Elshawaf, Iman Salama; (2022) Cognitive and linguistic factors associated with reading and spelling in 9- to 11-year-old multilingual Arabic-English-Turkish speaking poor readers and typically developing readers. Doctoral thesis (Ed.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This study aimed to investigate whole-word lexical and phonological sublexical processes in reading in multilingual ArabicL1-EnglishL2-TurkishL3 speaking children aged nine to eleven. Accuracy and times for reading words and nonwords were recorded in the three languages. Associations of the measures across languages were examined as well as associations with measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and vocabulary knowledge that were assessed in the children’s three languages. Participants were 38 typically developing readers (TD) and 12 poor readers (PR) who were recruited from the same school in Istanbul, Turkey. Examination of the findings from the typically developing readers indicated that word and nonword reading processes were associated for English and Turkish and for Arabic and Turkish, but it seemed that processes for reading words and nonwords in English and Arabic were, to an extent, independent. Correlations with the literacy-related variables (LRVs) revealed the scores for vocabulary were associated with all the reading measures except for Turkish nonword reading. Phonological awareness was associated with all measures, but the correlation was only marginally significant in the case of English exception words and Arabic words. RAN was associated with all measures except for Turkish nonwords. The findings for the poor readers involved two sets of analyses. One was a group comparison, where the results in reading and LRVs for the poor reader were compared with those of the typically developing readers. Findings indicated that, as a group, the poor readers had weaknesses in both lexical and sublexical reading processes across the three languages. The second set of analyses involved creating individual profiles for the poor readers in terms of deficits in reading words and nonwords and LRVs. The majority of children had deficits of both word and nonword reading in English and Turkish. There was one child with a selective lexical deficit in English and one with a sublexical deficit in Turkish. For Arabic, three children had deficits of both word and nonword reading and a further four children had sublexical deficits only. There did not appear to be any consistent association of deficits across the children’s three languages and nor were there any consistent associations of reading deficits with those in the literacy-related variables. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research looking at reading development across different orthographies and in multilingual children with reading difficulties.

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