Acquisition of certain grapheme-phoneme correspondences in normally achieving and disabled readers

The present study was designed to assess the development of the understanding of certain aspects of grapheme-phoneme correspondences in normally achieving and disabled readers. The correspondences rules were studied using both English words and pseudowords, the latter designed to contain the same features as the real words. The subjects were 76 normally achieving and 32 reading disabled children aged 6 to 14 years. The stimuli included words and pseudowords that tested the following: consonant blends, final e, r-influenced vowels, regular and irregular words, function words, and consistent and inconsistent vowels. When matched for chronological age, the reading disabled children performed significantly more poorly than normally achieving children on all of the tasks involving pseudowords. A similar pattern was found for the words with the exception of the highest frequency words (cvc, final e, consonant blends) at the oldest age level, 11–14 years. In this case, the performance of the oldest reading disabled children was similar to that of the normals on the words, but was still significantly poorer when the stimuli were pseudowords. Complexity and irregularity were significant determinants of difficulty. Comparisons were also made for groups of children matched on reading grade level. Even when the reading disabled and normally achieving children were matched on reading grade, the reading disabled children had significantly more difficulty, particularly with pseudowords. Reading disabled children had significant difficulty in abstracting the basic rules for grapheme-phoneme correspondences in English, and even when they have mastered these rules in connection with real words, they still had difficulty applying these rules to pseudowords. In normal development, the learning of these correspondences appears to be consolidated by approximately 9 years of age. However, reading disabled children appear to have a significant and persistent problem with the learning of basic grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules.