Toward understanding the problem in severely disabled readers Part II: Consonant errors

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe present research was designed to systematically examine consonant errors made by severely disabled readers in an attempt to clarify the nature of their underlying disability. In our first study, three groups of disabled readers were compared to both age- and reading-level matched controls on their performance reading a list of 96 one-syllable nonsense words. As predicted, subjects in all five groups made many more phonetic feature substitutions than orientation reversal substitutions. This is consistent with previous work indicating that reading errors typically result from linguistic- rather than visual-processing difficulties. Further, subjects from all three reading disabled groups, but not from the control groups, made more consonant addition errors than any other error type. A qualitative, post-hoc analysis of the errors suggested that these additions were quite systematic for the reading disabled subjects. The second study was designed as a replication and extension of the first. Results were consistent with those obtained in Study 1. These results are discussed with reference to the possible underlying cause(s) of severe reading disability.