Factors that influence phoneme-grapheme correspondence learning

The present study examined (a) the relative impact visual and phonetic factors have on learning phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and (b) the relationship between measures of visual and phonological processing and children's ability to learn novel phoneme-grapheme correspondence pairs. Participants were 20 children with reading disabilities (RD), 10 normally achieving children matched for mental age (MA), and 10 children matched for reading age (RA). The children ranged in age from 5 years 2 months to 9 years 3 months. All children completed a phoneme-grapheme learning task consisting of four novel correspondence pairs, a visual processing task, and five measures of phonological processing. The MA and RA groups learned the four correspondence pairs in significantly fewer trials than the RD group. The RD group had the least difficulty learning the correspondence pair with different phonemes and graphemes and the most difficulty learning the correspondence pair with similar phonemes and graphemes. Performance on the learning task was significantly correlated to performance on the visual processing task and the five measures of phonological processing. Performance on the phonological processing task of short-term memory was the best predictor of overall performance on the learning task. Although children with RD were able to learn the four novel correspondence pairs, their processing deficiencies affected how readily they learned each of the correspondence pairs.