SPEECH-PERCEPTION AND SPEECH PRODUCTION AS INDICATORS OF READING DIFFICULTY

In order to investigate the relation between reading accuracy and spee ch processing, 20 children, from grades 2 and 3 who were skilled in re ading were compared with 20 less skilled readers on a speech perceptio n and production task. The two groups of readers were indistinguishabl e in their production of the two-syllable words dippy, deepy, tippy, a nd teepy and in their perception of the stop consonants /d/ versus /t/ . Less skilled readers were significantly less accurate than the skill ed readers in a vowel identification task involving the lax and tense high vowels /I/ and /i/. The error pattern for vowel identification wa s similar across groups, with both groups making fewer errors when sho rt and longer segments were alternated. The results imply that vowel p honemes are less securely represented in the perceptual system of less skilled readers than are consonant phonemes. In addition, the results raise the possibility that a selective perceptual impairment underlie s at least some of the phonemic awareness problems that have been asso ciated with poor reading.