Chapter Eleven Integrating Beginning Word Study into Clinical Interventions

The accumulated empirical evidence indicates that reading disabil-ities, over and above difficulties caused by inadequate reading experience and instruction, are caused by linguistic deficiencies in the area of phonological awareness—namely, phonological coding (for reviews, see Adams, 1990; Chall, 1996; Stanovich, 2000; Vel-lutino et al., 1996). Phonological coding is the ability to code abstract representations of the sounds in spoken and written words into the form of phonemes (i.e., the individual components of the speech stream). An impressive line of research has proven the strong relationship between language deficits and readin