreement that the strongest preschool predictors are the children’s budding orthographic abilities (e.g. letter knowledge), phoneme awareness, and measures of productive l...

Literacy, language, and cognitive skills were compared for 35 4th-5th graders with early-identified reading disabilities (RD), 31 with late-identified RD (first seen after 3rd grade), and 95 normally achieving students. Late-identified reading deficits were heterogeneous; some children were weak in both comprehension and word-level processing, wher...

Reading achievement, IQ, and behavior problems were assessed in second and eighth grade for a longitudinal sample of 57 children. Changes in these scores over time were compared for children with no learning disabilities versus children with math or reading disabilities (research-identified and/or school-identified). A widening of the group differe...

Several decades of research have made it clear that by the time children enter school they already vary widely in their reading-related knowledge and skills. How well do these differences predict differences in reading acquisition? What can they tell us about the causes of reading disabilities? How might these research findings be used to reduce th...

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Many phonological terms are found in the contemporary literature on reading, and some inconsistencies and disagreements are apparent in how they are used and understood. To clarify the meanings of these words in current usage, and thereby to facilitate communication in the field of literacy, a thematically organized glossary of these terms and rela...

The National Research Council report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, reviews research on early reading and recommends prevention strategies and optimal interventions for reading difficulties. Since speech-language pathologists often treat children whose language problems co-occur with reading difficulties, they can help inform p...

Concurrent and prospective correlations among reading, spelling, phonemic awareness, verbal memory, rapid serial naming, and IQ were examined in a longitudinal sample that was studied at Grade 2 and Grade 8. Substantial temporal stability of individual differences in all of these skills was seen over the six-year period between assessments. The str...

Metaphonological sensitivity to the component sounds of spoken words has been shown to develop in conjunction with alphabetic literacy. It is generally presumed that skilled readers possess and display a high degree of phonemic awareness. Data are presented that challenge this claim and indicate that many mature readers are unexpectedly inaccurate...

Lonigan, and Dunning, Mason, and Stewart raised several interesting questions about our review of the efficacy of reading to preschool children. In response, we provide some further details regarding the computation of average effects and the comparison of effect sizes and offer a few additional comments about the contributions of home literacy pra...

Reviewed research from 1960 to 1993 pertaining to the hypothesized influence of parent–preschooler reading experiences on the development of language and literacy skills. The literature provides evidence for this association, although the magnitudes of the observed effects have been quite variable within and between samples and, on average, have be...

Maternal language during mother-child play sessions was examined in several samples (Ns = 12 to 20) that differed with respect to the young preschoolers' chronological ages, language proficiency, subsequent reading achievement, and familial incidence of reading disability. For most of the structural and functional aspects of mothers' utterances tha...

To examine the possible persistence of phonological selectional constraints on young children's lexical choices, the words attempted in the conversational speech of a longitudinal sample of 12 normally-developing preschoolers from age 2;0 to 5;0 were scored for syllabic length, presence of consonant clusters, and distribution of constituent phoneme...

During their children's preschool years, parents were asked about the frequencies of adult reading, parent-child reading, and children's solitary book activities in the home. Parental responses were compared for three groups of children defined according to the parents' reading skills and the children's reading achievement in Grade 2. The results i...

Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes was examined as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) served as the measure of syntactic and morphological pro...

The expressive language of 19 fragile X [fra(X)] males with chronological ages between 5 and 36 years and Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scores between 21 and 79 was examined for syntactic as well as pragmatic proficiency. The production of deviant repetitive language was observed with this group, corroborating the results of an earlier study with a sm...

In a longitudinal study of the relation between preschool development and later reading abilities, children with dyslexic parents and/or older siblings were compared to children with no family incidence of dyslexia. Many children from dyslexic families developed reading problems by the end of the second grade, and these poor readers were characteri...

At 2 1/2 years of age, children who later developed reading disabilities were deficient in the length, syntactic complexity, and pronunciation accuracy of their spoken language, but not in lexical or speech discrimination skills. As 3-year-olds, these children began to show deficits in receptive vocabulary and object-naming abilities, and as 5-year...

The syntactic development of preschoolers who later became disabled readers was compared to that of children who were similar to the dyslexics in sex, socioeconomic status, and IQ, but who became normal readers. Expressive and receptive syntactic abilities were examined longitudinally from age 30 to 60 months. The dyslexic group was poorer than the...

At 2 1/2 years of age, children who later developed reading disabilities were deficient in the length, syntactic complexity, and pronunciation accuracy of their spoken language, but not in lexical or speech discrimination skills. As 3-year-olds, these children began to show deficits in receptive vocabulary and object-naming abilities, and as 5-year...

Four children with early language delays (ELD) were compared to a control group of 12 children with respect to their preschool language abilities from age 2 1/2 to 5 years and their verbal skills at the end of Grade 2. The language-delayed children each initially showed severe and broad impairments in syntactic, phonological, and lexical production...

A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index an...

Reading ability at Grade 2 was well predicted both by the incidence of reading problems in children's families and by individual differences among the children in vocabulary, phonological awareness, and early literacy skills at age 5 years. In contrast, sex, socioeconomic status (SES), age, and preschool differences in IQ, nonverbal skills, early e...

Reading ability at Grade 2 was well predicted both by the incidence of reading problems in children's families and by individual differences among the children in vocabulary, phonological awareness, and early literacy skills at age 5 years. In contrast, sex, socioeconomic status, age, and preschool differences in IQ, nonverbal skills, early educati...

Although a linear relationship between age and utterance length during the preschool years has been reported, that result was only partially replicated from age 2 to 5 years in two new research samples, one cross-sectional and the other longitudinal in design. Instead, a deceleration in age curves, particularly beyond about 36 months, was observed...

Pointing gestures of verbally advanced 2-year-olds were contrasted with those of less advanced peers, in order to examine the relationships of gesture to language during the acquisition of each. Hypotheses regarding the replacement of gestural functions by speech as verbal skills improve, regarding developmental correspondences between the two comm...

If reading disabilities were the result of developmental lags, disabled readers should catch up to their peers in proficiency at maturity. As a test of this hypothesis, current literacy skills were assessed for adults who did, and did not, have childhood reading disabilities. Contrary to the developmental lag hypothesis, most of the former group re...

In a recognition memory task, 4-, 8-, and 16-year-olds quickly decided whether or not probe pictures were identical to remembered study pictures. Conceptual and visual, but not acoustic, confusion were evidenced by the longer latencies when probes were visually or conceptually related to study items than when unrelated or rhyming. Visual confusion...

When memory is required, sentence reading time patterns are U-shaped over the phrases, with prolonged pauses at phrase boundaries. Qualitative hypotheses suggest why subjects engage in higher-level coding at phrase boundaries. Quantitative models account for how long subjects pause there. A two-process additive model accounts well for the data and...

Conducted 5 reaction time (RT) experiments with 75 undergraduates to explore word-frequency effects in word-nonword decision tasks and in pronunciation and memory tasks. High-frequency words were recognized substantially faster than low-frequency words in the word-nonword decision tasks. However, there was little effect of word frequency in the pro...

A study with 48 undergraduates showed that patterns of word-by-word reading times differ for Ss who must later recall a sentence and Ss who must simply comprehend it. The data suggest that these 2 retrieval tasks induce different perceptual coding strategies. The recall Ss had slower reading times and smaller practice effects than the comprehension...