What Phonological Deficit?

Abstract

We review a series of experiments aimed at understanding the nature of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia. These experiments investigate input and output phonological representations, phonological grammar, foreign speech perception and production, and unconscious speech processing and lexical access. Our results converge on the observation that the phonological representations of people with dyslexia may be intact, and that the phonological deficit surfaces only as a function of certain task requirements, notably short-term memory, conscious awareness, and time constraints. In an attempt to reformulate those task requirements more economically, we propose that individuals with dyslexia have a deficit in access to phonological representations. We discuss the explanatory power of this concept and we speculate that a similar notion might also adequately describe the nature of other associated cognitive deficits when present.

How phonological awareness mediates the relation between working memory and word reading efficiency in children with dyslexia

“…Indeed, the more difficult phonological awareness tasks also appeal to children's working memory by demanding more updating capacities. This is in line with the suggestion by Ramus and Szenkovits (2008) who argued that the phonological representations of people with dyslexia may be intact, but not their access to these representations. They thus suggest that the phonological deficit can be seen as a function of task requirements.…”

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: Variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies

“…5 More recently, Roberts and McDougall (2003) distinguished slightly different categories, namely: implicit awareness (e.g., matching); production and discrimination (e.g., oddity, similarity detection); and manipulation (e.g., segmentation, blending). Yet another way of conceiving of the processing demands has been to treat the status of phonological speech representations separately from the metacognitive task demands such as short-term memory or conscious awareness that might be involved in accessing such representations (Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008). This acknowledges that even implicit phonological awareness tasks do not reflect speech representations as directly as online measures of speech processing since meta-cognitive processing is required and is likely to become increasingly involved with age and reading experience.…”

Computer-assisted training of phoneme–grapheme correspondence for children who are deaf and hard of hearing: Effects on phonological processing skills

“…This is probably not the case for unfamiliar words for which they show reduced sensitivity, thereby treating unknown words at a less refined grain-size [6][7][8]. PhPS and refined phonological representations play an essential part in a large number of cognitive processes, such as lexical access, reading, spelling, and learning new vocabulary [9][10][11][12]. PhPS are in turn closely connected to the phonological storage and rehearsal capacity in working memory, and to the semantic and phonological lexicon [7,8,13].…”

“…We constructed a global measure of PhPS, i.e., a phonological composite score that reflects various aspects of phonological representations [10]. The phonological composite score enabled us to measure and compare DHH and NH children's general PhPS skills with respect to their different auditory experience.…”

“…Further, the phonological composite score had theoretical implications. In relation to the information-processing model of speech perception and production and lexical access [10], the phonological composite score can be viewed as tapping into different aspects of phonological representations. These are; conscious access and attention to phonological representations and their subunits, storage and active recycling of input and output of sub-lexical representations, as well as retrieval of lexical phonological representations.…”