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.

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