Phonological coding in dyslexic readers.

A study was made of the ability of 9-, 12-, and 14-year-old dyslexics to recall auditorily presented rhyming and non-rhyming letter strings. These children showed a normal phonemic confusability effect, although overall their recall was much poorer than that of their chronological age controls; their recall levels were in fact very similar to those of their reading age controls. It was concluded that although previous studies have argued that poor readers show a weak phonemic confusability effect, this finding does not appear to be generalizable to older poor readers.