Learning to read is an expectation rather than an exception in society today. Despite this, some children experience reading difficulties. The purpose of this article is to review recent and seminal research on reading difficulties through the lenses of three perspectives: cognitive, social and cultural and interactive. The three perspectives are…

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype"…

Despite a history of reading or spelling difficulties, some adults attain age-appropriate spelling skills and succeed at university. We compared the spelling of 29 such high-functioning dyslexics with that of 28 typical students, matched on general spelling ability, and controlling for vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence. Participants wrote…

Examined the processing of speech and nonspeech sounds by 23 reading-disabled children. Children were required to identify and report the order of pairs of stimuli. Children had difficulty with very brief tones and stop consonant syllables at short interstimulus intervals. (SAK)

Reviews three sorts of converging evidence regarding dyslexic children's phonological processing difficulties: data from studies of spoken language impairments in dyslexic readers, evidence from the analysis of dyslexic reading and spelling skills, and evidence of phonological deficits that vary in severity and extent across the life-span in…

Investigates whether children who speak Kannada (a Dravidian language from South India) show the same pattern of specific dyslexia as children who speak European languages. Finds evidence of a consistent pattern in specific dyslexia which did not depend on any one writing system or geographical location. (RS)

This article provides a brief overview of the various areas of research that have served to clarify the condition of dyslexia. Using topics and content appearing in A. L. Benton and D. Pearl's (1978) text, Dyslexia: An Appraisal of Current Knowledge, as the point of departure, evolution of the definitions of dyslexia is traced to the current and…

A weakness in accessing the sounds of spoken language represents the most robust and specific correlate of reading disability in young school age children and adolescents. Neurological science and reading research that provides the scientific knowledge regarding this disability is presented.

The relationship of readability, "readable writing" techniques, and comprehension was evaluated in a series of five experiments involving United States Navy recruits. Eight expository passages from a standardized reading test were revised by using word lists to simplify the vocabulary and a restriction in syntactic structure to simplify…

Examines the performance of normal and disabled readers in recognizing whether orally presented letter strings represent real words. Finds that disabled readers have difficulty in making available the full range of semantic cues when processing stimuli in an acoustic form, supporting a verbal-processing deficit hypothesis of reading disability.…

Finds that children with learning disabilities performed significantly worse on only the first level of phonemic awareness compared to younger children of average reading ability at the same reading age level and significantly worse on compound phonemic awareness compared to a control group. Explicates implications for diagnosis and remediation of…

Examines accuracy as a function of native language and reading ability of grade two children who spelled pseudo-words and real words. Substantiates the hypothesis that poor readers would spell more poorly than average readers. Finds second language speakers also displayed phonological deficits relative to native speakers; however, they performed…

To test F. J. Morrison's conceptualization of reading disability as the failure to master the complex irregular system of rules governing sound-symbol correspondence in English (1980), a study investigated the speed with which disabled and normal readers processed short vowels, long vowels, and vowel digraphs. Subjects consisted of two groups of…

This final report on the relationship between orthographic characteristics and reading behavior consists of five chapters. The first chapter examines writing in its variety of forms in different cultures, noting that such differences can provide important clues to how the brain processes visual information. The second chapter addresses the issue…

As the first title in the new series, "New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches", this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates…