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Differences in reading strategies reflect differences in linguistic abilities 1
Author(s) -
Elbro Carsten
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/j.1473-4192.1991.tb00018.x
Subject(s) - psychology , reading (process) , dyslexia , cognitive psychology , vocabulary , nonsense , linguistics , learning to read , phonological awareness , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
A strong tendency towards a letter‐level recoding strategy in reading has traditionally been interpreted as a sign of poor skills in the visual modality. Dyslexics who read relatively few words ‘immediately’have been considered to suffer from poor visual discrimination and memory (e.g. Boder & Jarrico 1982). However, this assumption has never been experimentally verified. The present study compared reading skills and strategies with auditory skills and naming speed using 26 severely dyslexic adolescents and 26 younger, normal readers matched for reading level and IQ. Phonological discrimination abilities were found to account for much of the variance in phonological abilities in reading such as the ability to read nonsense words. Naming speed was found to explain much of the variance in reading strategies. The last result was replicated in a post hoc analysis of the data from the Colorado twin study (Olson et al. 1989). The result indicates that terms like ‘visually’impaired or ‘dyseidetic’used for poor whole‐word readers may be grossly misleading. Rather, dyslexics with a relatively small vocabulary of ‘sight words’may have specific difficulties with retrieval of the sounds of words, and teaching should develop methods to deal with this problem.