The chosen peer-reviewed article is by Alonzo et al. (2020). The article discovers the extent to which kindergarten letter identification and phonological awareness predict 2nd-grade word reading and dyslexia in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). It also examines children’s age- and grade-matched peers with typical language (TL). For their research method, Alonzo et al. (2020) used logistic regression. This was employed to identify how letter identification and phonological awareness predict dyslexia. The regression helps to determine the dichotomous categorization of good or poor word reading, in children with DLD and TL. They also utilized a quantile regression to analyze how letter identification and phonological awareness are related to word reading skills during the long-lasting process in these groups of children.
The Letter Identification subtest of the WRMT-R was given to kindergarten participants to investigate letter identification. The sub-test assesses children’s ability to name individual letters of the alphabet given in a range of typefaces. The Word Identification subtest of the WRMT-R was administered to second-grade subjects to examine word reading. The subtest assesses children’s ability to recognize printed English words in a range of frequency of occurrence from high to low. The assessments were given in two 2-hour sessions in each grade in both the epidemiological and longitudinal investigations. 17 qualified assessors—seven licensed speech-language pathologists, three assessors with a bachelor’s degree in speech and hearing, and seven assessors with a bachelor’s degree in education—administered the exams using specially equipped vans parked outside the participants’ houses or schools.
When compared to phonological awareness, logistic regression revealed that letter identification was the only significant, unique kindergarten predictor of dyslexia in 2nd-grade children with DLD. Both kindergarten letter identification and phonological awareness were found to be significant predictors of dyslexia in second grade in children with TL. When compared to higher-performing readers, kindergarten letter identification was a stronger predictor of 2nd-grade word reading for average and lower-achieving word readers with DLD and their peers with TL. In children with DLD, phonological awareness was only weakly linked to word reading across the entire spectrum of word reading ability. As such, Alonzo et al. (2020) suggest that, in kindergarten children with developmental language disorder, letter identification is a better predictor of poor word reading and dyslexia than phonological awareness, which has crucial implications for the current United States legislation concerning the early diagnosis of dyslexia in all children.
The article of Alonzo et al. (2020) expands my understanding of the topic of dyslexia in children with both conditioned by development language disorder and those who are not. Moreover, it provides methods for measuring letter identification and word reading in children. It uses different subsets that I may apply later in my project. Despite the prevalence of statistical analysis, I could understand the findings of the study and the conclusions that the authors made.
I think I will use the same research method which is applying logistic regression as well as quantile regression models. This is because such a research method seems to provide more clear and more reliable data. I will also use this article as a part of my theoretical background to examine what has already been investigated on the topic of dyslexia in children, in particular in young females aged between 5 and 9.
The findings of Alonzo et al. (2020) suggest that existing dyslexia screeners that depend significantly on phonological processing activities will produce a higher proportion of false positives for dyslexia risk in children with DLD. Inflated false positives would lead to a misallocation of resources for assessing and treating children with DLD who were not accurately identified. This can contribute to my final project as it provides some insights into how dyslexia should be investigated.
With regards to the evaluation of the article, it has both strengths and weaknesses that should be addressed in my literature review. The strongest side of this study is in its sample which was carefully obtained from several stages. Specifically, the epidemiology study included a stratified cluster sample of 7,218 children, stratified by residential setting and cluster sampled by school building. A total of 604 children were included in the longitudinal study, which yielded comprehensive data. For 473 of these children, complete data on measures of interest were available. Yet, the study did not distinguish between girls and boys, thus it is not clear if there are differences in dyslexia in children of the same age but with different sexes. One more strength of the study is that they carefully identified children with developmental language disorders. Children were identified as having DLD based on a diagnostic test battery done in kindergarten that measured three domains of language (vocabulary, grammar, and narration) as well as two modalities (receptive and expressive).
Alonzo et al. (2020) seem to neglect the fact that dyslexia is a multifaceted disorder in which a single element, such as a lack of phonological awareness or letter recognition, is unlikely to result in poor word reading. Therefore, some points made my authors seem not reliable as there is a need to consider omitted variables, such as language environment or specific features of every child that participated in the study.
References
Alonzo, C. N., McIlraith, A. L., Catts, H. W., & Hogan, T. P. (2020). Predicting dyslexia in children with developmental language disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63(1), 151-162.