Reading behavior in dyslexia: Is there a distinctive pattern?

Summary Our findings do not support the belief that a subclass of those specifically backward in reading, the dyslexics, can be differentiated from other poor readers on the basis of a high rate of reversal errors. Although some dyslexics showed orientational and directional biases which are absent in most poor readers, neither those children classified as dyslexics nor other poor readers typically displayed a high proportion of reversals as compared with other errors. Moreover, the difficulties manifested in the common error pattern are chiefly outside the domain of visual perception. They are language-related and are not specific to the visual perception of language. The difficulties of poor readers appear to reflect the inaccessibility of the phonetic segmentation of spoken language, inability to adopt an efficient coding strategy for operations involving short-term memory, and failure to grasp the complex nature of the spelling system of English. Since the difficulties of learning to read interact with the structural peculiarities of particular languages and the way those structures are manifested in the writing system, we must suppose that important work remains to be done in cross-language comparisons of children’s reading errors. How these linguistic factors may influence the reading behavior of dyslexics is likely to be a productive question for future investigation. Much of the authors’ research on reading acquisition was supported by a grant to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant #HD 01994). This article was adapted from a paper presented at the Symposium on Pathologies of Language Development of the Fourth Biennial Congress of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development held at the University of Pavia, Italy, September 19–23, 1977.