Phonological and Orthographic Coding Skills in Adult Readers

Abstract

Although less skilled readers are handicapped by their poor phonological skills, this may not be true of their visual and orthographic coding skills. Because of an increasing reliance on visual-orthographic coding with reading experience, the author predicted that there would be smaller differences between skilled and less skilled adult readers on orthographic coding measures than on phonological coding measures. The orthographic and phonological coding measures involved, respectively, judgments of which looks more like a word, filv-fild, and which sounds like a real word, kake-dake? On the orthographic measure, reading groups did not differ in coding speed—although the less skilled readers made more errors, but far fewer than on the phonological coding measure. Differences between reading groups were substantial for both speed and errors on the phonological coding measure. Phonological variables accounted for most of the variance in word recognition, and this was especially true for men. The results suggest that in less skilled adult readers, phonological skills are a primary factor in their reading despite some evidence of visual-orthographic compensation.