NONWORD REPETITION ABILITY IN THIRD-GRADE STUDENTS WITH DYSLEXIA

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Introduction: Developmental dyslexia has been recognized as being one of the most common types of reading disorders. According to phonological deficit hypothesis, the main difficulties in affected children are phonological processing and making incorrect representations. Nonword repetition task taps the encoding, storage and retrieval of phonological representations, and therefore, is an appropriate tool for measuring these skills, particularly phonological working memory. This task involves a variety of underlying processes including speech perception, lexical and phonological knowledge, motor planning, and articulation. The aim of this study was to investigate the performance of dyslexic students in nonword repetition task and to analysis their errors. Materials and Methods: This was a nonexprimental analytical cross-sectional study in which a case control paradigm was adopted. Participants were 15 students with dyslexia and 35 normal students, all of whom were studying at the third grade of elementary school at the time of the study. These students did not have any gross neurological impairments, psychiatric problems or speech- language disorders and had normal intelligence and hearing acuity. 40 one-to-four-syllable nonwords were used for the assessment. Broad transcription was applied for recording responses. The results were statistically analyzed using descriptive and analytic methods. Results: The dyslexic group obtained lower scores than did the control group in nonword repetition task and the difference between these two groups was statistically significant. Conclusion: The errors of dyslexic students in nonword repetition showed that they suffer some deficits in accessing, maintaining and retrieving phonological codes. Moreover, they have difficulties in distinguishing phonemes that were poorly encoded. Keywords: Nonword, Dyslexic, Phonological processing, Phonological working memory