The Developmental Lag Hypothesis in Reading: Longitudinal and Matched Reading-Level Comparisons

Abstract

STANOVICH, KEITH E.; NATHAN, RUTH G.; and ZOLMAN, JUDITH E. The Developmental Lag Hypothesis in Reading: Longitudinal and Matched Reading-Level Comparisons. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1988, 59, 71-86. Groups of third-, fifth-, and seventh-grade children (ages 8-11, 10-10, and 13-0, respectively) who were matched on reading ability were administered tasks assessing receptive vocabulary, strategic memory, nonstrategic memory, articulation speed, rhyming ability, nameretrieval ability, decoding skill, word-recognition efficiency, reliance on phonological information in decoding, and the use of context in word recognition. The cognitive profiles of the 3 groups were strikingly similar. The results support a developmental lag model of the reading problems of nondyslexic children. Subgroups of the fifthand seventh-grade children had been tested 2 years earlier as skilled thirdand less-skilled fifth-grade children who were matched on reading ability. In the subsequent testing 2 years later, the younger children had shown more growth in reading ability, a rate difference predicted by the lag model. An examination of the cognitive profiles of these 2 groups indicated that the more rapid growth in reading displayed by the younger children was accompanied by superior growth in word recognition. It is argued that any attempt to integrate the results from studies employing reading-level match designs must carefully distinguish the different populations of children used in the older, less-skilled groups and must differentiate decoding-level matches from comprehension-level matches.