Academic Language Therapy Flashcards

A student with dyslexia reads the irregular word 'yacht' as /jætʃt/ and 'colonel' as /kɒlənɛl/ (phonetically), yet decodes pseudowords accurately. This pattern most strongly suggests which subtype, and what does it indicate about intervention priority?

Answer: Surface dyslexia; intervention should prioritize orthographic pattern memorization and sight word automaticity over additional phonological decoding work

The student's pattern — regularization errors on irregular words (reading them phonetically) combined with intact pseudoword decoding — is the hallmark of surface dyslexia, which reflects a deficit in the orthographic lexicon rather than the phonological route. Since decoding is functional, intervention priority shifts to building orthographic representations through repeated exposure, multisensory spelling, and word-specific memorization of high-frequency irregulars.

During structured literacy intervention, an ALT introduces the Latin prefix 'sub-' to a 4th-grade student with dyslexia who has mastered closed, VCe, open, vowel team, and r-controlled syllable types. According to the principles of Multisensory Structured Language (MSL) instruction, what is the MOST critical prerequisite that must be verified before this lesson is appropriate?

Answer: The student can reliably identify base words and understands the concept of a bound morpheme as distinct from a free morpheme

In MSL instruction, morphological analysis depends on the student first having a conceptual understanding of base words and the distinction between bound and free morphemes. Without this foundation, teaching a prefix as a meaning unit is abstract and unsupported. A student who conflates 'sub-' with a syllable rather than a meaning-carrying bound morpheme cannot generalize prefix knowledge. The other options reflect either incidental exposure (not MSL-aligned) or skills that are parallel, not prerequisite.

According to the double-deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers), a student who demonstrates deficits in BOTH phonological awareness AND rapid automatized naming (RAN) is predicted to have which outcome compared to students with a single deficit?

Answer: More severe reading impairment that is less responsive to phonologically-focused intervention alone, often requiring fluency-building components in addition to phonological training

The double-deficit hypothesis posits that students with combined phonological awareness and RAN deficits form the most impaired subgroup — they show greater severity and poorer response to interventions targeting phonology alone. RAN reflects orthographic processing speed and automaticity of symbol retrieval, a distinct cognitive mechanism from phonological awareness. Effective intervention for double-deficit students must include both phonological training and explicit fluency-building (e.g., timed repeated readings, phrase-level automaticity work).

A CALT is analyzing the word 'indistinguishable' for morphological instruction. Which analysis is MOST precise and clinically appropriate when teaching a student to decode this word using structured morphological analysis?

Answer: in- (prefix: not) + distinguish (base word) + -able (suffix: capable of): 3 morphemes, treating 'distinguish' as an opaque base

For clinical intervention with students who have dyslexia, treating 'distinguish' as a base word (even though it contains a Latin root) is the most instructionally appropriate approach at most intervention levels. Unless teaching advanced Latin root morphology, parsing to 'tingu' exceeds the functional level needed for word recognition and spelling. The 3-morpheme analysis (in- + distinguish + -able) aligns with MSL principles of teaching at the level of functional orthographic units the student can generalize. Over-parsing can fragment a recognizable word chunk and impede rather than support automaticity.

When administering the CTOPP-2 (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, 2nd ed.) to a 9-year-old to inform CALT intervention planning, the examiner notices the student scores at the 63rd percentile on Phoneme Isolation but at the 8th percentile on Phoneme Elision. Which clinical interpretation is MOST accurate?

Answer: The discrepancy is diagnostically significant: phoneme elision requires manipulation and working memory beyond simple isolation, suggesting a specific deficit in phonological working memory or manipulation that isolation tasks do not capture

Phoneme isolation (identifying the first, last, or middle sound in a word) and phoneme elision (deleting a phoneme and producing the resulting word) are NOT equivalent tasks. Elision requires phonological manipulation — holding the word in working memory, deleting a specified phoneme, and blending the remainder — making it more cognitively demanding. A strong isolation score with a weak elision score is clinically meaningful: it reveals a specific deficit in phonological manipulation and working memory, which directly predicts difficulty with decoding complex words. This pattern should intensify phonological manipulation instruction, not delay it pending re-referral.

A CALT is providing intervention to an 11-year-old student who has successfully completed all six syllable types and is working on multisyllabic decoding. The student consistently makes division errors on words following the VCCV pattern when the consonant cluster is a digraph (e.g., dividing 'merchant' as mer-ch-ant instead of mer-chant). The MOST appropriate corrective technique is to:

Answer: Explicitly teach that digraphs and blends function as single phonemic units and must never be divided when applying the VCCV syllable division rule, preceding this with auditory discrimination of the digraph as a single sound

The error reveals a gap in the student's conceptual understanding: they are applying the VCCV rule letter-by-letter rather than by phoneme. In 'merchant,' is a digraph representing a single phoneme /tʃ/, so the word is phonemically VC-CV (/mɛr/-/tʃənt/), not VCCV graphemically. The correction requires first reinforcing that digraphs are single phonemes (auditory/articulatory), then applying the syllable division rule to phoneme units, not grapheme strings. Teaching it as a sight word or as VCCCV would perpetuate the misunderstanding and fail to generalize to other digraph-containing multisyllabic words.