Like them, he is a precise observer and attentive listener who records gestures, postures, tones of voice and turns of phrase (he notes that in his early years of office, Tony Blair was a serial name-dropper, reeling off the monarchs and presidents he had lately met).
Children's performance in verbal counting, number comparison, object counting, arithmetic, and a control task (rapid serial naming) were measured before and after the intervention.
An alternative hypothesis regards slow serial naming as a correlate of poor oral language development.
In particular, are phonological skills and/or rapid serial naming intact?
We may distinguish two explanations for the link between dyslexia and slow serial naming.
They were similar to the LI + DX group on most language measures, but rapid serial naming was superior to the LI + DX group and comparable to the TD.
Poor language need not hinder acquisition of decoding, so long as rapid serial naming is intact; reading comprehension, however, is constrained by LI.
If this were the case, we should find deficits on rapid serial naming in most children with LI, regardless of their literacy skills.
This question is important because some language abilities, such as phonological processing and rapid serial naming, might be influenced by literacy skills.
Studies of children with dyslexia have identified a third skill that is related to development of fluent reading, rapid serial naming.
Contrary to what might have been predicted, rapid serial naming was not related to language level but was a correlate of TOWRE performance.
