ABSTRACT
During the last decade, experimental psychologists have followed one of two lines when investigating ‘childhood dyslexia’. Those in what has been called the ‘deficit’ tradition have compared groups of dyslexic and normally developing readers in search of differences between the groups which explain ‘unexpected’ reading failure. This approach has enjoyed considerable success and characteristic ‘dyslexic’ deficits in memory, segmentation and other primarily verbal processes have been unveiled (Vellutino, 1979; Bryant and Bradley, 1985). An alternative approach, at least partly inspired by the successful application of psycholinguistic models to the analysis of acquired dyslexia has been the investigation of dyslexic reading and spelling processes (Coltheart, Patterson and Marshall, 1980). Here group studies have found that dyslexic children have specific difficulty reading nonword stimuli (Snowling, 1981; Baddeley et al., 1982). Individual case studies have corroborated this view to an extent but also have made clear that some dyslexies can decode novel stimuli with greater ease than others (Temple and Marshall, 1983; Seymour and McGregor, 1984). Thus, there is heterogeneity within the group of children described as dyslexic in so far as their written language skills are concerned.
