Abstract
Adults diagnosed as either reading disabled, borderline, or good readers on the basis of childhood testing have been found to differ significantly on tests of phonological processing given in adulthood but not on tests on memory, attention, or visual perceptual skill. This suggest that phonological processing problems describe a core language deficit of reading disability. This paper examines the test score profiles of subjects categorized by their adult reading scores as well as by ‘improvement’, defined as upward movement from the disabled category after accounting for educational attainment and statistical regression.
These results generally support the hypothesis that there is an enduring phonological deficit in reading disability. However, post hoc examination of differences among reading levels reveals that ‘improved’ readers, while performing significantly better than the persistently impaired on many tests (including rapid naming with or without alternation of stimuli), perform no better than impaired readers on reading and manipulating non-words in spite of better reading achievement. Thus, it would appear that a better adult outcome is related to rapid, perhaps automatized, access to the phonetic code rather than to accurate phonological manipulation. This may be interpreted as improvement in spite of poor phoneme awareness, perhaps by way of available avenues of compensation. Such a distinction may provide a basis for subtyping the reading disabled as impaired in one or the other or both of these categories of language processing.
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Flowers, D.L. (1995). Neuropsychological Profiles of Persistent Reading Disability and Reading Improvement. In: Leong, C.K., Joshi, R.M. (eds) Developmental and Acquired Dyslexia. Neuropsychology and Cognition, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1241-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1241-5_5
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