ABSTRACT
For some years our research has had the broad aim of understanding the processes whereby the language apparatus, which is biologically specialized for speech, becomes adapted to accept orthographic input. Only with such basic knowledge in hand can we hope to discover why some children fail to learn to read, and only then can we meet the challenge of effective prevention and remediation. Early work of the research group at Haskins Laboratories centered on the role of awareness of phonological segments in learning to read in an alphabetic system. It soon became evident that children who are failing to learn to read have a range of problems in the phonological sphere. In addition to problems in segmental awareness, poor readers have difficulties in naming objects, in processing speech under difficult listening conditions, and they are slower and less accurate in producing tongue twisters. The co-occurrence of these problems suggested that the nature of the children's difficulty in learning to read might lie in the underlying phonological processes themselves (Liberman & Shankweiler, 1985; Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989).
