The Effects of a Flash Card Training Program on Normal and Poor Readers’ Phonological Decoding Skills

Abstract

Numerous studies that investigated the reading problems of poor readers have centered on whether or not poor readers employ the same strategies in word reading as do normally developing readers. These studies showed that both normal and poor readers are able to employ a grapheme-phoneme conversion strategy, but that poor readers are less skillful in using this strategy (e.g., Beech & Awaida, 1992; Holligan & Johnston, 1988). Poor readers are slower and less efficient in grapheme-phoneme decoding than normal readers with a comparable reading level. As a consequence, poor readers and reading-level-matched normal controls differ most in reading pseudowords (Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992). Pseudowords (ortho­graphically regular and phonologically legal letter strings that do not form existing words), in contrast to words, do not have a repre­sentation in the mental lexicon, and therefore, place heavy demands on phonological decoding. Thus, a deficit in phonological decoding manifests itself most clearly in pseudoword reading.