Reading, Writing & Math Help for Dyslexia, LD & ADHD

Studies have shown that children with reading difficulties, dyslexia, or reading deficits typically perform more slowly than children without reading difficulties on tasks that measure speed of processing.

What Is Rapid Naming and How Does It Relate to Reading Problems?

Rapid Naming is the ability to name phonemes, words, word chunks, or objects in an quick and automatic manner.

Almost three decades of research with the Rapid Automatized Naming Test (RAN) have demonstrated that the majority of children and adults with reading difficulties have pronounced difficulties when asked to name rapidly the most familiar symbols and stimuli in the language: letters, numbers, colors, and similar objects.

This ability of rapid automatically naming is another aspect of phonologic processing. It is the phonologic access, the ability to retrieve easily and rapidly verbal (phonetic) information that is held in one’s long-term memory.

A Direct Connection

This ability to retrieve the stored information rapidly is directly related to the type of process that one goes through when they are reading. A child or adult must be able to access and retrieve the stored phonemes and/or word or word chunks that are stored on their memory at a quick rate in order to make sense of the written word.

Difficulty with rapidly automatically naming a series of objects, numbers, letters, or colors shows that reading difficulties are not just a difficulty with the phonological process (phonemic awareness). When the phonological component was taken out of the test, the speed-of-processing or accessing the information emerged as a stronger predictor of reading performance than phonological awareness tasks were.

What Can We Learn From This?

From these studies we can conclude that there are several areas that need to be addressed when working to improve reading skills. Phonological awareness and processing is one subset of the multiple processes involved in reading, but it is not the only process involved. Visual naming of objects, letters, numbers, and colors represents an array of other skills that are involved with successful reading. These other skills include attentional, perceptual, conceptual, memory, lexical, and visual sequential processing.

Snyder and Downey (1995) report from the Denver Reading Study that the accuracy rates of those with reading difficulties and of those with normal achieving readers were not significantly different. The only significant difference noted was the reaction time and production duration; the readers with reading difficulties has significantly longer reaction times and production durations.

What Can We Do?

You will want to use a program of reading practice that incorporates rapid naming practice into it. You will also want to be sure that the program you use also addresses visual tracking, another causes of reding problems. When you combine the training you alleviate two problems with one practice. You may want to check out Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills because it addresses both of these as well as several other areas of perception at the same time as it improves reading fluency.

More to come on Rapid Naming…

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET