The proposed research will integrate the diagnostic strengths of Research Projects 1, 2, and 3 with studies of computer-based remediation for deficits in phoneme awareness, word decoding, and reading comprehension in children with reading disability. During each year, 10 twin pairs tested in Projects 1, 2, and 3 and 4 children with extensive prereading longitudinal data will be trained and 12 children will be untrained controls. The trained children will read stories on the computer for 2 1/2 hours a week for 9 months in the home, with trained parental guidance. They will target difficult words in the stories with a mouse for immediate orthographic and speech feedback. The computer will emphasize important relations between print and sound. When the student targets a word, the computer will display the word or word segments in white against alternating blue and green backgrounds, and the child will attempt to sound out the word. When ready, the child will click the mouse button again, and a highly intelligible speech synthesizer will pronounce each segment while highlighting it in reverse video. Three supplementary training condiitons and an untrained control group will be compared over the course of the study. The first phase will compare 2 methods. One teaches articulatory- awareness, phonological awareness and phonological decoding prior to and concurrent with reading stories on the computer. The other teachers """"""""Reciprocal Teaching"""""""" comprehension strategies concurrent with text-reading and results in greater exposure to print in stories. The second phase of the study will compare two approaches to training phonological awareness. Both will include the intensive practice in ordering and manipulating phonemes and graphemes in reading and spelling exercises from the phonological awareness program of Phase I, but only one will include the pretraining of articulatory awareness, to isolate any unique effects of concrete speech-motor awareness. Interactions will be examined between the different treatment effects and individual differences in disabled readers' initial profiles of component reading, language, and attentional skills measured in Research Projects 1, 2, and 3. Longitudinal assessment and growth-curve analyses will describe development of reading and language skills during and up to 4 years after training.
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