Acquired dyslexia: a condition in which a person loses the ability to read and write as a result of damage to the brain.
Allophonic variation: variations in vocal output for a phoneme which are not pertinent to the sense.
The alphabetic principle links spoken and written language in languages, and a written alphabetical system is used. The units of the written system, the graphemes, generally represent spoken sequences corresponding roughly to phonemes.
Co-articulation: an effect of pronunciation caused by the vocal tract repositioning itself to articulate spoken sequences corresponding to phonemes, resulting in partially overlapping these phonemes.
Developmental dyslexia: a neurobiological profile, often inherited, shown by difficulties in reading, spelling and composition of text, despite a standard or superior level of intelligence.
Decoding system: system allowing the identification of written sequences by segmenting into graphemes, transcoding each grapheme into its corresponding phoneme, and concatenation or fusion of the generated phonemes.
Direct access system: system allowing the identification of familiar written words by activation of their orthographic and phonological representations stored in long-term memory.
Dyscalculia (or Math/Maths Learning Difficulties – MLD): a neurobiological condition affecting the capacity to acquire arithmetical and numeric cognitive skills.
Dysphasia or Specific Language Impairment (SLI): a neurobiological profile that affects oral language development. It is frequently accompanied by difficulties in reading and spelling.
Dyspraxia or impairment of motor coordination or DCD: developmental profile which affects coordination, balance, fine motor skills, language, thought and perception.
Grapheme: symbol used in written alphabetic systems to represent phonemes. It may be a single letter or a group of letters (e.g. the letter f, the consonant digraph ph,.the vowel digraph oo; the trigraphs tch, dge)
Hyperkinaesthesia or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): neurobiological condition caused by a disturbance of the cerebral ‘higher level’ executive functions which control behaviour and attention.
Irregular word: word containing one or more irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences, that is to say one or more graphemes which are not pronounced as in the majority of words and/or one or more phonemes which are not written as in the majority of words. For example dge, tion.
Lexicalisation: error made when reading by offering a real word for a pseudo-word. This shows that the system for direct access is being over-exploited.
The Matthew Effect: Keith Stanovich (1986, 2000, 2009) borrowed this term from Richard Merton (1968, 1988), who coined it to refer to the vicious circle by which the rich get richer and the poor poorer, affecting also academic careers. Merton derived the concept’s name from “For to him who has shall be given and he shall have abundance; but from him who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken away (Matthew 25:29, King James Version). Stanovich (1986) argued that:
Access to the printed text paves the way for learning and economic growth and justifies the importance given to ensuring that young learn to read as early and as expediently as possible. The path to efficient reading starts with reading visually and ends with reading visually. It is the process that leads to efficient automatic visually accomplished reading that is the focus of this research, in a context where the more efficient this process of early literacy learning is, the faster is the access to and success in learning. The speed and effectiveness of this early literacy learning process affects success in learning and has a Matthew Effect
(Falzon, 2012, p.24)
(Desai, 2023)
Thus, challenges with early literacy learning lead to more and more severe divergence in reading development between those who read and those who do not or read very little unless early intervention is in place and inclusive strategies are used in early literacy teaching.
Percentile: one of 99 values dividing a series of data into 100 similar (or nearly similar) groups, which permits an estimation for the position of an individual in relation to others in the group sampled for the test.
Phoneme: the smallest sequence of speech in a language capable of altering the meaning of a word.
Phonemic awareness: Part of phonological awareness, phonological awareness refers to the awareness that spoken words can be analysed into phonemes.
Phonological abilities: processing skills in analysing speech sequences into phonological units (syllables, onset/rime units and phonemes), and the ability to manipulate these units.
Phonological awareness: the awareness that language is presented in words, words in syllables and syllables in phonemes, where such awareness allows spoken phrases and words to be analysed into phonological/phonemic units smaller than words.
Phonological dyslexia: A dyslexic subtype where the decoding system appears deficient whilst the direct access system remains intact.
Phonological units: units into which sequences of words can be analysed. The three principal units are the syllable, onset/rime (not rhyme), and phoneme.
In phonics, rime refers to the part of a syllable that starts with the vowel and includes the rest of the syllable after the initial consonant or consonant cluster (called the onset). Namely, a part of a syllable that includes the vowel and the sounds that follow it. It helps in teaching reading and spelling by breaking down words into smaller parts. Example: In the word “cat,” the onset is “c” and the rime is “at.; “sing”: onset is “s”, rime is “ing”; “frog”: onset is “fr”, rime is “og”
Rhyme is a literary term that refers to the repetition of similar sounds in the last stressed syllable of two or more words, often used in poetry and songs. Example: The words “cat” and “hat”, “sky” and “high”, “bake” and “cake”,”moon” and “spoon” rhyme because they share the same ending sound. Thus, the similarity of sounds between words, especially at the ends of lines in poems or songs.
Using these concepts, teachers can help students understand the structure of words (rime) and enjoy the musical quality of language (rhyme).
Pseudo-word: Sequence of graphemes or phonemes that do not form an actual word in the language but can be pronounced or spelt as if a word of the language. Such word assess learners’ decoding skills.
Regular word: A word in which the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are not ambiguous or, more precisely, they correspond exactly and reciprocally, that is to say, each grapheme corresponds systematically to the same phoneme, and the other way round.
Regularisation: Type of mistake in reading or spelling an irregular word as if it is a regular word. Indicates overexploitation of the decoding system.
Sequencing Ability: Ability to memorise, recall and manipulate arbitrary sequences of items (alphabet, days, months, numbers).
Standard Deviation: SD – measure of the spread of a series of results around their mean.
Standardised Test: Test applied to a representative group of individuals of a particular age or age range, from the results of which statistical values for the mean and deviation can be derived. Allows the prediction of a performance expected of individuals of the same age(s).