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In three studies, the effects of visual and phonological distinctness on the visual-verbal paired associate learning of dyslexic and normal readers at the age of 10-12 were examined. We hypothesized that both groups would be equally affected by the visual distinctness of the pictures, whereas the learning performance of the dyslexic children would be more susceptible to the phonological distinctness of the verbal stimuli (words). As expected, in Study 1 we found that the visual distinctness of pictures had a similar effect on both groups. However, the results of Studies 2 and 3 on the effect of phonological distinctness did not support the hypothesis. Both reader groups were equally affected by the phonological distinctness of the words. In addition, we found that, although not consistently, dyslexic children tended to be worse in verbal learning, which could to a large extent be explained by their problems with phonological processing.

We tested the hypothesis that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge of novel words that are presented in an indistinct context, that is a context with many orthographically similar words, would be more difficult for dyslexic than for normal readers. Participants were 19 Dutch dyslexic children (mean age 10;9 years), 20 age-matched and 20 reading-age-matched normal readers. During training the children repeatedly read a series of nonwords in a distinct (KWOG with KWES and SNAR) and an indistinct (KWOG with KWOS and KROG) orthographic context. At posttest, the dyslexic children were slower but more accurate in the reading of nonwords if these had been acquired in an indistinct than in a distinct training context. In normal readers context did not have an effect. We argue that dyslexic children's sensitivity to orthographic context is due to their problems in the acquisition of fully specified orthographic representations causing interference by similar words.

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