Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties: A specific disability in regular orthographies.

Abstract

Two large studies identified substantial numbers of German-speaking children (Grade 3) with marked dissociations between reading and spelling difficulties. These dissociations were expected because German exhibits high regularity in the direction of graphemes to phonemes (forward regularity) but not in the direction of phonemes to graphemes (backward regularity). High forward regularity allows reliance on phonological processing in reading (even in advanced fluent reading), whereas low backward regularity requires reliance on orthographic memory representations in spelling. Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties was associated only with a naming speed deficit—assessed at school entrance— but not with phonological memory or phonological awareness deficits. In contrast, a specific spelling deficit was preceded by phonological deficits. In orthographies with regular grapheme–phoneme relations, difficulties in learning to read take another form than they do in English. In English, the typical problem of children who are dyslexic is to read correctly unfamiliar words, whereas in more regular orthographies, the typical problem is to read fluently. To illustrate, in Landerl, Wimmer, and Frith’s (1997) comparative study, a majority of the 11-year-old English children who were dyslexic had a problem with the word character. Some children refused to read it and others produced misreadings ranging from chancelor and calendar to nonwords such as tshraekter. In contrast, the German children who were dyslexic for the close to identical word Charakter produced few misreadings (all nonwords), but their reading time was between 2 and 3 times higher than that of their peers who read normally. The massive reading fluency impairment of German children who were dyslexic in the context of relatively few errors (even under speed instruction) has been obtained in several studies (Klicpera & Schabmann, 1993;