Department of Linguistics

The integrity of phonological representation/processing in dyslexic children was explored with a gating task in which children listened to successively longer segments (gates) of a word. At each gate, the task was to decide what the entire word was. Responses were scored for overall accuracy, as well as the child’s sensitivity to coarticulation from the final consonant. As a group, dyslexic children were less able than normally achieving readers to detect coarticulation present in the vowel portion of the word, and primarily on the most difficult items, those ending in a nasal sound. Hierarchical regression and path analyses indicated that phonological awareness mediated the relationship of gating and general language ability to word and pseudoword reading ability.