How you read affects what you gain: Individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system predict intervention gains in children with reading disabilities.

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in computational models of reading and focus on individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system. Specifically, we estimate the extent to which children with reading disabilities (n = 118 3rd-4th graders) rely on two sources of information during an oral word reading task-print-speech correspondences and semantic imageability-before and after a phonologically-weighted intervention. We show that children who relied more on print-speech regularities and less on imageability preintervention had better intervention gains. In parallel, children who over the course of the intervention exhibited greater increases in their reliance on print-speech correspondences and greater decreases in their reliance on imageability, had better intervention outcomes. Importantly, these two factors were differentially related to specific reading task outcomes, with greater reliance on print-speech correspondences associated with pseudoword naming, while (lesser) reliance on imageability related to word reading and comprehension. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical models of reading acquisition and educational practice. Educational Impact and Implications Statement Why do some children with reading disabilities show substantial gains when provided with an intervention program, whereas others show little to no improvement? Here we argue that such differences in improvement can be tied to the way in which different children read (reflecting the functional organization of their reading system). We measure how different children are impacted by two sources of information of words they read-print-speech correspondences (orthographic-phonological) and semantic imageability-before and after a phonologically-weighted intervention for children with reading disabilities. Results show that children who before the intervention relied more on orthographic-phonological knowledge, and less on semantic imageability, had greater reading skill gains over the intervention. Skill gains were also associated with changes children made in their use of these two sources of information over the intervention. These findings may help in detecting the children who may benefit more or less from a given intervention and advance us toward identifying an optimal intervention program for each individual based on the state of their reading system.