SUBTYPES OF DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA AND LEXICAL ACQUISITION

Although much has been learned about the nature and etiology of impair ments in sublexical translation skills, less is known about the diffic ulties of children who are poor at recognising words as whole orthogra phic units. In the research described here, an attempt was made to loo k closely at the process these poor readers go through when trying to acquire new lexical information. Groups of poor readers were required to learn the pronunciations of a set of ''irregular'' nonsense words o ver a series of training sessions. There was an imperfect corresponden ce between the orthographic and phonological forms of these items, so grapheme-phoneme conversion rules could not be used (e.g., macht was p ronounced ''mot''). The results indicated that this learning task dist inguishes between poor readers with a specific lexical deficit and tho se with a different type of reading difficulty. Ways in which this kin d of task might usefully be employed in future research in this area a re discussed.