Research Projects Funded by IDA 

Summary: 

A Family Study of Reading Achievement in Russia

The underlying premise of this research was that the child?s ability to consciously separate the spoken word into phonemes is critical for his/her acquisition of reading. Decoding is the term that describes the process of converting the letters of a printed word into some approximation of their possible phonemic representations (their “sounds”) and blending these discrete representations together to form a holistic representation similar to the spoken word. This study focuses on the phase of reading development in which the child moves from initial decoding, which is labored and slow, to fluent, automatic decoding. The orthography of the Russian language is particularly well-suited for the study of this transition. This research addressed two hypotheses about the reading characteristics that facilitate fluent decoding. Both hypotheses recognize the need to understand the cognitive structure of the reader’s knowledge of how letters and letter clusters relate to a particular language. One theory is that, during the transition to skilled reading, the decoding process becomes automatic; it occurs without selective attention. An alternative hypothesis is that the skilled reader’s transition to fluent decoding results from the readers, use of the print-to-sound relations of increasingly larger clusters of letters (larger “grain-sizes”). In evaluating the evidence for these two alternatives, this work characterized the transition for Russian but will also provide a plausible model for the transition in English. In addition, this study assessed the hypothesis that the good reader, but not the poor reader, is characterized by an ability to consciously attend to the phoneme building blocks that comprise a spoken word. Finally, this study has investigated cross-generation patterns of reading performance indicators in Russian families. This study was the first attempt to explore the tiology of reading performance in a population of native Russian speakers. The proposed research was conducted on a sample of 100 children and their parents. All study participants were assessed using standard tests of phonological awareness and reading ability. This sample provided, for the first time, an opportunity to: 1) verify the current model of reading achievement in Russian; 2) to estimate heritability coefficients of reading-related processes; and 3) to investigate patterns of transmission of reading-related cognitive processes in a family sample of native Russian speakers. The study allowed the assembly of a model of reading difficulties in Russian, according to which the early developmental indicators of these difficulties are related to phonological deficits, but the later indicators are related to a lack of fluency. (Based on ideas developed with Leonard Katz, University of Connecticut)