AUDITORY-PERCEPTION, PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING, AND READING-ABILITY DISABILITY

Auditory perception has been proposed as one source of individual vari ation in the phonological abilities that play a critical role in skill ed reading as well as in reading disabilities. A structural equation a pproach (LISREL, Joreskog & Sorbom, 1990) was used to analyze relation ships among auditory perception, phonological processing, and reading in a sample of 94 college undergraduates, 24 of whom met specific crit eria for a reading disability. In the mathematical model that proved t o be the best fit to the data, speech perception was strongly related to three of four phonological variables including short- and long-term auditory memory and phoneme segmentation. These phonological variable s in turn were strongly related to reading. Nonverbal temporal process ing was not significantly related to any of the phonological variables in the structural equations. It was concluded that speech perception, which was measured with speech repetition, syllable sequence discrimi nation, and degraded speech tasks, may contribute significantly to ind ividual differences in the phonological abilities necessary for skille d reading.