The Orthographic Code: Developmental Trends in Reading-disabled and Normally-achieving Children

An auditory rhyme detection task was employed to examine orthographic code development in 27 reading-disabled (RD) and 27 normally-achieving (NA) children ranging in age from 7-0 to 11-5. The amount of orthographic facilitation (that is, the reduction in response latencies for orthographically similar as opposed to orthographically dissimilar rhyme pairs) was recorded for each subject. Results indicated that RD children exhibit significantly less facilitation overall than NA children and that RD children do not demonstrate comparable orthographic facilitation effects to NA children until they are about two years older than their NA peers. It is concluded that children with a reading disability have a lessened ability to access automatically and make available stored lexical information relating to orthography.