Evidence for an articulatory awareness deficit in adult dyslexics

Dyslexia is widely considered to be associated with impaired performance on phonological awareness tasks. However, it is likely that orthographic knowledge also influences performance on these tasks. In this study, adult dyslexics, for whom reading is no longer a major problem, were compared to a control group on a measure of articulatory awareness, a task which is not confounded with orthography. The dyslexic group showed deficits on the task in comparison to the control group. We hypothesize that information about articulatory movements for specific phonemes is less accessible to dyslexics because of a deficient phonological processing system.