Reading ability and efficiency of graphemic-phonemic encoding.

It was hypothesized that children with a specific reading disability differ from children of normal reading ability because the former are impaired in extracting speech-like representations from graphemes. Three groups of 12 each of grade school boys and girls participated in timed word comparison tasks which required a "same-different" response. One group was specifically reading deficient, the other groups were matched either on age or on reading level to a deficient group. Monosyllabic word pairs were presented simultaneously by a slide projector. The deficient readers were slower than the two control groups only in a vowel phoneme comparison task and produced response times similar to the control groups for graphemic and visual symbol comparisons. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the problem in learning to read is due to multiple relationships between spelling (graphemes) and sound (phonemes).