![]() A large body of behavioural and neuro-imaging evidence suggests that the core deficit in children with dyslexia is impairment in phonological processing skills, which may be defined as an individual’s understanding of the sound structure of language. Decoding difficulties are a hallmark of dyslexia. So, the bottleneck for the majority of poor readers is related to poor decoding skills. In addition, the ability to read irregular words depends highly on reading experience and decoding ability (Sprenger-Charolles & Serniclaes, 2006). However, research also suggests that a large proportion of children with reading comprehension difficulties are poor comprehenders due to decoding difficulties (see Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004 for a review). ![]() ![]() Indeed, research suggests that good decoders with poor reading comprehension also have poor listening comprehension skills and therefore are likely to have underling language difficulties. Of course, comprehension skills are crucial in the reading process, and the importance of developing language skills cannot be underemphasised. “Yes, but what about comprehension skills? There is a lot more to reading than decoding!” I hear you say. An overwhelming body of research suggests that in general, poor readers have poor decoding skills and that better readers have better decoding skills. Poor decoding skills lead to difficulty in reading unfamiliar words, and poor self-teaching. While most children acquire decoding ability without too much difficulty, a significant proportion of the population (around 20%) have great difficulty in developing adequate decoding skills. Decoding skills are not so useful when reading unfamiliar irregular words (words that do not contain regular grapheme-phoneme patterns, such as the words “bureau”, “yacht” and “colonel”). Approximately 50% of English words can be spelt correctly with grapheme-phoneme conversions alone, and a further 36% can be spelt with the exception of one grapheme-phoneme inconsistency (Hanna, 1966), making strong decoding ability a very powerful tool for self-teaching.ĭecoding skills are crucial when reading unfamiliar regular words with consistent sound-symbol relationships (such as the words “strips”, “representing” and “hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”) as well as non-words – made up words that consist of permissible spelling patterns but have no meaning (such as the words “scritten”, “borker” and “vasster”). Nevertheless, most of English spelling is based on the phonology of the language. Despite being an alphabetic language, English does not have a consistent orthography (like Finnish or Italian, for example) in which every phoneme, or sound, in the language has a corresponding grapheme (a letter or group of letters representing one phoneme), with some graphemes representing more than one phoneme (compare “school” with “chip”), and some phonemes represented by more than one grapheme (consider “her, bird” and “turn”). This process is called decoding, and allows the reader to successfully read unfamiliar words and develop visual word recognition skills.ĭecoding allows children to access the thousands of words they have already heard but never seen in written form. Since the orthography of alphabetic languages such as English is based on the phonological system, an understanding of the relationship between sound and letter patterns facilitates the “breaking of the code” in written language. Alphabetic languages rely on a process of converting this spoken, phonemic code into a visual, orthographic code, which is then converted back to speech when reading. ![]() The phonological system of a language may be described as the underlying shared system of speech sounds that we use to convey meaning. Why do some children struggle with reading? Is there a relationship between dyslexia and auditory processing disorder (APD)?Įnglish is an alphabetic language, meaning that the written symbols of the language are closely related to the phonological system.
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