Phonological knowledge and naming ability in children with reading disability

✍ Scribed by Hyla Rubin; Sara Zimmerman; Robert B. Katz

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 702 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0922-4777
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00386269

✦ Synopsis

Children who are poor readers have difficulty naming pictured objects. Their naming difficulty could be a result of inadequate representations of the phonology of words, inadequate processing of those representations, or both. In this study, third-grade good and poor readers were tested on object naming, and, in cases of naming failure, forced-choice recognition tasks were used to probe their knowledge of the phonology of the object names. The two reading groups showed no differences in their ability to select the initial phonemes or rhymes of object names they had not produced spontaneously. Moreover, initial phoneme prompts were helpful for both reading groups. The children differed, however, in their ability to produce words after being given rhyme information. The results indicated that, except in the ability to manipulate explicitly phonological information, the poor readers' performance was qualitatively similar to that of the good readers. It is suggested that training in phonological analysis may help poor readers overcome the deficiencies in establishing and processing phonological representations that lead to their quantitative deficit in object naming.