The development of phonological and orthographic processing strategies in readers with a specific reading disability compared to normally achieving readers
Creators: name: Kirby, ML
Publisher: name: University Of Tasmania
Year: 2023

description: The self-teaching model of reading acquisition proposed by Share (1995, 1999) suggests that phonological decoding may be the principal means for becoming skilled at word recognition. Given that individuals with a specific reading disability (SRD) have been shown to have a phonological processing deficit (Rack et al., 1992), the lack of proficiency in these skills could have detrimental effects on orthographic processing skills. In contrast, Lennox and Siegel (1994) argue that the cognitive profile of children who have a specific reading disability (SRDs) might include deficient phonological skills and superior orthographic skills. In a two-year longitudinal study, SRDs in Grades 3, 5, and 7 and their chronological age (CAMs) and reading age (RAMs) matched controls (N=98) performed a range of standardised and experimental tasks to investigate the development of phonological and orthographic component processing skills. Although SRDs made significant gains on isolated word recognition tasks over time, they did not improve to the same extent as RAMs. This was largely attributed to a phonological processing deficit given that, in comparison to controls, SRDs were significantly less accurate on nonword reading, phoneme deletion, and phonological coding tasks and did not improve significantly over time for the latter two tasks. SRDs demonstrated a particular difficulty with phonological analysis of visual stimuli and were more likely than controls to use an orthographic strategy to perform this task. Although SRDs did not demonstrate a deficit for synthesis tasks, they did show an atypical developmental pattern compared to RAMs. SRDs in Grade 3 had difficulty discriminating between real word targets and pseudohomophone foils on an orthographic coding task compared to controls whereas older SRDs performed similarly to RAMs. Although all SRDs improved on this task, the youngest group appeared to develop less accurate orthographic representations. In discriminating between nonwords containing legal letter strings and those containing letter strings in positions that never occur in the English language, all groups performed similarly indicating that the participants had attained a sufficient level of orthographic knowledge required to perform this task. Orthographic strategy use and coding skills appeared to be relatively intact in comparison to phonological processing skills for SRDs. However, there was insufficient evidence to conclude that SRDs compensate for their phonological deficit with superior orthographic skills given that there were no orthographic tasks where SRDs performed better than would be expected given their reading age. Furthermore, in addition to an atypical developmental pattern for phonological processing skills, SRDs showed a protracted developmental course for some measures of orthographic processing. These findings support Share's (1995, 1999) idea that the acquisition of orthographic representations is largely dependent on phonological processing skills.