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Index Number: 7094

CHAPTER 3 THE INTERACTION OF HEMISPHERIC RELATED
STRATEGIES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

The purpose of this Chapter is to provide evidence that the
individual difference aspect of LEM has meaningful behavioral
correlates in an educational setting.
No assumptions were made as to the neuropsychological substrate of
LEM.  They were used simply as a means of dividing subjects into two
groups:  those who move their eyes predominantly to the right and those
who move them predominantly to the left.
Half of the right movers were taught a learning strategy involving
verbal rehearsal and the other half a learning strategy involving
imagery. The same procedure was followed for the left movers.  The
question was whether there is a relationship between the typical
direction of LEM and the effectiveness of the two learning strategies.

Method
Subjects
The subjects were drawn from a pool of 120 average or above
average fifth and sixth graders in a suburban school system. A
series of verbal, spatial, imaginal, and informational questions were
asked in a face to face situation and the 72 subjects who had the most
extreme number of left movements and the most extreme number of right
movements participated in the study.  The subjects were divided into
equal numbers of male and female right and left movers.

Stimuli
Seventy-two words appropriate to fifth and sixth graders and
matched for abstractness, concreteness, and imagery were chosen
from the list provided by Pavivo, Yuille, and Madigan (1968).   Two
equivalent sets consisting of 18 pairs, created from this list, served
as the learning stimuli.  Two distractor lists of 12 pairs each were
also created using the same procedure.  Each pair was then photographed
and developed as 35mm slide.  Procedure Each subject, tested
individually, was seated approximately 4 ft. from a screen on which the
18 pairs of words were presented by means of a slide projector for 4
sec.  The child was then asked to recall as many pairs of words as
possible and the number of correct pairs served as one dependent
variable.  The subjects were then shown 24 pairs of words, half of
which they had already seen and half of which were distractors.  These
slides were then presented and the subject had to indicate by switch
closure whether they had seen the word pair.  Both accuracy and
response time (in milliseconds) were measured.
Following this procedure half of the subjects whose LEM were
predominantly leftward and half whose LEM were predominantly leftward
were taught a verbal rehearsal strategy in order to improve
performance.  They were instructed to repeat the pairs of words as many
times as possible during the 4 sec interval between pairs.  They were
then given six practice trials.  The remaining subjects were instructed
on how to form an integrated image from the word pairs.They were also
given six practice trials.  The subjects were then tested on 18 new
pairs of words using the same procedures as the in the pre-training
condition.  This effectively created four groups: right movers taught
to use either imagery or verbal rehearsal strategies and left movers
taught the same strategies.

Results
There were three dependent measures that were analyzed in this study: the
number of pairs recalled, the number of pairs recognized, and the
response time for recognition.  The design for all three variables was
a split plot factorial with Direction (leftward or rightward LEM) and
Strategy (verbal rehearsal or imagery) as the between factors and Time
(before or after training) as the within factor. The mean number of
correct pairs recalled under all conditions is shown in Table 1.

Table 1
Mean Number of Word Pairs Recalled for Right and Left Movers Under Verbal
Rehearsal and Imagery Instructions
_______________________________________________________________________

Set			Pre Test		 Post Test
_______________________________________________________________________

Verbal
Left Movers		3.39				1.78
Right Movers		1.89				2.61
Imagery
Left Movers		2.61				3.28
Right Movers		2.39				2.56
________________________________________________________________________

The analysis of variance indicated no significant differences
involving Direction or Strategy, but there was a significant
interaction of Direction x Strategy x Time.  Simple effects analysis
indicated that children with rightward LEM did not change as a result
of imagery instructions, but made a significant improvement as a result
of verbal rehearsal instructions.  Children with leftward LEM made a
significant improvement as a result of imagery instructions, but showed
a significant decrement as a result of verbal rehearsal instructions.
Mean performance for the recognition scores is presented in

Table 2.
The analysis of variance again indicated a significant interactions
between Direction x Strategy x Time.

Table 2
Mean Number of Correct Recognitions
________________________________________________________________________

 Set				Pre Test			Post Test
_________________________________________________________________________

Verbal
Left Movers			29.28				27.61
Right Movers			28.11				29.44
Imagery
Left Movers			29.56				30.67
Right Movers			29.89				29.44
________________________________________________________________________

The simple effects analysis indicated that children with
rightward LEM showed a significant improvement using a verbal
rehearsal strategy and children with leftward LEM showed a significant
decrement using a verbal rehearsal strategy.  The mean reaction times
for the recognition task is shown in Table 3.  The analysis of variance
indicated that there was an overall decrease in reaction time from pre
to post testing and the same significant three way interaction of
Direction x Strategy x Time.

Table 3
Mean Reaction Times (in milliseconds) for the Recognition Task
___________________________________________________________________________

Set			     Pre Test	                	Post Test
___________________________________________________________________________

Verbal
Left Movers			2059				2118
Right Movers			2447				1894
Imagery
Left Movers			2244				1829
Right Movers			1846				1627
___________________________________________________________________________

Simple effects analysis indicated that children with rightward
LEM were significantly faster using a verbal rehearsal strategy
and children with leftward LEM were significantly slower using a verbal
rehearsal strategy. The analyses of the three variables lead to the
single conclusion that children who have predominantly leftward LEM
should not be taught by a verbal repetition strategy.

Discussion
>From the theoretical perspective, these results support the
findings of Ehrlichman and Weinberger that LEM are a reliable
measure of an individual difference variable. It also provides evidence
of the validity of LEM; individuals who differed on LEM showed
differences on a relevant behavioral measure -- verbal learning.  The
most important question, however, is whether LEM have any relationship
to brain organization.
Individuals who had predominantly rightward LEM showed better
retention when using the left hemisphere oriented strategy of verbal
rehearsal and individuals who had predominantly leftward LEM showed
decreased retention when using the left hemisphere oriented strategy.
These are the facts, and while it is premature to draw firm
conclusions, these facts are consistent with the existence of a
relationship between LEM and brain organization.
The clearest conclusion from these findings are that children
differ in the extent they can benefit from a verbal repetition
strategy in learning.  From the educational perspective it is clear
that there are children in schools who not only do not benefit from a
verbal rehearsal strategy, but whose performance is also decreased.
Spelling and arithmetic tables are examples of subjects that usually
stress a rote memorization based on oral repetition.  One alternative
would be to have the child repeatedly image the letters of the word or
number facts without verbalizing them.  When it came time to use the
word or number fact the child would recall the image.  Educators must
become more aware of the individual differences in the way people
learn.  This becomes even more evident the next chapter where these
individual differences can be seen to be at the heart of what has been
called reading disability.

CHAPTER 4
THE DIAGNOSIS OF READING DISABILITY

Although there is general agreement that reading disability is not a single
entity, there is considerably less than a consensus as to the number of
different syndromes that actually exist. Neuropsychological assessment,
the types of errors made with verbal material, cognitive tests, and
differences in processing strategies have all been used in the
classification of the reading disabled into symptom-related subtypes.
As many as five different subtypes of reading disability have been
found through the use of neuropsychological tests.
For example, Mattis, French and Rapin (1978) reported three groups and
Doehring, Honshko, and Byans (1979) distinguished four types. Fisk and
Rourke (1979) Petroskas and Rourke (1979) have identified subgroups
which were consistent.
These subtypes, however, can be considered in terms of the presence or
absence of auditory linguistic deficits, a distinction reported
throughout the reading disability literature.  Subtypes that include
auditory linguistic deficits comprise 80 to 90 percent of the total
population of reading disabled children.  The smaller group has usually
been reported to show deficits in visual spatial processing.
Boder (1973) examined the nature of the spelling errors made by
reading disabled children.  She used the term dysphonetic to
describe the type of reading disability marked by linguistic and
phonetic difficulties; and the term dyseidetic to describe the type
which had difficulties with the overall visual spatial aspects of the
written word.  Boder estimated that the dysphonetic group was four to
five times more prevalent than the dyseidetic group.  Pirozzolo (1979)
used ratings, writing samples, and psychological and neuropsychological
tests to separate two reading disability groups that were similar to
those suggested by Boder.  Bakker (1982) proposed a similar distinction
that he related to hemispheric functioning.  The auditory linguistic
disabled reader were not effective in the use left hemisphere related
tasks.  There was also an association of the visual spatial disabled
reader and the effective use of right hemisphere related strategies.
Zenhausern (1987) distinguished these two types on the basis of
both reading related tasks and the predominant direction of
their lateral eye movements.  He found that the majority of children
with leftward lateral movements had difficulty determining whether
words in their sight vocabulary did or did not rhyme.  He also found
that group of children with predominantly rightward lateral eye
movements had no difficulty in determining whether two words rhymed,
but were deficient in determining whether words and pictures
represented the same concept.  The auditory linguistic group had
difficulty converting a word to its sound and the smaller group showed
deficits in converting a word to its meaning.  He used the terms
Phonetic and Semantic to describe this distinction.
>From a behavioral perspective, phonetic disabled readers are the children who
struggle with every word when they read aloud and thus lose continuity
in the text.  They are frequently anomic and have a general difficulty
with the auditory linguistic aspects of reading, especially the
grapheme to phoneme conversion. The Semantic disabled reader, on the
other hand, is the child who will give a perfect word for word
rendition of text, but has no comprehension of the meaning of that
text. The Semantic disabled readers can convert words into their
phonetic representation, but this representation is not converted into
its meaning.  They have no problems with the sound of a word but are at
deficit for tasks involving the meaning of words.
The original study was based on 13 Phonetic and 13 Semantic readers from
the second to fourth grades.  One purpose of this research was to
determine whether these Phonetic and Semantic subtypes would replicate
across the entire elementary school population.  A second goal of this
study was to replicate the second finding of the original study. The
Phonetic disabled readers moved their eyes predominantly to the left
the left and Semantic disabled readers predominantly to the right. The
second purpose of this research was to be to determine whether lateral eye
movements can be used as a marker variable for the two types of reading
disability.

METHOD
Subjects
The subjects in this were 160 children from the second to the eighth grades.
All we of at least average intelligence. Forty children were selected
at grades 2 or 3, grades 4 or 5, grades 6 or 7, and grade 8. Of the 40
children at each age level, 20 were at or above grade level and 20
children were at least one year below grade level in reading.
Half of each group were chosen to have rightward LEM and half leftward
LEM. The predominant direction of LEM was determined individually for
each child.  A series of 20 informational questions were asked in a
face to face situation and the predominant direction of LEM was noted.
Normal readers split evenly between right and left movers, but 84% of
the disabled readers were left movers.  Materials and Procedure
There were four kinds of reading related tasks that used words selected from
the individual sight vocabulary of each child.  A rhyme task stressed
the auditory linguistic aspects of the written word and the remaining
three tasks placed more emphasis on the meaning of the words.

1) The rhyme stimuli consisted of 10 each of four types of word pairs:
   a) words which neither rhymed nor had similar orthography (tree/eats);
   b) words which were both phonetically and orthographically similar
      (pool/cool);
   c) words which were orthographically similar, but did not rhyme
      (bone/gone); and
   d) words which were orthographically dissimilar, but rhymed
      (by/tie).

2) The word match stimuli consisted of 20 word pairs, one in upper
   case the other in lower case which did or did not represent the
   same word (TREE/tree, TREE/eats).

3) The word/picture stimuli consisted of 20 word and picture
   pairs, in which the word and picture did or did not represent
   the same concept.

4) The synonym/antonym pairs consisted of words which meant
   either the same or the opposite.

Each stimulus was presented on 35 mm slides and projected for
130 ms.  The subjects were tested individually and responded verbally
as to the whether the words rhymed in the rhyme condition and whether they
matched or meant the same in each of the three other conditions. All
words used in the study were determined to be in the sight vocabulary
of all subjects on the basis of prior testing.

RESULTS
The number of correct responses for all children on the four
grade levels was subjected to an analysis of variance for each
of the four tasks. The grouping factors included Grade Level, Reading
Ability, and Eye Movement Direction. The normal readers achieved
virtually perfect performance on all tasks and their results were not
included in the tables.  The interaction of eye movement group and the
rhyme task was significant (F (3,432 = 29.29, p < 001). The mean number
of correct responses for the interaction are presented in Table 1.

Table 1
Mean Number Correct on the Rhyme Task for Disabled Readers with
predominately Right and Left LEM at Four Grade Levels
_______________________________________________________________________

LEM             Grade           Similar                 Dissimilar
				Rhyme   Non-Rhyme       Rhyme   Non-Rhyme
_______________________________________________________________________

Right		 2-3            17.80   15.20         14.80   14.00
		 4-5     	17.80   17.80         16.40   17.89
		 6-7            17.80   18.60         18.60   19.30
	         8              19.90   19.80         19.10   19.70
Left      	 2-3            16.10    5.90          7.40   14.40
		 4-5 	        16.10   10.30         10.20   17.30
		 6-7 	        16.80   13.60         12.50   18.50
		 8               9.60   12.00         10.40   17.60
_______________________________________________________________________

On the basis of the simple effects analysis, those children who
had predominantly leftward eye movements were significantly
more impaired than those who moved predominately to the right. This was
particularly true on those conditions for which the orthography and
phonology of the words were inconsistent (bye/tie or bone/gone).  Those
children with predominantly leftward lateral eye movements are the
Phonetic disabled readers who have difficulty with the auditory
linguistic aspects of reading.

The analyses of variance for the semantic tasks indicated a
significant difference between disability groups.  The results
from the three tasks are presented in Table 2.

Table 2
Mean Number Correct on the Uppercase/lowercase,
Word/picture and Synonym/antonym tasks for Disabled
Readers with Right and Left LEM at Four Grade Levels
_______________________________________________________________________

LEM 	Grade   Case    	Word    	Synonym
_______________________________________________________________________

Right 	2-3     15.70           7.90            8.65
	4-5     17.50   	7.80            6.55
	6-7     18.80 		13.40           13.05
	8       15.90	        15.90           15.00
Left    2-3     19.00   	17.50           17.15
	4-5     19.30   	19.30           17.45
	6-7     18.10 		19.10           18.75
	8       17.40  		19.70           17.40
________________________________________________________________________

Again the normal readers performed almost flawlessly and the
disabled readers were inferior at every grade level.  It was
the reading disabled readers with predominately rightward LEM who were
the significantly more disabled group for these.tasks.  They were
significantly inferior on the word matching task (F (1,144) = 4.81, p
<.02), the word picture task (F (1,144) = 76.17, p < .001), and the
synonym antonym task (F (1,144) = 47.04, p<.001). These children could
create the sound of a word from its orthography, but did not understand
the meaning of that word. This is a replication of a second type of
disabled reader, a Semantic subtype whose deficit involves the meaning
of words rather than their phonology.  Rightward lateral eye movements
is a marker for this subtype.  In the past, this subtype has often been
identified with visual spatial and perceptual problems.
This may be true but it is incidental to their reading disability
since they had no difficulty in perceiving the words in the rhyme
task.  These results support the existence of two subtypes of reading
disability.  The Phonetic disabled reader has difficulty converting the
written form of a word to its phonetic counterpart. The Semantic
disabled reader can convert word to its sound, but not its meaning.
There were two distinct patterns of errors made by the Phonetic
and Semantic disabled readers, but what is the relationship
between these patterns and reading disability?  The answer to this
question lies in the way we teach reading.  The next Chapter is a
discussion of how these two deficits interact with current reading
methods and the effectiveness of a different approach to the reading
process.

CHAPTER 5
THE THEORY AND REMEDIATION OF READING DISABILITY
Current teaching methods almost invariably use an indirect
phonological route to meaning in which the written word is
converted to its phonological counterpart so that meaning derives from
auditory comprehension. In practice, a child comes to school with
auditory comprehension, that is, hearing the word "ball" leads to the
concept of "a round, bouncy thing". In reading, the letters b-a-l-l
must lead to the concept of "a round, bouncy thing". In virtually every
case, the child is taught to see the word, say it, and understand it
from its sound.  This is an effective technique for two reasons. First,
it takes advantage the existing auditory comprehension of children;
second, it provides the background for the future decoding of new
words.  As effective as this procedure is for most children, a
significant number of individuals are not able to learn under this
protocol and they comprise the majority of the children we term
"reading disabled."
The Phonetic disabled reader has difficulty with the first step
of this indirect phonological route to reading -- converting
the graphemic form of the word into its phonological counterpart.  The
Semantic reading disabled readers have no difficulty with this first
step; they can make the grapheme to phoneme conversion.  For whatever
reason, however, the sound of the word does not lead to its
comprehension.
The standard methods of teaching reading are well-entrenched
and educators sincerely believe that this indirect phonological
route to meaning is the best. Therefore, remediation for these
"disabled readers" means an intensification of what was not successful
in the past.  Extensive drilling in phonetic skills has led to an
emphasis on teaching to weakness, rather than strength. The imbalance
is reflected in reading curricula and standardized tests that stress
phonetic decoding at the expense of comprehension.  Phonetic decoding
is a means to the end of comprehension; it has become an end in
itself.
The purpose of, this Chapter was to investigate the
effectiveness of an approach to reading which does not depend
on an indirect phonological approach to comprehension. The Direct
Access method has one basic principle: the meaning of the printed word
should not be derived from the sound of that word.  Any procedure that
avoids the grapheme to phoneme conversion is consistent with this
approach.  The child is never required to read aloud, but asked to
explain what a passage meant. Trivial deviations in verbiage, e.g.,
"jet" for "plane", are de-emphasized. The stress is on comprehension
rather than a slavish word for word decoding.
One of the simplest procedures used in the method involves
pairing words and pictures until the written word directly
triggers a concept, rather than indirectly through its sound.  The
child can then construct sentences composed of pictures in parallel
with sentences composed of words.  Children automatically fill in words
like "a", "the", "in", etc. when they comprehend the sentence.  In a
very short period, the pictures are no longer needed and the written
word is understood on its own.
Several techniques are available for more abstract concepts.
One possibility involves a class discussion of, for example,
our legal system.  The teacher can then show the class the word
"justice" and ask the children to draw a picture of justice. It is not
the picture itself that is important, but it serves a link between the
written word and its conceptualization by the child.  Another
possibility is a homework assignment requiring the child to bring
pictures to school that represent specific concepts.  The Direct Access
places only one constraint on the creativity of teachers:  Do not teach
reading by deriving of the meaning of a word from the way it sounds.
Phonic decoding is a skill that should be developed, but it should not
serve as the usual reading strategy for these two groups of readers.
Maxwell and Zenhausern (1983) applied the method to First Grade
children who were "at risk" during the second semester. After
25 half-hour sessions, the children increased their comprehension
scores from the 26th to the 56th percentile on the Metropolitan
Achievement Test and increased their sight vocabulary by over 100
words. A comparable control group showed no gain in comprehension.
Minardi, Zenhausern, and Maxwell (1984) found similar results with
Junior and Senior High School children. Using the same regimen of 25
half-hour sessions, the Junior High School students gained an average
of 7 months and the Senior High School students an average of 1.4
years.
The previous research on the Direct Access method of reading
has been limited to a small number of children taught by a
single teacher. The purpose of this study was to apply the method in a
large scale basis, using a broad range of grades and teachers.

Method
Subjects
A total of 209 children from grades 1 through 10 (with the
exclusion of Grade 9) who were at least one year below grade
level in reading and 240 children who were reading at least on grade
level were the subjects in this study.

Materials and Procedure A workshop explaining the theory and practice
of the Direct Access reading method was presented to teachers
throughout a 32 school District in suburban North Carolina.  After the
workshop was completed, those teachers who were interested were given
further experience. There were no absolute procedures specified, but
the teachers were shown various possibilities and were told to use any
techniques that did not depend on the indirect phonological route to
meaning. Following these sessions the children in the classes taught by
the teachers were given the Metropolitan Achievement Test Form L as a
pretest measure of their reading ability.  The teachers then used the
Direct Access method exclusively for 10 weeks, after which time the
children were retested on the Metropolitan Achievement Test Form M.

Results
The results of the reading disabled children and a control
group are presented in Table 3. The pre and post scores were
subjected to dependent t tests for each grade.  The average gain across
the whole group was almost 1 year and several grades showed gains of
over 2 years. Individual gains of 4 or more years were not uncommon.
Given that these results were obtained during only a 10-week period,
the Direct Access approach is clearly an effective strategy to use with
Phonetic and Semantic reading disabled children. In addition to these
objective gains, the teachers reported an extremely positive reaction
on the part of the students and have commented on the effects of the
method on both spelling and writing composition.