Abstracts

Text simplification and its effects on young poor readers

Barbara Arfe

University of Padova 

Text simplification is widely used by teachers and clinicians to supply students with material which is at an appropriate level of difficulty for their language and reading skills. The purpose of text simplification is to provide a reader with a text that is more comprehensible and accessible than the original version. Current systems of text simplification typically offer a single level of text simplification, which is linguistic. Data will be presented that shows how different levels or kinds of text simplification can be necessary to promote and foster language learning and reading in readers differing for their cognitive and linguistic skills.

Understanding the cognitive constraints that young children face as they begin to write in school

Lorna Bourke 

Liverpool Hope University

The ability to make use of the knowledge and expertise gained through coding strategies for information relevant to the writing task is likely to impact on the progress young children make. One potential avenue to explore this further is to conduct studies across different education systems and with different orthographic and morphological underpinnings. The current project is focused on children aged 4-5 years in the UK and considers the development of the integration of phonological and visual coding skills in the context of narrative texts

Dynamics of orthographic development

Valeria Csepe

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Learning to read is critical in which the developing mastery of orthographic stimuli may depend on many factors. The presentation focuses on the emergence of visual expertise during the first school years. Although the main question is how orthography develops and how orthographic transparency may contribute to, the first step is to understand the nature of the underlying processes and their contribution to the variations and processing dynamics of development. Examples of the various methods used for measuring the emerging visual expertise will be shown and new research data that highlight the superiority of familiar orthographic stimuli over non-familiar symbol strings investigated by using a new brain and behavior paradigm will be discussed. As our preliminary results on the characteristic brain responses show the first graders rapidly develop expertise for print. This initial tuning for print is similar in 1st and 3rd graders, despite of the behavioral superiority of 3rd graders in reading-related tasks, suggesting that the effect is less sensitive to reading ability. Moreover, the audiovisual presentation enhances the effect, suggesting that the establishment of letter-string specific visual expertise is driven by learning orthographic-phonological mappings, rather than by mere visual exposure to print.

The effects of dyslexia on undergraduates’ writing processes and product

David Galbraith

Southampton University

This talk will describe the preliminary results of a study comparing the writing of undergraduates with and without dyslexia. The analysis will  address the extent to which differences in the quality of the writing produced by these groups are mediated by low level differences in written word production or can also be attributed to higher level differences in planning.  It will also explore potential implications for the teaching of writing to younger writers.

The present study examines language proficiency and literacy skills, reading and writing, of Russian–Cypriot Greek bilingual children in Cyprus, with the implementation of both cross-sectional and longitudinal research methodology.

Parents’ Perception of Everyday Working Memory questionnaire (PP-EWM)

Hanne Knudsen

Aalborg University

Parents’ Perception of Everyday Working Memory questionnaire (PP-EWM) was examined. The results supports the reliability of taking into account parents’ perceptions when assessing children’s WM, and contributes to considerations for a broad approach to detecting children with reading difficulties at an early stage.

HandSpy: the road ahead 

José Paulo Leal

University of Porto

HandSpy is a collaborative web system that processes data collected by smartpens, currently in its version 2.0. This presentation will discuss the main challenges for the next version, which include: supporting a new generation of smartpens from different vendors; synchronizing stroke data with data collected by other devices, such as physiologic data (for instance, heartbeat or skin conductivity) or live video; performing morphological and semantic analysis on words found in transcriptions, including categorizing words that express emotions; processing stroke data as text, for counting words and characters, and for detecting changes in text features such as character size, space between words and characters and italicization.  

Opening the mystery of dyslexia…

Heikki Lyytinnen

University of Jyväskylä

 ...on the basis of the extensive developmental data from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal study of children at risk for dyslexia from birth to adulthood.

Designing a questionnaire to assess European teachers' challenges for a multi lingual Europe

Charles Mifsud

University of Malta

Charles Mifsud will present an initial draft of the questionnaire to be sent to teachers for a Europe-wide survey about multilingual classrooms.  The survey will seek to identify the benefits and challenges for teachers presented by such classrooms in Europe.  On the Saturday morning Julie Dockrell and Charles Mifsud will lead a seminar to review and revise the draft questionnaire.  An implementation plan for the survey will be drawn up.

Handwriting execution in children with dyslexia

Guido Nottbusch

University of Potsdam

The research questions tackled in this talk will be: How does dysgraphic children's handwriting differ from those by non-impaired age matches and from younger, spelling-ability matched children? Are the main differences related to the pen-on-paper phases or to the pen-in-air phases? What happens during within-word pauses?

OpenHandWrite

Guido Nottbusch

University of Potsdam

OpenHandWrite provides accurately timed capture of pen movement data from digitising tablets and tablet PCs, and a markup and analysis tool that allows users to manually segment the pen trace into meaningful units (sentences, words, lines, strokes) and then computes by-segment summary statistics. Specific features include (a) Pen sample timing using a parallel event-handling technology that avoids quantising issues associated with windows swap and USB polling, therefore giving very accurate sample timing and more or less no sample skipping. (b) Integration into an existing, flexible and fully-featured experiment development environment (PsychoPy). (c) Capture of zero-pressure pen traces. (d)  An approach to analysis based on identifying behaviourally-meaningful pen trace segments, rather than on locating and counting pen-lifts over a particular threshold duration ("pauses"). OpenHandWrite is free and open source.

Semantic structuring and non-linear sentence planning

Jens Roeser

Nottingham Trent University´

Planning in the production of short sentences is typically not complete at the onset of output (e.g., Martin et al., 2010) but typically unfolds, at least to some degree, linearly (Ferreira and Slevc, 2007). Non-linear dependencies may mediate advanced grammatical planning (Lee et al., 2013). The present research aims at examining whether the semantic/conceptual structure of the message determines the need for non-linear sentence processing. 

Adolescent with dyslexia writing in a shallow orthography: Process and product

Vibeke Rønneberg

University of Stavanger

We assessed text quality and writing process (via measurement of inter-keypress intervals) in students with and without dyslexia, in both a normal writing condition and a condition where what they were writing was masked. Students with dyslexia made more spelling errors and produced poorer quality text. Their inter key-press latencies were substantially longer pre-word, at word-end, and within-word. These findings provide some support for the word-level focus hypothesis. Masking did not affect differences between dyslexics and controls indicating that reduced fluency was associated with production rather than monitoring what they had produced.