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Can solving of wordchains be explained by phonological skills alone?
Author(s) -
Asbjørnsen Arve E.,
Obrzut John E.,
Eikeland OleJohan,
Manger Terje
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
dyslexia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.694
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1099-0909
pISSN - 1076-9242
DOI - 10.1002/dys.394
Subject(s) - dyslexia , psychology , normative , norwegian , working memory , developmental psychology , word recognition , cognitive psychology , phonological awareness , test (biology) , reading (process) , audiology , cognition , linguistics , medicine , literacy , paleontology , pedagogy , philosophy , epistemology , neuroscience , biology
The present study focussed on the determinants for effective solving of the Wordchains Test (WCT) in a normative sample of Norwegian junior high‐school students. Forty voluntary participants from a rural school district in Western Norway completed the WCT along with tests of general intellectual capacity, single word and non‐word reading, auditory working memory, and visual scanning. All measures correlated significantly with each other except for general non‐verbal abilities were not correlated with visual scanning. A stepwise multiple regression analysis, using the WCT as the dependent variable, yielded a model that included single word reading, letter recognition, and working memory as independent variables. This model accounted for 75% of the variance in WCT performance. This finding suggests that phonological skills only have an indirect influence on WCT performance. Thus, the core deficit in dyslexia, i.e. impaired phonological skills, may be related to the development of word recognition skills, but have no direct effect on the WCT performance in a normative sample. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.