Grapheme-phoneme correspondence in dyslexic and matched control readers

Snowling (1980) reported that dyslexic children appear to have specific deficits in grapheme-phoneme conversion skills. Using a similar methodology, the present study compared the ability of dyslexic and control readers to make phoneme discriminations between the beginnings and ends of words. Recognition of word pairs as same or different were presented in four conditions: visual presentation-visual recognition (V-V), auditory-auditory (A-A), visual-auditory (V-A) and auditory-visual (A-V). It was found that dyslexic readers had particular difficulty with the mixed-mode conditions (V-A, A-V) which required grapheme-phoneme conversion. Furthermore, dyslexic readers were particularly error-prone in these conditions if words differed on their end-sound rather than their beginning sound.