Prevalence and Profile of Phonological and Surface Subgroups in College Students With a History of Reading Disability

The purpose of the present study was to identify and characterize surface and phonological subgroups of readers among college students with a prior diagnosis of developmental reading disability (RD). Using a speeded naming task derived from Castles and Coltheart's subtyping study, we identified subgroups of readers from among college students with RD and then compared them on a number of component reading tasks. Most of our adults with RD showed a discrepancy in lexical versus sublexical reading skills. The majority of classified individuals were in the phonological dyslexia group, and this group's performance was worse than that of other groups on a range of reading-related tasks. Specifically, being relatively less skilled at reading nonwords compared to irregular words was associated with deficits in both sublexical and lexical tasks, and with unique deficits compared to the surface dyslexia group not only in an independent measure of phonological coding but also in spelling, rapid automatized naming, and speeded oral reading. The surface dyslexia group was small, and the pattern of results for these readers was not consistent with the predicted profile of a specific deficit in lexical and automatized reading processes. Our surface group did not show reduced skill in lexical mechanisms specifically, nor any unique deficit compared to the phonological group. These results seem more supportive of models of reading that place phonological processing impairments at the core of RD, with all other impairments being clearly subsidiary.