Decoding Support

Elbro, C., Rasmussen, I., & Spelling, B. (1996). Teaching reading to disabled readers with language disorders: A controlled evaluation of synthetic speech feedback. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 37(2), 140-155.

Students in grades 2–6 with reading and language disabilities read with text-to-speech support daily for 40 days. Words were presented broken into visual and auditory segments (by syllable or letter names), and students had to attempt their own pronunciation before clicking on the word and hearing the word pronounced. The intervention had a significant remedial effect.

NOTE: This article also appears in the references for Text-to-Speech with Synchronized Highlighting.

McKenna, M. C. (1998). Electronic texts and the transformation of beginning reading. In D. Reinking, M. C. McKenna, L. D. Labbo & R. D. Kieffer (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 45-59). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Children in grades K–1 read talking books offering decoding support; students could click on unfamiliar words to hear a digitized pronunciation and phonics analogies feedback. Students tended to access words they already knew rather than words they did not know. The researchers concluded that students needed alphabetic knowledge and a minimal level of sight vocabulary to realize improvements in incidental word recognition.

Mostow, J., Aist, G., Burkhead, P., Corbett, A., Cuneo, A., Eitelman, S., Huang, S., Junker, B., Sklar, M. B., & Tobin, B. (2003). Evaluation of an automated reading tutor that listens: Comparison to human tutoring and classroom instruction. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 29(1), 61-117.

Poor readers in grades 2 and 3 used a computer program to read or write texts. The computer used speech recognition to monitor students' reading accuracy and offered instructional feedback such as re-cueing, reading aloud or decomposing a word, and comparing the word to another word with the same onset or rime. Students in the computer program group outperformed students receiving regular classroom instruction on word comprehension.

Olson, R. K., & Wise, B. W. (1992). Reading on the computer with orthographic and speech feedback. Reading and Writing, 4(2), 107-144.

In this paper we present an overview of a computer program directed toward the remediation of children's deficits in word recognition and phonological decoding. In the present studies, 138 children read stories on the computer, in their school, for a half hour per day during a semester. Children were trained to request synthetic-speech feedback (DECtalk) for difficult words by targeting the words with a mouse. Different groups received whole-word feedback, wherein targeted words were highlighted and spoken as a unit, or segmented feedback, wherein segments of words (onsets, rimes, or syllables) were sequentially highlighted and spoken by the computer, requiring the child to pay attention to and blend the segments. Both whole-word and segmented feedback resulted in almost twice the gains in standardized word recognition scores compared to control groups that spent an equal time in their normal remedial reading program. Most important, the computer-trained groups improved their phonological decoding of non-words at about four times the rate of the control group. However, there was a significant interaction between level of deficit severity and optimal feedback condition. The most severely disabled readers showed the largest phonological decoding gains from syllable feedback, while the largest gains for the less severely disabled readers were from onset-rime feedback. The disabled readers' level of phonological awareness at pre-test was the strongest predictor for gains in word recognition and phonological decoding. Implications of the results for future training programs are discussed.