ABSTRACT
Introduction
Speech disorders may impair the construction of phoneme-grapheme association and affect decoding and reading fluency.
Purpose
To describe the performance profiles of schoolchildren diagnosed with reading disorder (RD) and with reading disorder associated with phonological disorder (PD) in the task of reading of isolated items according to the psycholinguistic characteristics of such items.
Methods
The medical records of 36 schoolchildren enrolled at the 4th and 5th grades of elementary school were analyzed as follows: 18 children with RD were paired with other 18 children with typical development according to age, schooling, and gender. The study sample was divided into four groups: Study Group 1 (SG1), composed of 10 schoolchildren with RD; Study Group 2 (SG2), comprising eight schoolchildren with RD and PD; Control Group paired with SG1 (CG1); and CG paired with SG2 (CG2). The reading of words and pseudo words was compared with respect to orthographic regularity, frequency, and extension. The data were statistically analyzed.
Results
Lower values of rate and accuracy were observed in the study groups compared with those of the control groups, except for the rate of pseudo words in SG2. The study groups showed lower statistical results than the control groups for all regularity variables, except for irregular words. SG1 and CG1 presented similar performance in the reading of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. Regarding trisyllabic and dissyllable words, significantly lower mean values were found in SG1 compared with those of CG1; however, SG2 showed significantly lower performance regardless of item extension. Performance of the study groups with respect to item familiarity was significantly lower for all variables, except for high frequency.
Conclusion
Children with RD present good use of the lexical route and difficulty with the phonological route. Phonological speech disorder impairs the performance of schoolchildren on both reading routes.
Reading; Cognition; Dyslexia; Articulation disorders; Speech, language and hearing sciences