Reading Behavior in Dyslexia: Is There a Distinctive Pattern?

Current research at the Haskins Laboratories concerning dyslexia & the relation between learning to read & earlier language acquisitions is reported. The possibility of a distinctive misreading in dyslexic children & their tendencies to reverse letter & word orientation, as compared with other slow readers whose problems stem from different causes, is explored. Two such groups of 8- to 10-year-olds were tested by reading isolated words & nonsense syllables. No significant difference was found in the incidence of reversal errors. Vowels caused the most errors in both groups, & it seems that a word's phonetic & orthographic structure is largely responsible for such errors. Slow readers also tend to show difficulty in verbal recall & recognition where a word's phonetic properties must be retained. Three groups of children, ages 8 to 10 & varying in reading ability from "superior" to "mildly backward" to "severely backward" were given rhyming & nonrhyming written words to write down later. Slow readers were found to be much less affected by the word's phonetic characteristics, indicating that they perhaps use other criteria in reading, eg, visual shapes. However, the same results were found when the material was presented orally, indicating that the problem probably lies with internal representation of the stimuli. Thus, reading difficulties seem to be related to far-reaching language processing weaknesses, especially phonetic segmentation capacities. 2 Figures. A. Sbragia