INTRUSION OF ORTHOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE ON PHONEME AWARENESS - STRONG IN NORMAL READERS, WEAK IN DYSLEXIC READERS

In three typical phonological awareness tasks it was found that childr en with normal reading development sometimes give responses that are b ased on orthographic rather than phonological information. In dyslexic children, the number of occurrences of such orthographic intrusions w as significantly lower. This effect cannot be explained by positing a lower degree of orthographic knowledge in dyslexic children since a gr oup of younger children who had the same spelling level as the dyslexi cs also showed more orthographic intrusions. A plausible explanation f or this difference between normal and dyslexic readers is that, in nor mal readers, phonological and orthographic representations of words ar e so closely connected that they are usually coactivated, even if such a coactivation is misleading. In dyslexics this connection is less st rong, so that orthographic representations interfere less with phonemi c segmentation. The relevance of this finding with respect to recent a ssumptions about the importance of phonology in establishing orthograp hic representations is discussed.