ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to place the remarkable progress in perspective and considers its implications for an account of learning disabilities. It begins by considering competing analogies and perspectives that seek to define the fundamental nature of reading disability. The chapter reviews several behavioral markers of learning disabilities that have been widely held previously. It turns to a discussion of the behavioral marker that is the cause of much of the excitement, namely, a deficit in phonological processing. The chapter focuses on implications of research on phonological processing for understanding the nature of reading disabilities and for application of this understanding to diagnosis and treatment. It shows that the dwarfism-versus-obesity analogy maps nicely onto a distinction between two perspectives on learning disabilities. The chapter explains the independent causal influences of individual differences in phonological processing abilities on subsequent word-level reading.
