S This article presents results from a longitudinal study of children of dyslexic and of normally reading parents. The children were followed from the beginning of kindergarten (at the age of 6, 1 year before reading instruction in Denmark) until the beginning of the second grade. Children of dyslexic parents were found to have an increased risk of dyslexia (a 4.3 odds ratio) when dyslexia was defined as poor phonological recoding (poor reading of nonwords and pseudohomophones of real words). All language measures in kindergarten were statistically significant predictors of dyslexia. Logistic regression analyses with backwards stepwise selection indicated that three measures contributed independently to the prediction of dyslexia: letter naming, phoneme identification, and distinctness of phonological representations. The measure of distinctness of phonological representations also contributed significantly to the prediction of poor phoneme awareness in Grade 2—even when differences in early syllable and phoneme awareness, articulation, and productive and receptive vocabulary were accounted for. The results suggest that the quality of phonological representations in the mental lexicon is a determinant of the development of both segmental (e.g., phoneme) awareness and of the acquisition of phonological recoding skills in reading. ESTE TRABAJO presenta los resultados de un estudio longitudinal de niños hijos de padres disléxicos y normales. El seguimiento de los niños se produjo desde el comienzo del preescolar (a la edad de seis años, un año antes de comenzar la enseñanza de la lectura en Dinamarca), hasta el comienzo de segundo grado. Se halló que entre los hijos de padres disléxicos aumentaba el riesgo de dislexia (a razón del 4.3) cuando se definía la dislexia como problemas de recodificación fonológica (problemas para leer pseudo‐palabras y pseudo‐homófonos de palabras reales). Todas las medidas de lenguaje tomadas en preescolar fueron predictoras de dislexia estadísticamente significativas. Los análisis de regresión logística con selección por pasos indicaron que las tres medidas contribuían independientemente a la predicción de la dislexia: nombrar letras, identificar fonemas y la precisión de las representaciones fonológicas. La medida de precisión de las representaciones fonológicas también contribuyó significativamente a predecir problemas de conciencia fonológica en segundo grado ‐ aún cuando se tomaron en cuenta las diferencias en conciencia silábica y fonológica tempranas. Los resultados sugieren que la calidad de las representaciones fonológicas en el léxico mental es determinante tanto del desarrollo de la conciencia segmental (por ej., fonológica) como de la adquisición de habilidades fonológicas en la lectura. DIESER ARTIKEL stellt die Ergebnisse einer Langzeitstudie mit Kindern von dyslexischen und normal‐lesenden Eltern vor. Die Kinder wurden mit Beginn des Kindergartens (im Alter von sechs, ein Jahr vor Beginn des Leseunterrichts in Dänemark) bis zum Eintritt in das zweite Schuljahr betr...

This paper begins by presenting theoretical arguments and empirical evidence to support the idea that morpheme analysis strategies play a part in word recognition in reading, and in dyslexia in particular. The results of two studies are presented which indicate that dyslexic adolescents use recognition of root morphemes as a compensatory strategy in reading of both single words and coherent text. Furthermore, the evidence is reviewed that the use of morpheme recognition as a strategy in reading to some extent depends on the linguistic awareness of morphemes in spoken language. Finally, results from a pilot study of the effects of morphological awareness training of dyslexic students are presented which suggest that it may be possible to improve the awareness of morphology independently of phoneme awareness, and that such a training may have positive effects on reading of coherent text and on the accurate spelling of morphologically complex words.

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Difficulties in reading and language skills which persist from childhood into adult life are the concerns of this article. The aims were twofold: (1) to find measures of adult reading processes that validate adults' retrospective reports of difficulties in learning to read during the school years, and (2) to search for indications of basic deficits in phonological processing that may point toward underlying causes of reading difficulties. Adults who reported a history of difficulties in learning to read (n=102) were distinctly disabled in phonological coding in reading, compared to adults without similar histories (n=56). They were less disabled in the comprehension of written passages, and the comprehension disability was explained by the phonological difficulties. A number of indications were found that adults with poor phonological coding skills in reading (i.e., dyslexia) have basic deficits in phonological representations of spoken words, even when semantic word knowledge, phonemic awareness, educational level, and daily reading habits are taken into account. It is suggested that dyslexics possess less distinct phonological representations of spoken words.

Positive long-term effects of phoneme awareness training in kindergarten were found in this study with children of dyslexic parents. Thirty-five at-risk children (attending 26 different classes) participated in an intensive 17-week program in their regular kindergarten classes designed to help them improve in phoneme awareness. Follow-up measures indicated that the trained children outperformed 47 untrained at-risk controls in both word and nonword reading in Grades 2, 3, and 7. For the very poorest readers, significant effects were found-even in Grade 7 reading comprehension. However, the trained at-risk children were found to lag behind a 2nd control group of 41 not-at-risk children in most aspects of reading. Treatment-resistant children had relatively poor phonological representations of known words.

This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups: children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

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This study of dyslexia was concerned with the quality of phonological representations of lexical items. It extended the studies of verbal learning in dyslexia from learning new vocabulary items (pseudo-names) to the learning of more well-specified variants of known words. The participants were 19 dyslexic adolescents in grades 4 to 6 and 19 younger normal readers in grade 2 matched on single word decoding. The dyslexics were significantly outperformed by the reading-age controls in non-word reading and in phoneme awareness. The dyslexics also took longer time to learn to associate a set of pseudo-names with pictures of persons although the dyslexics learned to associate familiar names with pictures as quickly as the controls did. The acquisition of new phonological representations of words was studied in an imitation task with maximally distinct pronunciations of long, familiar words. The dyslexics gained less than the controls in this task. They also gained less on one measure taken from a phoneme substitution task with the same words as in the distinctness task. The results are interpreted in the light of the hypothesis that poorly specified phonological representations may be an underlying problem in dyslexia.