Clayton, F. & Hulme, C.
University College London
Learning to read an alphabetic language requires the formation of associations between letters and their corresponding speech-sounds. The dominant theory of dyslexia argues that reading difficulties are caused by a phonological deficit, however recent research has proposed that such difficulties arise from a specific deficit in establishing automatic letter-sound associations (Blomert, 2011). The current research uses behavioural experiments to assess the contribution of automatic letter-sound integration in learning to read.
Two-hundred and twelve typically developing children and twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 5-7 years) completed several reading-related measures and an experimental priming task designed to measure the extent to which letters and speech-sounds are automatically integrated.
Both groups were significantly faster to identify a speech-sound when primed by a congruent visual letter than when primed by a novel symbol. This indicates that both typically developing children and children with dyslexia automatically integrate visual letters with their corresponding speech-sounds. Furthermore, results from this study found that children?s performance on this task did not predict unique variance in reading performance. Rather, baseline performance (simply deciding if a sound is speech-sound or not) predicts individual differences in reading, arguably providing further evidence of the importance of phonological skills in learning to read.