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Toward understanding the problem in severely disabled readers Part 1: Vowel errors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Susan E. Bryson and
Janet F. Werker
Susan E. Bryson*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
Janet F. Werker
Affiliation:
The University of British Columbia
*
Susan E. Bryson, Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario NIG 2W1, Canada.
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Abstract

This experiment examined the vowel responses of severely disabled readers and normal control children in reading orthographically regular nonwords. The disabled readers were divided into three groups based on their relative Verbal and Performance IQs. Following the rationale of Fowler, Shankweiler, and Liberman (1979), vowel responses were classified as incorrect or correct. Correctness was determined according to either context-free or context-dependent criteria. The main finding was that the vowel responses of two out of three reading disabled groups paralleled those of their reading level peers. However, disabled readers with higher Performance than Verbal IQs made significantly more context-free responses and significantly fewer context-dependent responses than all other groups. Moreover, knowledge of how speech is segmented at the phonemic level predicted performance on the reading task. The findings suggest that disabled readers employ very local (context-independent) strategies in reading; these findings are discussed in terms of the idea that disabled readers suffer a basic deficit in phonological processing (Liberman, Liberman, & Mattingly, 1980) or linguistic processing (Siegel & Ryan, 1984).

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Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1989, pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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