Phonological representations of adult poor readers: An investigation of specificity and stability

Deficits in the underlying phonological processes involved in the encoding, storage and retrieval of the phonological segments of language have been hypothesized to result in less-specified or impoverished lexical representations for poor readers (e.g., Elbro, Nielsen, & Petersen, 1994). To explore this issue, the central goal of this study was to examine the quality of the phonological representations of adult poor readers (n = 25) in comparison to two control groups, adult skilled readers (n = 25) and younger reading-age controls (n = 25), through the use of three tasks: confrontation naming, spelling, and pseudoword repetition. A test/retest paradigm was used to assess consistency of naming and spelling performance. The results confirm weakness in phonological representations of words for adult less-skilled readers. On the confrontation naming task, the less-skilled readers were less accurate and made more phonological errors than the other groups. The less-skilled readers also produced less consistent naming responses. On the spelling measure, the less-skilled readers were significantly less accurate than the two control groups, as well as less consistent. Relevant to the study, the spelling accuracy performance of the less-skilled readers was influenced by inaccurate naming significantly more often than for the control groups. Performance on the pseudoword repetition measure further verified the phonological deficits of the less-skilled readers whose performance was significantly below the skilled readers and the reading-age controls. The results of this study indicate that basic deficits in the phonological representations of words are related to reading ability. This finding has implications for educational strategies for the older student, as well as for younger, beginning readers