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Motor Control and Reading Fluency: Contributions beyond Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in Children with Reading Disabilities.

Multiple domains of deficit have been proposed to account for the apparent reading failure of children with a reading disability. Deficits in both phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming are consistently linked with the development of a reading disability in young school age children. Less research, however, has sought to connect these two reading related processes to global theories of deficit, such as temporal processing deficits, in the explanation of reading fluency difficulties. This study sought to explore the relationship between aspects of temporal processing, as indexed through measures of motor fluency and control, and measures of reading related processes, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, to word reading fluency. Using structural equation modeling, measures of patterned motor movement were found to be negatively and significantly related to measures of phonological awareness. Measures of oral and repetitive movement were found to be positively and significantly related to measures of patterned movement. Finally, phonological awareness was found to be a significant predictor of word reading fluency both independently and through rapid automatized naming. No direct relationship between measures of motor control and fluency and word reading fluency was found. These findings suggest that temporal processing, as indexed by measures of motor fluency and control, are moderately predictive of the facility with which a child with a reading disability can access, manipulate, and reproduce phonetically based information. Implications for the inclusion of motor based measures in the assessment of children with reading disabilities and future directions for research are discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:digitalarchive.gsu.edu:psych_diss-1035
Date28 November 2007
CreatorsWolfe, Christopher Blake
PublisherDigital Archive @ GSU
Source SetsGeorgia State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourcePsychology Dissertations

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