Reading disability, phonemic analysis, and dysphonetic spelling: A follow‐up study

Abstract

A previous study found that first graders with severe reading disability had marked deficits in phonemic analysis. The present study, done three years later, followed the same children with severe reading disability and average readers matched for age, sex, IQ, and social background. Members of the severely reading disabled group had been held back and were thus all in the third grade at follow‐up. The average readers were all in fourth grade. All of the poor readers are now proficient at phonemic segmenting. However, most poor readers now show a “dysphonetic”; pattern of reading difficulty, including bizarre spelling errors. The spelling errors made by children in the control group, in contrast, were usually good phonetic equivalents of the words misspelled.