ABSTRACT
Children vary in their rates of cognitive development. It might be that the cognitive processes underlying reading within children who are poor readers may not have sufficiently matured. The normal child undergoes developmental changes in a particular sequence and at a particular rate, but the beginning reader has a slower rate of development in some functional aspects of cognition. The problem of sorting out precisely which immature processes in cognitive development relate to poor reading performance needs to be worked out more by experimentation than theoretical development at this stage. If developments in particular aspects of cognitive functions are the antecedents to the ability to learn to read, this would be very useful for the screening problem. A developmental lag explanation would be that perhaps such training was actually facilitating the growth of neuronal structures, or facilitating synaptic transmission, and so on in those areas necessary for reading development.
