The role of orthographic analogies in reading for meaning: evidence from readers with dyslexia

1467-9817

Blackwell Publishing Journal Backfiles 1879-2005

Linguistics and Literary Studies

Education

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the use of orthographic analogies in conditions that involved making sense of print (picture-word matching) and pronouncing print (reading aloud) for readers with dyslexia. An adapted version of the classic clue-word paradigm developed by Goswami was used. Participants were 40 readers with dyslexia and 40 reading-age-matched comparison readers. Based on previous theory and research in this area, we predicted that readers with dyslexia would read significantly fewer analogous words than their reading-age-matched counterparts. In light of the supposition that word-picture matching does not require the synthesised pronunciation of a word, we also predicted that readers with dyslexia might be less impaired at analogy use in the picture-word matching than in the reading aloud condition. However, we found that the dyslexic group read significantly fewer analogous words at post-test than their reading-age-matched peers in both conditions. Also, performance in overall word reading was better for both groups in the word-picture matching condition. The implications of these results for theory and practice in reading development are discussed, and methodological limitations are noted.

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