wots that werd? pseudowords (non-words) may be a misleading measure of phonological skills in young...

DYSLEXIAPublished online 25 September 2006 in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/dys.328

& Wots that Werd?Pseudowords (non-words) maybe a Misleading Measure ofPhonological Skills in YoungLearner ReadersBrenda Thomson1, David P. Crewther2 and Sheila G. Crewther1,*

1 School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 3086, Australia2 Brain Sciences Institute, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn 3122, Victoria,Australia

Pseudoword (non-word) reading tasks are a commonly usedmeasure of phonological processing across diverse fields of readingresearch. However, whether pseudoword reading gives any moreinformation about phonological processing in young learnerreaders than does the reading of real words has seldom beenconsidered. Here we show that pseudoword and real word readingare so strongly correlated (r¼0.94) in the first 4 years of school asto be representative of the same construct. Two of the subskills ofphonological processing, phonological awareness and rapidautomatic naming also predict almost identical amounts of variancein pseudoword and real word reading. A divergence in thecorrelations between word and pseudoword reading andphonological awareness and rapid naming only emerges in thefourth year, while a significant correlation between phonologicalawareness and rapid automatic naming is evident only in the firstyear of schooling. Thus these results suggest that, at least in youngchildren learning to read, care should be taken when usingpseudoword reading to measure either phonological processingability or phonological awareness as this may misinform thechoice of therapy for a child showing symptoms of dyslexia. Copyright# 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: reading; real words; pseudo (nonsense) words; phonological processing; phonologicalawareness; rapid automatic naming; learner readers

*Correspondence to: Sheila Crewther, School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University,Melbourne, Victoria 3086, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DYSLEXIA 12: 289–299 (2006)

INTRODUCTION

Pseudowords (non-words) are pronounceable combinations of letterswhich lack semantic meaning and which are considered unreadableusing either contextual clues or previous sight word familiarity but which

can be decoded and pronounced via phonological processing and alphabetic(letter-sound) knowledge (Fredrickson, Frith, & Reason, 1997). Thus pseudowordreading, which has been suggested by Siegel (1993) to be ‘the best measure ofphonological processing skill’, is now widely used as a determinant ofphonological dyslexia (Castles & Coltheart, 1993; Shaywitz et al., 1998), and asan indicator of phonological processing ability (Castles, Datta, Gayan, & Olson,1999; Cestnick & Jerger, 2000; Wu, Martin, & Damian, 2002) in educational andclinical assessment (Fredrickson et al., 1997; Martin & Pratt, 2001) and as acriterion in the determination of remediation programs. Most recently, pseudo-words have been used as a representative phonological processing task in avariety of recent genetic (Fisher et al., 1999; Fisher and Defries, 2002; Gayan et al.,2005; Scerri et al., 2004) and brain imaging studies of dyslexia (Brunswick,McCrory, Price, Frith, & Frith, 1999; Georgiewa et al., 2002, 1999; Paulesu et al.,2001; Rae et al., 2002; Robichon, Levrier, Farnarier, & Habib, 2000; Simos, Breier,Fletcher, Bergman, & Papanicolaou, 2000a; Simos et al., 2000b; Temple et al., 2001;Temple, 2002). In fact, a literature search over the period 2000–2005 using thekeywords ‘non-word reading’ showed that over 70 studies have used non-wordreading tasks in reading-related research in a variety of fields and with a varietyof populations indicating its general popularity as a test measure though theactual construct validity of this test in populations such as Williams Syndrome(Menghini, Verucci, & Vicari, 2004) and stroke patients (Pitchford & Funnell,1999) and studies of children and adults with reading disabilities across differentlanguages and orthographies (Gonzalez & Valle, 2000; Landerl, 2003;Wade-Woolley, 1999) has not always been accessed.

Traditionally, phonological processing ability has been assessed in termsof three verbal measures}phonological awareness (the ability to manipulatethe phonologic constituents of spoken words (Goswami & Bryant, 1990)),short-term auditory memory and speed of rapid automatic naming (RAN) ofnumbers or of common, known objects (Torgesen & Wagner, 1998). However, asalluded to above, many recent brain imaging studies have used pseudowordreading as a measure of phonological awareness (Shaywitz et al., 1998; Talcottet al., 1998), rather than of phonological processing, assuming that measuresof phonological awareness and phonological processing represent the sameconstruct.

Thus we investigated the relationships between pseudoword and real wordreading, and in turn, their relationships to the subskills of phonologicalprocessing: phonological awareness and RAN, in children during their first4 years of schooling. Children of this age were chosen for the study as the first4 years of schooling covers the period when dyslexia is usually diagnosed, (oftenon the basis of pseudoword reading,) and remediation is initiated. However, theidentification of children with subtypes of dyslexia more associated with deficitsin RAN than with phonological awareness (Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2002; Morriset al., 1998; Wolf & Bowers, 1999) and the observation that such children donot respond well to intervention programs based on phonological remediation

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Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DYSLEXIA 12: 289–299 (2006)DOI: 10.1002/dys

(Allor, Fuch, & Mathers, 2001) mandates scrutiny of tasks used in thedetermination of these subtypes of dyslexia for the provision of meaningfulinformation.

METHOD

Participants

The children used in this study (N¼71) ranged in age from 6 to 9 years. Twentychildren (10 boys and 10 girls) from each of grades preparatory, one, two andthree, were recruited from a primary school in a middle class socio-economicdistrict. Nine children were excluded from the analysis either because of missingdata or on the basis of a standard score of less than 85 on the Raven’s ColouredProgressive Matrices (RCPM) (Raven, 1998), or because sub-skill scores lay morethan 2.5 standard deviations away from normalized year-by-year means.Participants were tested individually during the final term of the school year.All children had English as a first language. None had a reported history oflearning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hearing impairment,uncorrected visual acuity deficits, physical impairment or behavioural disorders.Group details are shown in Table 1.

Materials and Procedures

Tests commonly used in both research and clinical practice were selected for thestudy and were administered and scored in accordance with the instructionsspecified in test manuals. The real word reading test was the letter wordidentification subtest from the Woodcock language proficiency battery–revised(WLPB-R) (Woodcock, 1991). The pseudoword reading test was the word attacksubtest from the same battery. Phonological awareness was measured using theLindamood Auditory Analysis Test (LAC Test) (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1979)which is a non-reading measure of the ability to discriminate phonemes and todecompose words into their phonologic constituents. The RAN task was the testof digit naming from the Phonological Assessment Battery (Fredrickson et al.,1997). This test uses digits from one to nine repeated randomly in a sequence of

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics for children included in the study

Year 1 (n¼19) Year 2 (n¼17) Year 3 (n¼18) Year 4 (n¼17)

M SE M SE M SE M SE

Age in months 77.2 0.8 88.7 1.1 99.7 0.9 110.0 1.4NVIQ 20.1 1.0 25.7 1.1 28.3 0.8 29.2 1.2Word reading 22.7 1.5 29.0 1.3 42.0 1.8 42.2 1.4Pseudoword reading 5.3 1.4 8.7 1.1 18.1 1.5 20.7 1.4RAN rate 61.4 3.5 73.5 5.0 95.6 5.8 118.2 5.0PA 54.4 3.8 64.9 3.7 82.6 2.5 84.8 2.3

Note: NVIQ¼Ravens coloured progressive matrices (raw score); word reading=Woodcock language proficiencybattery (Revised), word identification subtest (raw score); pseudoword reading=Woodcock language proficiencybattery (Revised), word attack subtest (raw score); PA¼Lindamood auditory analysis test (LAC); RAN¼digitnaming speed from the phonological assessment battery.

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50 numbers repeated over two trials. It is scored as the time in seconds taken tocomplete the two trials. Scores were converted to items per minute to provide anaming rate. The non-verbal intelligence measure (NVIQ) used to ascertain thatall children showed average NVIQ was the RCPM (Raven, 1998). Mean NVIQ foryears 1, 2, 3 and 4 were above the 50th percentile.

Analyses

Correlations were used to determine the relationships between the individualvariables. In order to determine the relative contributions of phonologicalawareness and RAN to real-word and pseudoword reading multiple regressionsusing the enter method were conducted.

Randomization models (bootstrap and permutation) have emerged intomainstream statistical testing (Hesterberg, Monaghan, Moore, Clipson, &Epstein, 2005; Manly, 1997). Thus a model for testing whether correlations weresignificantly different was constructed on the basis of the null hypothesis (thatword and pseudoword reading represented the same construct). If the nullhypothesis were true, then pair-wise swapping of data between word andpseudoword reading (once the data have been standardized to account fordifferent scales) should not alter the correlation values with RAN. This allows forthe full statistical distribution of correlation differences to be established. Aprogram was developed in LabView software (National Instruments, Austin,Texas), to allow random pair-wise swaps of elements between the standardizedword and pseudoword reading data. A total of 10 000 such pair wise swaps werecalculated and on each occasion the resulting new data sets were correlated withphonological awareness and RAN. The differences in correlation were rankedand the position of the real data was determined with respect to the constructeddistribution, directly giving a p value.

RESULTS

Our data, collected from children in the first 4 years of schooling, shows aremarkably strong correlation between pseudoword and real word reading (Pearsoncorrelation, r ¼ 0.94, n ¼ 71, p 5 0.01, two tailed) as illustrated in Figure 1.The individual correlations for each of the first 3 years of schooling remained highbut fell in year 4 (year 1: r¼0.91, year 2: r¼0.91, year 3: r¼0.93, year 4: r¼0.70).

The high correlation between pseudoword and real word reading suggests thatthey represent measures of the same construct in the early years of reading. Ifthat were so, then pseudoword and real word reading should correlate equallywith individual subskills of phonological processing. The scatter plots of Figure 2show similar patterns for phonological awareness with both pseudoword andreal word reading and for RAN with pseudoword and real word reading. Closerinspection shows that the correlations weaken in the older children in the fourthyear of school.

A bootstrap correlation approach showed that, when tested across the 4 years,phonological awareness was more strongly correlated with word than withpseudoword reading while differences in correlation between word and



pseudoword reading with RAN were insignificant. However, removal of the year4 data from the analysis demonstrated that for the first 3 years, the correlation ofphonological awareness with pseudoword reading was insignificantly differentfrom that with real word reading. Similarly, the correlation of RAN speed withpseudoword reading was insignificantly different from that with real wordreading (see Table 2).

Multiple regression analysis was also used to determine the extent to which thevariance in pseudoword and real word reading ability were differentiallypredicted by phonological awareness and RAN speed. Significant modelsemerged for both pseudoword reading (F2,68¼81.1, p50.0001) predicting 70%of the variance, and real word reading (F2,68¼91.8, p50.0001) predicting 72% ofthe variance. Phonological awareness and RAN were significant predictors(p50.0001) in both models. Indeed, phonological awareness and RAN togetherpredicted no more of the variance in pseudoword reading than they did in wordreading in the first 4 years of schooling.

The high correlation observed between pseudo and real word reading couldarise as a result of a high correlation between the subskills, effectively making thetwo reading measures reliant on a single underlying variable. In order to test thisidea we investigated the relation between RAN and PA during the first 4 years ofschooling (see Figure 3).

Significant correlation between PA and RAN rate was only observed in the firstyear of schooling (r¼0.54, p50.05), although PA and RAN, continue to improvethrough years 2 and 3, implying they have become independent variables.

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Figure 1. Comparison of word and pseudoword reading in children across the first fouryears of schooling (Increasing dot size indicates year 1 to year 4 of school). A strong

correlation (r¼0.94) is demonstrated between word reading and pseudoword reading.

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DISCUSSION

Our results are not the first to identify a significant correlation betweenpseudoword and real word reading but we are the first to question the validity

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Figure 2. The development of phonological awareness as a function of word reading (a)and of pseudoword reading (b) and of rapid naming rate as a function of word reading (c)and of pseudoword reading (d). Schooling from year 1 to year 4 is indicated by

increasing dot size.

Table 2. Correlations of subskills with word and pseudoword reading for early learnerreaders

n Word Pseudoword p-value

PA Yr 1-4 71 0.797 0.739 0.026RAN Yr 1-4 71 0.707 0.748 0.123

PA Yr 1-3 54 0.768 0.741 0.255RAN Yr 1-3 54 0.657 0.659 0.948

Note: Word¼WLPB(R) word identification subtest; pseudoword¼WLPB(R) word attack subtest; PA¼LAC test;RAN¼digit naming speed from the phonological assessment battery.Correlation (year 1–4) for word and pseudoword reading¼0.940, correlation (year 1–3) for word and pseudowordreading¼0.955.



of pseudoword reading as an independent measure of phonological processing,and more particularly phonological awareness, in children learning to read.Our findings are consistent with those reported in the standardization ofthe Woodcock Johnson test (Woodcock, 1991) and are also consistent with, butmuch higher than the r¼0.61 correlation of a recent meta-analysis of 137 readingdisability studies of both children and adults (Swanson, Trainin, Nechoechea,& Hammill, 2003). This lower correlation presumably reflects the divergenceof performance on pseudoword and real word reading that we observed tobegin in year 4 when most children would be expected to have acquired a moreautomatized approach to reading and where fluency becomes more associatedwith acquisition of vocabulary, orthographic and semantic skills. As would bepredicted by our study, the results of the meta-analysis also showed similar lowcorrelations between RAN and phonological awareness with both word andpseudoword reading demonstrating that pseudoword reading is no bettermeasure of these skills that real word reading.

Most importantly, the results of our study demonstrate that pseudowordreading tasks provide no more useful diagnostic information regardingphonological awareness or phonological processing ability in young learnerreaders than do real word reading tests. Although we used a normal population

Figure 3. Over the first 4 years of schooling, the relation between phonological awarenessand rapid naming rate is rather weak. However, for the children in their first yearschooling a robust relation exists. The improvement in phonological awareness in years2–4 appears to be independent of performance on the rapid automatized naming task.(Correlations r(year 1)¼0.54; r(year 2)¼0.041, r(year 3)¼0.23, r(year 4)¼�0.035, with onlythe correlation for Year 1 significant and that for years 2, 3 and 4 being non-significant).

Increasing dot size indicates year 1 to year 4 of schooling.

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of young learner readers, such findings are also likely to generalize to childrenwith dyslexia whose reading performance is reminiscent of younger readers, i.e.,they exhibit reduced word knowledge and vocabulary commensurate withyounger normal readers. The results reported here have significant implicationsfor the conclusions drawn from previous studies in young readers. First, theprognosis of reading remediation may be affected if a diagnosis of phonologicaldyslexia is based on pseudoword reading performance. Research has shown thatsome 10–30% of children with both phonological awareness and RAN deficitsbenefit from intervention strategies other than the widely used phonologicallybased remediation (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998). Secondly, wherepseudoword reading has been used as a means of identifying phonologicaldyslexia, our results would predict that this classification scheme may not giveany more information than real reading accuracy alone, and hence may not bea valid diagnostic criterion for sub-typing of developmental dyslexia. This isconsistent with other recent findings for children (Bosse & Valdois, 2003)and adults (Zabell & Everatt, 2002). Finally, our results suggest the need forre-examination of the interpretation of the neurological aetiologies inferred onthe basis of many recent brain imaging studies (Eden & Moats, 2002; Georgiewaet al., 1999; Paulesu et al., 2001; Robichon et al., 2000; Simos et al., 2000a; Templeet al., 2001), which have used pseudoword reading performance to select dyslexicsubjects for inter-group fMRI comparisons or as a phonological task.

Our finding that the relationships between either of the subskills (PA andRAN) with word and pseudoword reading vary as a result of years of schoolinghas important theoretical implication for the longstanding debate as to thedevelopmental role of phonological awareness in the process of readingacquisition (Castles & Coltheart, 2004).

Finally, the relations between phonological processing subskills during readingdevelopment have some impact on the major finding of this paper. Namely, ifword and pseudoword reading were independent functions of PA, and RAN,then the dissociation of these two sub-skills beyond Year 1 would likely bereflected by a lessening of the tight correlation between word and pseudowordreading shown in Figure 1. That this does not occur until year 4 suggests that thecontributions of PA and RAN to word and pseudoword reading are so similar asto reflect the same reliance of the two reading measures on performance for thesephonological processing sub-skills (just as might occur for two different measuresof real word reading).

In conclusion, these results suggest that, at least in young learner readers,pseudoword reading is an inappropriate measure of either phonologicalawareness or the broader construct of phonological processing and, that in theseearly readers, word and pseudoword reading are little better than measures ofthe same construct.

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