Cameirão, M. & Vicente, S.
Faculty of Psychology and Education - University of Porto
Spoken word recognition in normative and reading-disabled children
The Lexical Reestructuring Model (LRM; Metsala & Walley, 1998) suggests that, in young children, phonological representations are stored in the mental lexicon in a holistic fashion and, through childhood, they become increasingly segmental. The model proposes that reading-disabled (RD) children show a delay in this restructuring, which causes impairments in reading, phonological awareness and spoken word recognition tasks. We tested 17 RD children (M Age = 10.09), 17 age-matched controls (CA; M = 10.32) and 17 reading-age matched controls (RA; M = 7.72) in a gating task. The children should recognize 49 dyssilabic words, that contrasted in frequency, age-of-acquisition (AoA) and neighborhood density. The first gate of each word had 100 ms and subsequent gates increased in 50 ms. Overall, RD children needed more time than CA children to recognize words (456 vs. 429 ms), but didn´t differ significantly from the RA group (456 vs. 461, respectivily). There was a significant triple interaction between group, AoA and neighborhood density. RD children were impaired in recognizing early-acquired sparse words, but again didn´t differ from the RA group. These results puzzle the question whether imature representations are cause or consequence of poor reading experience.