Implicit phonological representations in children with dyslexia

This study was designed to measure implicit phonological representations in children with dyslexia and relate this construct to various other levels of linguistic processing and literacy variables known to be affected in this disorder. Specifically, this study tested the segmentation hypothesis, which states that one of the core deficits in dyslexia, phonemic awareness, is due to phonological representations that are less segmented than in average readers.;Three experimental tasks were used to measure implicit phonological representations: a lexical gating task, a priming task, and a syllable similarity task. The same predicted pattern of results was found on all three experimental tasks; children with dyslexia performed consistently worse than CA controls, and generally worse than RA controls, when more segmental representations were required. A composite measure of implicit phonological representations was significantly correlated with measures of speech perception, phoneme awareness, and phonological short-term memory, but not rapid automatized naming. Notwithstanding the shared variance with these other core reading process variables, implicit phonological representations still accounted for a significant amount of unique variance in predicting reading ability. These results provide strong support for less mature implicit phonological representations in children with dyslexia. These results are discussed relative to potential alternative etiologies for the deficient phonological representations, including a more general deficit in auditory processing.