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Quality of phonological representations, verbal learning, and phoneme awareness in dyslexic and normal readers
Author(s) -
ELBRO CARSTEN,
JENSEN METTE NYGAARD
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2005.00468.x
Subject(s) - psychology , dyslexia , reading (process) , task (project management) , vocabulary , set (abstract data type) , cognitive psychology , phonological awareness , phonology , imitation , linguistics , computer science , philosophy , management , economics , programming language , social psychology
This study of dyslexia was concerned with the quality of phonological representations of lexical items. It extended the studies of verbal learning in dyslexia from learning new vocabulary items (pseudo‐names) to the learning of more well‐specified variants of known words. The participants were 19 dyslexic adolescents in grades 4 to 6 and 19 younger normal readers in grade 2 matched on single word decoding. The dyslexics were significantly outperformed by the reading‐age controls in non‐word reading and in phoneme awareness. The dyslexics also took longer time to learn to associate a set of pseudo‐names with pictures of persons although the dyslexics learned to associate familiar names with pictures as quickly as the controls did. The acquisition of new phonological representations of words was studied in an imitation task with maximally distinct pronunciations of long, familiar words. The dyslexics gained less than the controls in this task. They also gained less on one measure taken from a phoneme substitution task with the same words as in the distinctness task. The results are interpreted in the light of the hypothesis that poorly specified phonological representations may be an underlying problem in dyslexia.