Vh. Denenberg, A critique of Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady's "Speech perception deficits in poor readers: Auditory processing or phonological coding?", J LEARN DI, 32(5), 1999, pp. 379-383
A 1997 article by Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady claimed that their stud
ies constituted a critical test of two hypotheses concerning students with
reading impairment: (a) that they experience speech-specific failure in pho
nological representation, and (b) they display general deficits in auditory
temporal processing. From these studies, the authors concluded that their
findings were consistent with the first hypothesis but were not in agreemen
t with the second. A critical analysis of the Mody et al. article leads to
the conclusion that it makes no contribution to that debate because (a) the
children in the Poor reading group did not meet the accepted reading-impai
rment criterion of being delayed by at least 1 year in their reading skills
, (b) there were severe violations of statistical assumptions, and (c) thei
r conclusions were based on the failure tot find significant differences, t
hus compelling them to accept the null hypothesis as proven, in the absence
of any statistical power analysis.