Is the ‘naming’ deficit in dyslexia a misnomer?

Abstract

We report a study that investigated the widely held belief that naming-speed deficits in developmental dyslexia reflect impaired access to lexical-phonological codes. To investigate this issue, we compared adult dyslexic and adult non-dyslexic readers’ performance when naming and semantically categorizing arrays of objects. Dyslexic readers yielded slower response latencies than non-dyslexic readers when naming objects, but a subsequent comparison of object-naming and object-categorization tasks showed that the apparent ‘naming’ deficit could be attributed to a more general difficulty in retrieving information – either phonological or semantic – from the visual stimulus. Our findings suggest that although visual–phonological connections may be crucial in explaining naming-speed performance they do not fully characterise dyslexic readers’ naming-speed impairments.