Pseudoword spelling ability predicts responsiveness to treatment for spelling words
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1
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, United States
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2
Johns Hopkins University, United States
Previous research has shown that post-stroke dysgraphia is responsive to behavioral treatment (Beeson, et al., 2002). This study evaluated the contribution of the three central processes of spelling to an individual’s responsiveness to treatment: orthographic long-term memory (orthographic lexicon), orthographic working memory (graphemic buffer), and phoneme-grapheme conversion (sublexical system). It is currently unknown to what extent damage to these components affects responsiveness to dysgraphia treatment. Therefore, we assessed the relationship between the pre-treatment integrity of each of these processes and several measures of recovery for both trained and untrained words.
Methods and Results. 19 participants (7 females, age 62.4 ± 17 years) with dysgraphia (and no auditory comprehension deficits) following a single left hemisphere stroke, received an average of 26 sessions of behavioral treatment. A spell-study-spell treatment (Rapp & Kane, 2002) was administered, using individualized word sets. Spelling accuracy on trained words, untrained words, and pseudowords was tested before, immediately after, and 3 months following treatment and seven measures of recovery were calculated. These included accuracy changes, for trained words: pre to post treatment, pre to treatment session #8, pre to follow-up, post to follow-up, rate of improvement. Accuracy changes for untrained words: pre to post treatment and pre to follow-up.
Prior to treatment, the integrity of the three central spelling processes was quantified on the basis of spelling performance on an independent word set. For each recovery measure, a linear multiple regression model was evaluated to determine which factors were significant predictors of the recovery measure. Predictors indexing the integrity of the three central spelling processes were: frequency effect (O-LTM), word length effect (O-WM), and pseudoword spelling accuracy (PGC). Additional predictors were: age, years of education, and lesion volume; pre-treatment accuracy on the trained (or untrained) items.
Of the three measures indexing the components of the spelling systems, PGC integrity was a significant predictor of response to treatment in six of the seven models, O-WM integrity was a significant predictor in two of the seven models, and O-LTM integrity was a significant predictor in none of the models. Across the group, pseudoword spelling accuracy did not improve from pre-to-post-training (p < 0.655), indicating that the observed improvements were not due to changes in the PGC system itself. Predictive R2 (Allen 1971) values generated for each model accounted, on average, for 23% of the variance.
Conclusions. This study provides strong evidence that a key aspect of the recovery in post-stroke dysgraphia is the pre-treatment integrity of the sublexical PGC system. The PGC system is normally used during spelling by applying learned knowledge of the mapping of sounds to letters to generate plausible spellings for words and pseudowords. We found that individuals with more intact PGC systems before treatment exhibited faster training rates, greater retention, and more generalization to untrained items. We hypothesize that these effects may be due to the PGC system’s role in reinforcing lexical processes (Hillis & Caramazza, 1995; Rapp, et al, 2002;) and in supporting self-teaching (Shahar-Yames & Share, 2008).
Acknowledgements
The multi-site, NIDCD-supported project examining the neurobiology of language recovery in aphasia (DC006740).
References
Allen, D. M. (1971). The prediction sum of squares as a criterion for selecting predictor variables. Univ. of Ky. Dept. of Statistics, Tech. Report 25.
Beeson, P. M., Hirsch, F. M., & Rewega, M. A. (2002). Successful single-word writing treatment: Experimental analyses of four cases. Aphasiology, 16(4-6), 473-491.
Hillis, A. E., & Caramazza, A. (1995). Converging evidence for the interaction of semantic and sublexical phonological information in accessing lexical representations for spoken output. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 12(2), 187-227.
Rapp, B., Epstein, C., & Tainturier, M. J. (2002). The integration of information across lexical and sublexical processes in spelling. Cognitive neuropsychology, 19(1), 1-29.
Rapp, B., & Kane, A. (2002). Remediation of deficits affecting different components of the spelling process. Aphasiology, 16(4-6), 439-454.
Shahar‐Yames, D., & Share, D. L. (2008). Spelling as a self‐teaching mechanism in orthographic learning. Journal of research in reading, 31(1), 22-39.
Keywords:
orthographic working memory,
orthographic long term memory,
Dysgraphia treatment,
Response to treatment,
Phoneme-Grapheme conversion
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation
Topic:
Not eligible for student award
Citation:
Wiley
RW,
Moss
N,
Shea
J and
Rapp
B
(2019). Pseudoword spelling ability predicts responsiveness to treatment for spelling words.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00047
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Received:
06 May 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Robert W Wiley, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, United States, rwwiley@uncg.edu