Effects of Phonological Complexity Training on Pseudoword Reading in Acquired Phonological Dyslexia

Abstract

Individuals with acquired phonological dyslexia experience difficulty associating written letters with corresponding sounds, especially with pseudowords. In training studies with children, when phonologically “more complex” consonant clusters were trained, improvement was noted on trained clusters and untrained “less complex” clusters, but not vice versa. To date, no treatment studies for acquired phonological dyslexia have systematically manipulated phonological complexity to improve reading ability. The present study applied principles of phonological complexity to letter-sound training in acquired phonological dyslexia. Our findings suggest phonological complexity can be used to improve generalization to untrained phonologically related words in this population.