Patterns of Information Processing Skills and Word Recognition Strategies in Developmental Dyslexia

The developmental‐lag hypothesis in theories about dyslexia refers to an unexpected slow, but not qualitatively different, development of reading skills in dyslexic children. The alternative hypothesis holds that dyslexic readers use qualitatively different or idiosyncratic strategies in reading, particularly in word recognition, because of deficient cognitive and linguistic processes related to reading. In order to evaluate these hypotheses, a reading level design was set up. A carefully selected group of 19 dyslexic adolescents was compared to a group of younger children with the same word‐reading ability as the dyslexics. The comparisons included a set of word‐recognition skills (e.g. lexical decision, nonword reading) and a set of reading‐related tasks (e.g. visual discrimination, naming, phonemic synthesis). Although the dyslexics had about the same performance on a word reading test, they were far behind the younger children in the experimental word‐recognition skills. On the perceptual and cognitive tasks less directly related to reading, the dyslexies were almost normal. The results were interpreted as being in favour of the deficit hypothesis. Dyslexies seem to have specific impairments in cognitive modules closely related to reading. Apparently they have to use different strategies to arrive at a functional level of word recognition as compared to normals.