Explaining speech production deficits in poor readers

The purpose of the present study was to further examine speech production abilities of young poor readers. Fourteen poor readers and 14 age-matched nondisabled subjects were taught to produce four novel, multisyllabic nonsense words. A recognition task was part of the training procedure. Retention of the words was also probed. The poor readers took significantly longer than the nondisabled children to produce three of the four words. The recognition data indicated that encoding limitations, rather than speech production limitations, were primarily responsible for the longer acquisition times. Speech production deficiencies seemed to account for only a small portion of the difficulty the poor readers experienced learning the novel words. The data are consistent with previous research that has documented encoding limitations in poor readers.