ABSTRACT
Research from around the world reported in this volume confirms that the primary deficit in specific reading disability is in printed word recognition, caused mainly by underlying deficits in analytic language skills of phoneme awareness (reflecting on sounds within a syllable) and phonological decoding (translating print to sound). Phoneme awareness manifests in the ability to analyze and manipulate sounds within syllables (e.g., to count, delete, and reorder them). It is the strongest predictor of reading progress (Stanovich, Cunningham, & Feeman, 1984), it correlates with reading ability across grade levels (Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973), and it is the major cause of problems in phonological decoding (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). Group deficits in phoneme awareness and phonological decoding may have a neuropsychological basis (Hynd & Semrud-Clikeman, 1989; Larsen, Hoien, Lundberg, & Odegaard, 1989) and a significant genetic etiology (Olson, Forsberg, & Wise, 1994). Yet research suggests that they can be remedied with methods specifically designed to address them (Alexander, Anderson, Voeller, & Torgesen, 1991; Brady, Fowler, Stone, & Winbury, 1994; Kennedy & Backman, 1993; Truch, 1994; Wise, 1991; Wise & Olson, 1995).
