Phonological processing deficits and the acquisition of the alphabetic principle in a severely delayed reader: a case study.

At the end of first grade, TM did not know the alphabet and could read no words. He could not tap syllables in words, had difficulty producing rhyming words and retrieving the phonological representations of words, and he could not discriminate many phoneme contrasts. He learned letter-sound correspondences first for single-consonant onsets and then later for the final consonant in a word but had difficulty with letter-sound associations for vowels. TM's ability to select a printed word to match a spoken word on the basis of the initial or final letter and sound was interpreted as evidence of Ehri's phonetic-cue reading. Using the Glass Analysis method, the authors taught TM to read and he became an independent reader. We discuss how his phonological processing deficits contributed to his reading difficulties.