Assessment and remediation of a phonemic discrimination deficit in reading disabled second and fourth graders

Abstract

Previous research has implicated the role of phonemic processing in disabled readers' difficulty identifying and discriminating phonemes. Experiment 1 of the present study examined second- and fourth-grade disabled and nondisabled readers' ability to discriminate between combinations of two-syllable, phoneme pairs with varying intersyllable intervals. Second-grade disabled readers performed significantly worse than nondisabled grade-mates and the fourth-grade disabled and nondisabled readers, all of whom performed similarly. Second-grade non-disabled and fourth-grade disabled readers matched on reading level performed almost identically, suggesting a developmental lag in phonemic processing. In Experiment 2, the disabled readers who performed poorly in Experiment 1 were trained on phonemic stimuli which became increasingly complex; the training significantly improved their performance up to the level of the nondisabled readers in Experiment 1. Control training with nonspeech steady-state stimuli did not improve phonemic discrimination. Overall, the results suggest that disabled readers do experience a phonemic processing deficit, but that it can be remedied with appropriate training.