Part II--Consequences and correlates of dyslexia: Beyond phoneme awareness

Annals of Dyslexia, 1998

Phoneme awareness is a powerful conceptual achievementboth for the would-be reader and for the scientist seeking to understand the crucial links between spoken and written language. But it has long been recognized by both researchers and practitioners (1) that success in phoneme awareness depends crucially on other more basic factors; and (2) that other factors may also contribute to the reading difficulties of some children. We are pleased to publish this year four papers that consider correlates of reading difficulty that are not easily subsumed under the construct of phoneme awareness.

Chapters 4 and 5 are longitudinal studies of rapid serial naming, which is one of the most reliable and consistent (if least understood) long-term predictors of reading disability. By tracking students through the elementary school years, both provide valuable information about the developmental course of rapid naming skills and the association between rapid naming and other literacy-related skills over time. The normative data on naming presented in chapter 4 by M. Meyers and her colleagues will serve as a valuable resource to clinicians; their kindergarten results should also add to our understanding of the factors that influence naming speed. In kindergarten, the letter/number naming advantage (over object/color naming) is strongly tied to alphabet recitation accuracy; by first grade the letter/number advantage is no longer a useful index of any literacy measure. The data from H. Scarborough make clear just how important and stable naming is as a predictor of reading success. Even when collected at Grade 2, individual differences in naming speed account for variability in 8th grade reading above and beyond what can be explained by phoneme awareness. Scarborough's and other recent studies suggest ways that assessment in schools can easily be expanded to more accurately predict who would benefit most from intervention.

The preliminary study by Jaarsma and colleagues in chapter 6 investigates a much less studied phenomenon-the association betwen reading difficulties and difficulties in learning labels for musical notes. Jaarsma and colleagues note a number of parallels between the reading of text and the reading of music; their data suggest that at least some poor readers have weaknesses with sound-symbol correspondences that do not require explicit analysis of words into phonemes. It is a phenomenon worth pondering and studying in greater depth.

The final chapter in part II, by Cornelissen and Hansen, takes up the possibility that some (though by no means most) reading difficulties stem from visual processing impairments. The specific hypothesis is that deficits at the magnocellular level result in an unstable visual image, leading to exhanges among features across letters, shifts of letter order within words, and shifts of words within a line. Their paper begins with evidence that adult poor readers are slightly less able to detect coherent motion among moving dots on a computer screen than are adult skilled readers. It goes on to relate weaker performance on the motion detection task to a greater number of errors in a lexical decision task tapping susceptibility to letter reversals. Cornelissen and Hansen's second study focuses on children and reveals a nonlinear association between weak motion detection and letter reversal errors in a word reading task. Although the findings are subtle, this provocative paper makes an unusually clear presentation of the argument and should generate discussion among those trying to make links between neurobiology and behavior.