English is an alphabetic language highly irregular and with a deep orthography. Its alphabet has 26 letters which map onto more than 40 phonemes, and in order to determine the value of some phonemes one needs to consider more than one letter. Some of the letters in English have a stable phonemic value, what means that their pronunciation can be determine in word-initial positions without considering other letters. For other letters, at least one additional grapheme must be identified before the value of the first phoneme in a word can  be determined. Sometimes the reader needs to consider at least four more letters before the first phoneme can be unambiguously determined (e.g. chord vs. chore). At other times, the addition of one grapheme can radically change the pronunciation of a letter elsewhere in the word, as is the case for the “silent e” long vowel marker. In addition, there are idiosyncratic words in English, like “yacht”, which need to be learned individually since they cannot be pronounced either by rule or analogy on the basis of their spelling (Geva & Siegel, p.3).

            There is converging evidence from a large number of studies of English-speaking children that phonological awareness skills of kindergarten children is the best predictor of grade 1 reading and spelling ability. Therefore, the phonological processing skills are the ones primarly affected in an individual with developmental dyslexia. These skills can be described as follows: rapid serial naming, verbal short-term memory, phonological awareness. These three skills have been proved to be related to dyslexia. Most of the literature done in this area is in English speaking individuals (Brewster Clark & Kellogg Uhry, 1995).

            How English differs from other languages? This question has been answered among the description of the research conducted in other languages. There are interesting findings on the research conducted by Wimmer (1994), that shows that English speaking children showed more orthographic errors (real words) than phonological errors (non-words) when reading non-words as compared to German speaking children. This might be due to the fact that English is so irregular that sight vocabulary (orthographic route) and whole-word reading are strategies commonly implemented by beginner readers. In contrast, readers of more transparent orthographies tend to make more phonological errors (non-words), due to the direct GFC of the decoding. This means that they are implementing pure phonological decoding when reading.

            Lennox and Siegel (1993) investigated the hypothesis that children with a reading disability understand and use sound-spelling correspondence rules (phonological rules) less frequently in spelling than children with other learning disabilities (such as arithmetic) and normally achieving children. They analyzed the spelling of children from age 6 to 16, and they confirm their hypothesis. These data also contribute to the hypothesis that reading disabled individuals have a phonological deficit. What it is interesting from this study is that reading disabled students had difficulty also learning rudimentary sound-symbol rules, but by the age of 9-10 years old, they could perform equally as well as normally achieving children on this measure, as long as positional constraints do not have to be processed. The arithmetic disabled group (AD) had some spelling underachievement, but far ahead from the RD group and behind the NA. Reaching the age of 11-16 years, the AD group perform equal to the NA group. This gives support to the phonological core theory for reading disabilities and suggests that something else is affected in an AD (hypothesis for another web page).

Glossary

GFC:grapheme-phoneme correspondece

RD: reading disabled / reading disability

NA: normal achievers

AD: arithmetic disabled / arithmetic disability
 

                                                                                                                                    
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