Siliό, M. C., & Barbetta, P. M. (2010). The effects of word prediction and text-to-speech technologies on the narrative writing skills of Hispanic students with specific learning disabilities . Journal of Special Education Technology , 25 (4), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/016264341002500402

The effects of using text-to-speech over headphones while composing written responses with word processors was examined. [Note: students silently read the directions and narrative writing prompt; they used text-to-speech while producing their written compositions.] Each student completed writing tasks in four conditions: word processing (baseline), word processing with text-to-speech alone, word processing with word prediction alone, and word processing with both accommodations (text-to-speech and word prediction) in combination (WordQ Version 2). Without being directed to do so, participants also all accessed the spell checking function in the desktop computer's software. The participants were placed into two cohorts for comparing the order of the test conditions.

Six grade 5 students with learning disabilities in an urban elementary school in Florida (U.S.) participated, during an after-school program they attended. Participants were all Hispanic/Latino males, and had already demonstrated English proficiency and had been exited from English language skill-directed academic support services. Students' amounts of English instruction, subsequent to being exited from specialized English language instruction, were also reported.

Participants' compositions were examined on four writing aspects: (a) writing fluency, based on words produced per minute during 15-minute sessions; (b) accuracy of spelling; (c) syntactic maturity, based on number of T-units—grammatical segments forming sentences; and (d) organization, based on a state standards rubric rating of 0 to 6.0. Each student's state writing assessment score (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test/FCAT), performance on the Woodcock-Johnson III Test of Achievement (2007), and IQ score from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV, 2003), were also collected.