A Developmental Neuropsychological Perspective for Reading and Writing Acquisition

The principle of developmental dissociations is illustrated as a technique for studying functional brain organization in developing children with and without frank brain damage. Specific developmental dissociations described include disparities between (a) the cognitive and motor systems; (b) declarative and procedural knowledge; (c) fine motor, orthographic, oral language, reading, and writing function; (d) corresponding orthographic-phonological code connections; and (e) lexical analysis and lexical selection in reading. The educational implications of these dissociations are discussed. First, the developmental dissociations observed between the cognitive and motor systems and between declarative and procedural knowledge in motorically impaired individuals suggest that sensorimotor experience may not be a prerequisite for all intellectual development, as Piaget claimed, and that an abnormal sensorimotor period may impair the acquisition of procedural knowledge relatively more than the acquisition of declarative knowledge. Second, the dissociations observed among fine motor, orthographic, oral language, reading, and writing function support a model of noncontingent, normal variation or developmental independence in acquiring neurodevelopmental skills and academic skills, which fall along a continuum in a range typically found in normally developing readers and writers and which vary considerably within and across individuals in their relative level of development. Third, the dissociations between corresponding orthographic-phonological codes can contribute to problems in acquiring word recognition skills. Finally, the dissociation between lexical analysis and lexical selection accounts for children who can extract meaning from silent reading of text but whose oral reading is dysfluent. We argue, in keeping with the spirit of the Piagetian tradition, that developmental dissociations offer a technique for dissecting the components of biofunctional brain systems and thus for studying the constructive processes of the learner whose nervous system continually interacts with the environment.