THE EARLY MANIFESTATION OF DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA - EVIDENCE FROM GERMAN CHILDREN

The present study retrospectively examined early difficulties with pho nological coding and phonemic segmentation of German children who afte r four years in school were diagnosed as dyslexic. German, in comparis on to English, exhibits rather simple and straightforward grapheme-pho neme correspondences, and the initial teaching approach was phonics or iented. Despite these favorable circumstances for the acquisition of p honological coding, the majority of the later dyslexic children had pa rticular difficulties with the accurate reading of nonwords and of unf amiliar words after about seven months of reading instruction. However , there were enormous differences between the dyslexic children. Two o f them were completely unable to 'blend' phonemes into pronunciations, another seven were slow and error prone decoders, and three children had slow and laborious pronunciation assembly as the core problem. The majority of the later dyslexic children also exhibited phonemic segme ntation deficits as tested with a nonword spelling task and a phoneme reversal task. In correspondence with findings from older German dysle xic children, the early difficulties with accurate phonological coding and phonemic segmentation were no longer found at the end of grade fo ur. Children then suffered from very slow reading and poor spelling. I n general, the difficulties of German dyslexic children emphasize the phonological impairment account of dyslexia. More specifically, these findings suggest that the assembly of letter sounds into pronunciation s is particularly affected in the early phase of learning to read a co nsistent orthography.