Reading Development, Dyslexia and Phonological Skills

Abstract

It is argued here that the most general information processing deficit in developmental dyslexia lies in phonological processing and that studies of individual differences in reading development where intelligence is controlled generate patterns of associations which are essentially similar to those which arise from studies of developmental dyslexia. Developmental dyslexics are shown to resemble acquired surface dyslexics but they are even more similar to younger children of equivalent reading ability. Also, it is argued that a complete understanding of the development of reading can come only from longitudinal investigations of development itself. Such studies demonstrate typical sequences of interactive growth of related skills. They show how reading changes in nature as it is learned and that a crucial early stage in its development is the adoption of an alphabetic reading strategy. The precursors of the phonological knowledge that forms the foundations of grapheme-phoneme reading are traced back throu...