Advisor
Hess, Robyn S.
Advisor
Dunn, Thomas M.
Committee Member
Koehler-Hak, Kathrine
Committee Member
Peterson, Lori Y.
Department
School Psychology
Institution
University of Northern Colorado
Type of Resources
Text
Place of Publication
Greeley (Colo.)
Publisher
University of Northern Colorado
Date Created
8-1-2015
Genre
Thesis
Extent
182 pages
Digital Origin
Born digital
Description
Given that children and adolescents with dyslexia may struggle academically as well as socially and emotionally, it is critical to understand and develop methods for early intervention. A growing body of research has focused on reading interventions that include word priming which typically involves numerous presentations of words that are phonologically or semantically related to a target word. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of word and picture priming on the reaction times of word recognition tasks for five youth with dyslexia, aged 7-16 with dyslexia. Results of this 25-session multiple-case multiple treatment reversal design study showed that picture priming treatments assisted all participants in reading target words more quickly. Word priming treatments assisted four of the five participants in reading target words more quickly. All participants demonstrated greater decreases in their reaction times reading target words with picture primes than with word primes. The decoding ability of participants appeared to affect their perception of the benefits of the two types of intervention. Readers with less decoding ability preferred picture primes, while more advanced decoders believed word primes were more beneficial. Overall, results showed that younger and less-skilled readers showed enhanced effects of semantics as compared with older readers whose decoding skills were relatively efficient. These findings are consistent with the proposition that the semantic pathway can compensate direct orthography-to-phonology translations when that process is slow and inefficient.
Degree type
PhD
Degree Name
Doctoral
Language
English
Local Identifiers
Johnson_unco_0161D_10379
Rights Statement
Copyright is held by author.
