NAMING SPEED IN CHILDREN WITH DYSLEXIA

A series of tests of naming speed in discrete reaction time format wer e undertaken by seven groups of children: three groups with dyslexia w ith mean ages 8, 13, and 17 years; three groups of normally achieving children matched for age and IQ with the dyslexic groups; and a group of 10-year-old children with mild learning difficulties (slow learners ) matched for reading age with the youngest dyslexic group. The childr en with dyslexia were significantly slower than even their chronologic al age-matched controls, and equivalent to their reading age-matched c ontrols, on naming colors, digits, and letters, and significantly slow er than even their reading age-matched controls on naming pictures of common objects. Overall, performance of the 17-year-old children with dyslexia was closet to that of the 8-year-old controls. Performance of the slow learners was equivalent to that of the youngest children wit h dyslexia. The results show that children with dyslexia have persiste nt-and unexpectedly severe-problems in naming speed for all stimuli, r egardless of whether or not the stimulus requires grapheme-phoneme dec oding.