Papers by Jackie Masterson
Neuropsychological rehabilitation, Jan 14, 2018
An intervention study was carried out with two nine-year-old Greek-speaking dyslexic children. Bo... more An intervention study was carried out with two nine-year-old Greek-speaking dyslexic children. Both children were slow in reading single words and text and had difficulty in spelling irregularly spelled words. One child was also poor in non-word reading. Intervention focused on spelling in a whole-word training using a flashcard technique that had previously been found to be effective with English-speaking children. Post-intervention assessments conducted immediately at the end of the intervention, one month later and then five months later showed a significant improvement in spelling of treated words that was sustained over time. In addition, both children showed generalisation of improvement to untrained words and an increase in scores in a standardised spelling assessment. The findings support the effectiveness of theoretically based targeted intervention for literacy difficulties.
International journal of speech-language pathology, Jan 31, 2017
The study investigated the outcome of a word-web intervention for children diagnosed with word-fi... more The study investigated the outcome of a word-web intervention for children diagnosed with word-finding difficulties (WFDs). Twenty children age 6-8 years with WFDs confirmed by a discrepancy between comprehension and production on the Test of Word Finding-2, were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 11) and waiting control (n = 9) groups. The intervention group had six sessions of intervention which used word-webs and targeted children's meta-cognitive awareness and word-retrieval. On the treated experimental set (n = 25 items) the intervention group gained on average four times as many items as the waiting control group (d = 2.30). There were also gains on personally chosen items for the intervention group. There was little change on untreated items for either group. The study is the first randomised control trial to demonstrate an effect of word-finding therapy with children with language difficulties in mainstream school. The improvement in word-finding for treated items wa...
Reading and Writing an Interdisciplinary Journal, Jan 5, 2002
A training study was conducted to investigate the relationship between phoneme segmentation abili... more A training study was conducted to investigate the relationship between phoneme segmentation ability and the development of orthographic representations. Five-year-old children with varying degrees of phoneme segmentation ability were taught to read ten new words by repeated presentation of the words on flashcards. It was found that those children who were most well equipped to perform phoneme segmentation tasks acquired this new reading vocabulary significantly faster than those who were less phonemically aware. A series of post-tests was implemented to discover the nature of the internal orthographic representations which the children had created for the words learned. The results of these post-tests demonstrated that the children who were most phonemically aware had also internalised the most detailed orthographic representations, despite needing fewer learning trials. Salient letters for orthographic storage were predictable from the children's phoneme segmentation abilities. This paper provides strong support for the thesis that phonemic awareness is related to orthographic storage as well as alphabetic reading techniques.
Why is knowledge of factors affecting spelling important? • Spelling elucidates the cognitive and... more Why is knowledge of factors affecting spelling important? • Spelling elucidates the cognitive and linguistic strategies involved in literacy acquisition. According to recent frameworks, skill in spelling facilitates compositional writing (McCutchen,
Reading and Writing, 2012
Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2009
The present study examined whether equivalents of surface and phonological subtypes of developmen... more The present study examined whether equivalents of surface and phonological subtypes of developmental dyslexia could be found among a sample of 84 poor readers aged 9-12 years in Greece. Word reading latency was used as a measure of lexical skill, and nonword reading accuracy was used as a measure of nonlexical skill. A simple regression of word reading latencies on nonword reading accuracy scores was performed for 42 developing readers. A total of 2 poor readers with accurate nonword reading plus slow word reading relative to controls (equivalents of surface dyslexia) and 2 poor readers with inaccurate nonword reading plus fast accurate word reading relative to controls (equivalents of phonological dyslexia) were identified from amongst the sample of poor readers. Further testing of these 4 cases on measures of irregular-word and nonword spelling revealed additional evidence of a dissociation between lexical and nonlexical impairments. These results support the notion that dual-route models can be used to explore individual differences among dyslexic readers in transparent orthographic systems such as Greek. An attempt is also made to interpret the results in terms of a double deficit theory of dyslexia.
Behavior research methods, Feb 28, 2016
In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking child... more In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1 with Grades 2 to 6. It provides values for Zipf, frequency per million, dispersion, estimated word frequency per million, standard word frequency, contextual diversity, orthographic Levenshtein distance, and lemma frequency. These values are derived from 116 textbooks used in primary education in Greece and Cyprus, producing a total of 68,692 different word types. HelexKids was developed to assist researchers in studying language development, educators in selecting age-appropriate items for teaching, as well as writers and authors of educational books for Greek/Cypriot children. The database is open access and can be searched online at www.helexkids.org .
Journal of experimental child psychology, Jan 11, 2016
We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-ye... more We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General semantic knowledge was measured using standardized tasks in which children defined words and made judgments about the relationships between words. Item-specific knowledge of to-be-read words was assessed using auditory lexical decision (lexical phonology) and definitions (semantic) tasks. Regressions and mixed-effects models indicated a close relationship between semantic knowledge (but not lexical phonology) and both regular and exception word reading. Thus, during the early stages of learning to read, semantic knowledge may support word reading irrespective of regularity. Contextual support particularly benefitted reading of exception words. We found evidence that lexical-semantic knowledge and context make separable contributions to word reading.
Journal of experimental child psychology, Jan 11, 2016
We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-ye... more We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General semantic knowledge was measured using standardized tasks in which children defined words and made judgments about the relationships between words. Item-specific knowledge of to-be-read words was assessed using auditory lexical decision (lexical phonology) and definitions (semantic) tasks. Regressions and mixed-effects models indicated a close relationship between semantic knowledge (but not lexical phonology) and both regular and exception word reading. Thus, during the early stages of learning to read, semantic knowledge may support word reading irrespective of regularity. Contextual support particularly benefitted reading of exception words. We found evidence that lexical-semantic knowledge and context make separable contributions to word reading.
Neuropsychology and Cognition, 1999
Brain and Language, 2006
The present study compared object and action naming in patients with Alzheimer's dementia. We tes... more The present study compared object and action naming in patients with Alzheimer's dementia. We tested the hypothesis put forward in (some) previous studies that in Alzheimer's dementia the production of verbs, that is required in action naming, is better preserved than the production of nouns, that is required in object naming. The possible reason for the dissociation is that verbs are supported predominantly by frontal brain structures that may remain relatively better preserved in early Alzheimer's disease. Objects, on the other hand, are supported by temporal lobe structures that are aVected early in the disease. An alternative hypothesis, which is supported by other studies, is that action naming is more impaired than object naming due to verbs being semantically more complex than nouns. In order to test these contrasting hypotheses, the present study used more stringent methodology than previous studies. We used a larger set of stimuli with carefully matched object and action items and we collected not only accuracy data but also naming latencies, a measure that is sensitive to even mild lexical retrieval problems. We compared the performance of 19 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease with that of 19 healthy age matched participants. We found that both the patients and the comparison group responded faster and made fewer errors on the object pictures than the action pictures. A qualitative analysis of the naming errors indicated that object and action naming pose diVerent demands for the language system. The results overall suggest that the patients' performance is an exaggeration of the pattern present in the comparison participants.
A case study is reported of a ten year old girl (NT) who was a fluent speaker of a Turkish origin... more A case study is reported of a ten year old girl (NT) who was a fluent speaker of a Turkish origin alphabetic language as well as Greek and English. The study focuses on NT’s reading and spelling in English and Greek as she did not have literacy skills in her mother tongue. NT had average reading ability in Greek and English, but her spelling ability for both familiar words and pseudowords was impaired in both languages. Assessments revealed that NT did not appear to have a deficit of phonological awareness, however visual attention span was impaired. An intervention was conducted with the aim of improving whole-word (lexical) spelling processes in English and Greek. Post-intervention assessments carried out immediately at the end of the intervention and one month and four months later showed a significant improvement in spelling that was sustained over time. The findings support the notion of specific profiles of dyslexia/dysgraphia not only in monolingual English speakers (Castles ...
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A-human Experimental Psychology, 1999
We report an experiment designed to investigate 6-to-7-year-old children's ability to acq... more We report an experiment designed to investigate 6-to-7-year-old children's ability to acquire knowledge of sublexical correspondences between print and sound from their reading experience. A computer database containing the printed word vocabulary of children taking part in the experiment was compiled and used to devise stimuli controlled for grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) frequency and rime neighbourhood consistency according to the children's reading experience. Knowledge of GPC rules and rime units was compared by asking children to read aloud three types of nonword varying in regularity of GPC and consistency of rime pronunciation. Results supported the view that children can acquire knowledge of both GPC rules and rime units from their reading experience. GPC rule strength affects the likelihood of a GPC response; rime consistency affects the likelihood of a rime response.
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Papers by Jackie Masterson