Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16: 21–39, 2003.

21
© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Phonological basis in reading disability: A review and analysis of

the evidence

MARIA MODY
Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Abstract. Poor readers are known to do consistently worse than their normal reading peers
on tasks of phonological processing. They are characterized by their difficulties in printed
word recognition, phonological awareness and phonological decoding. An increasing body
of evidence points to deficits in speech perception as a source of subtle but ramifying
effects in reading impaired children and adults. These deficits may be traced to poorly coded
phonological representations. This article will attempt to explain poor readers’ difficulties in
phonological coding by drawing on a gestural account speech development. Implications of
this approach for reading intervention will be presented.

Key words: Articulation rate, Phonological awareness, Reading, Speech perception

Introduction

Twenty-five years ago, research in dyslexia was more concerned with

establishing what reading disability was not, rather than what it was
(Liberman, Shankweiler, Orlando, Harris & Bell-Berti, 1971). For, in those
days, treatment for dyslexia included eye exercises and the use of balancing
beams. Fortunately, today, some basic facts about this reading disorder are
well established. Most importantly, dyslexia may be traced to a weakness
in the phonological component of language. It is characterized by a deficit
in printed word recognition. The problem is believed to stem from under-
lying deficits in phonological awareness and phonological decoding skills.
Studies have repeatedly shown that children who have reading difficulties do
significantly worse than their normal reading peers on tasks of phonological
processing (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Perfetti, 1985; Shankweiler, 1999). In
fact, phonological awareness is believed to be the single best predictor of later
reading performance (Liberman, 1973).
In addition to their difficulties with phonological processing as in
phonemic segmentation, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping and phoneme iden-
tification and discrimination, children who are poor readers also evidence
problems with speed and accuracy in lexical retrieval, verbal short-term
memory, as well as semantic and syntactic processing on tasks of listening
22 MARIA MODY

comprehension (Olson, 1992). The question is are these various deficits

related or do they represent independent difficulties at different levels within
the language system? Before we attempt to answer this question, let us take a
closer look at some of these characteristic deficits in poor readers. The article
will first present an overview of the phonological deficits that characterize
poor readers. This will be followed by an attempt to explain the difficulties
associated with acquiring phonological awareness for poor readers. Finally,
a suggestion for the use of phonological awareness training that incorporates
aspects of both speech perception and speech production as integral to reading
remediation will be proposed.

Characteristic deficits in poor readers

Phonological awareness

Learning to read an alphabetic text necessitates that the beginning reader be

aware of the segmental nature of speech, i.e., that phonemes exist and can
be permuted and combined. Thus, phonological awareness refers to one’s
ability to make judgments about and manipulate the phonological structure
of spoken words. Additionally, the beginning reader must learn to map the
phonological structure of a word to its orthographic counterpart. To do so,
a child must be able to make judgments that pertain to phonemes, syllables,
onsets, rimes and words. The phoneme is considered to be the most elusive of
these, making it difficult to discover in the speech stream, even for the normal
child (Treiman, 1985). Thus most poor readers have difficulty tapping out the
number of phones in a word, as well as in adding or deleting a phone or
reversing the order of phones in a word (Lundberg, Olofsson & Wall, 1980;
Stanovich, 1986). Each of these phonological units has its own cognitive
demands and its own developmental time course. So, for example, children
can often do a syllable segmentation task before the ability to segment at
the phonemic level has developed. This has important clinical implications
for determining age-appropriate use of these units in tasks that determine a
child’s future success in reading.
Despite the evidence in favor of phonological awareness abilities as a
predictor of reading success, there are some who continue to debate its
role in reading. More specifically, a question frequently raised is whether
phonological awareness is a prerequisite for reading acquisition, or as Morais
and his colleagues (Morais, Cary, Alegria & Bertelson, 1979) argue, a
consequence of reading instruction. Research suggests that the novice reader
does bring to the reading task some degree of syllabic and rhyme awareness
(Mann & Liberman, 1984); however, full phoneme awareness is found only in
 PHONOLOGICAL BASIS IN READING DISABILITY 23

few before the start of reading instruction. The increase in phoneme segmen-
tation ability after the beginning of school clearly points to the influence of
reading instruction on the development of these abilities (Bentin, Hammer &
Cahan, 1991). However, despite these differing points of view, there is suffi-
cient evidence in favor of the importance of phonological awareness training
in reading development. In fact, support for a causal relation between phono-
logical awareness and reading development comes from various phonemic
training studies, which show the positive effects of such training on reading
development (Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Hurford & Sanders, 1990). In one
such study, four- and five-year-old children with phonological awareness
problems, who were not trained in sound categorization, were still delayed in
reading by the time they were eight years old, and did not catch up (Bradley
& Bryant, 1983).
Experiments by Ball and Blachman (1991) have shown that in order
for phonological training to be effective, a child has to be made aware of
segments and the correspondences with print has to be explicitly pointed out
to them. However, this is not to be confused with training to discriminate
between minimal pairs. Poor readers’ performance on phoneme discrimi-
nation tasks does not constitute a measure of their phonological awareness.
Such tasks do not yield information about a listener’s knowledge of the
existence of phonemes but rather about the listener’ ability to detect a
difference (more on this topic under “Speech Perception Deficits” below).
To quote Shankweiler (1999), “. . . such abilities go hand in hand with
knowing a language, but phonological awareness does not come free with
language acquisition.” Poor readers, thus, have difficulty becoming aware
of the segmental nature of speech. This would account for their specific
difficulty in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (Snowling, 1980).

Verbal short-term memory

Another consistent feature of poor readers is their shorter verbal memory

spans compared to normal readers (Hansen & Bowey, 1994; Jorm, 1983).
This pattern has been observed in tasks using digit-span, letter strings,
syllables, word strings, sentence and picture recall, and holds good whether
the information is presented visually in script or auditorily (Cohen & Netley,
1981; Shankweiler & Liberman, 1977; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1982). Inter-
estingly, these deficits in working memory appear to be specific to speech
(Brady, Shankweiler & Mann, 1983). That is, poor readers do not have
difficulty recalling strings of items like photographs of strangers, nonsense
figures, visual patterns, or characters from unfamiliar writing systems, when
these cannot be easily represented using verbal labels (Gould & Glencross,
1990; Katz, Shankweiler & Liberman, 1981).
24 MARIA MODY

A related finding here is the difference between good and poor readers
on recall of phonetically similar versus dissimilar letter strings (Liberman,
Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler & Fischer, 1977). These authors found that
while both groups did poorly on the phonetically similar task good readers did
significantly better than the poor readers when the stimuli were dissimilar.
This was attributed to the superior phonological coding abilities of good
readers that allowed them to take advantage of the increased phonological
contrast of the phonetically dissimilar stimuli. The poor readers, on the other
hand, did not appear to be as affected by the phonetic characteristics of
the stimuli. Their larger number of errors compared to the good readers,
along with their reduced phonological sensitivity suggest an incomplete
coding of phonetic details in working memory. In short, poor readers are
hypothesized to have less fine-grained phonological storage and therefore
weak phonological awareness skills. Such deficits have also been linked to
vocabulary size because the learning of new words necessitates coding unfa-
miliar forms in full detail (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). In a related study,
Stone and Brady (1995) found poor readers performance on a pseudoword
repetition task to be highly correlated with reading ability. These results,
while suggesting a link between phonological processing abilities, verbal
working memory and reading skills, do not shed light on the exact locus of
the problem. More specifically, poor pseudoword repetition ability may be a
consequence of a variety of factors such as deficits in phonetic perception,
phonological encoding, storage capacity, lexical access, or even articula-
tion (Elbro, 1996). In fact, some researches have reported a link between
articulatory speed and reading ability (Ackerman, Dykman & Gardner, 1990).

Articulation rate and reading ability

As mentioned earlier, poor readers’ inferior nonword repetition ability may

be attributed to a coarse-grained encoding of phonetic detail in working
memory (Snowling & Hulme, 1994). As such, these representations may be
lacking in articulatory specifications. Like the phonological representations
of very young children (Fowler, 1991), poor readers may then store words as
a complex of loosely organized gestures. Consequently, they lack full infor-
mation about the phonetic properties of the sound. Thus, when faced with a
printed word, poor readers must struggle to recover spoken segments from
the orthographic form, as they have only their incomplete representations to
guide them. This frequently takes the form of slow and reluctant sounding
out of a word, accompanied by labored articulatory routines, while simul-
taneously engaging in a lexical look-up to find a match. The fluent reader,
by contrast, can draw on phonological awareness skills to access an intact
representation, well coded in its articulatory detail, to sound out the word.
 PHONOLOGICAL BASIS IN READING DISABILITY 25

This then would account for the difference in articulation rate between good
and poor readers.
Support for an articulatory basis in phonological coding comes from a
functional imaging study (Shaywitz, Shaywitz, Pugh, Fulbright, Constable,
Mencl et al., 1998). These authors found relatively greater activation in
the inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area) which is associated with speech
production, in poor readers compared to good readers on silent reading tasks
that systematically varied the demands on phonological mapping of print.
Conversely, good readers showed greater activation on the same tasks, in
posterior brain regions like the superior temporal gyrus (Wernicke’s area)
which is associated with auditory receptive processing. The relative over-
activation of Broca’s area for poor readers compared to good readers suggests
that poor readers have to work harder to uncover the articulatory basis of
words, i.e. the gestures that underlie the phonological structure of words,
due to their poor phonological coding of the same. This is evident in their
slow and effortful sounding out of printed words. In the fluent reader,
this skill has become relatively automated due to efficient phonological
processing. Perhaps, then, the greater articulatory involvement in phono-
logical processing by poor readers would account for the increased activity in
anterior brain regions for this group (Pugh, Mencl, Jenner, Katz, Frost, Lee et
al., 2000).
In conclusion, a child who is phonologically aware is better prepared to
learn to read. Whereas there appears to be a general consensus about the
importance of phonological decoding in reading acquisition, its role in skilled
reading remains a matter of debate for proponents of a dual-route theory
(Coltheart, 1980).

Role of phonology in reading comprehension deficits

Dual-route theorists (Coltheart, 1980; Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins & Haller,

1993; Coltheart & Rastle, 1994) argue for two distinct and independent
modes of processing words: a faster visual-semantic route which relies on the
visual-orthographic properties of words, and a slower phonological analysis
route (for a review of the evidence, see Frost, 1998). A major claim of
these models is the superiority of the visual-semantic route over that of
phonological analysis in that the former is faster thereby allowing for more
efficient comprehension. Whereas this may appear to be true for the skilled
adult reader in the context of familiar words, the development of word
recognition must depend on efficient phonologic analysis and grapheme-to-
phoneme mapping. Thus, for the beginning reader, discovering the meaning
of a word must necessarily be mediated by phonology. However, the speed
with which an adult skilled reader accesses meaning of a printed word
26 MARIA MODY

may not be a matter of bypassing the phonological route, but rather of

speeding it up thereby engaging fewer resources for this purpose. This frees
up valuable resources for comprehension (Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975). A
similar explanation accounts for differences in speech perception abilities
between good and poor readers (Brady et al., 1983). According to Brady
and colleagues, poor readers’ inferior phonological coding skills necessitate
an increased use of resources for perception, leaving fewer resources avail-
able to store a percept from which one draws meaning. Consequently, such
children frequently have comprehension difficulties as well. Support for the
notion that reading comprehension is largely driven by bottom-up skills as
in phonological decoding comes from a study comparing reading measures
from a sample of 361 children aged 7.5 to 9.5 years including many with
reading disabilities (Shankweiler, Lundquist, Katz, Stuebing, Fletcher, Brady
et al., 1999). The authors found high correlations between word reading and
nonword reading and between each of these abilities and reading compre-
hension. This lead them to conclude that skill in word identification is
inseparable from phonologically analytic decoding and that differences in
reading comprehension are closely associated with differences in decoding
skill.
Additional support for phonological decoding in reading comprehension
comes from some recent studies (Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Van Orden, 1987; Van
Orden, Pennington & Stone, 1990). Using a lexical decision task, Lukatela &
Turvey (1994) showed that the latency to name “frog” was shortened by the
prior presentation of “TODE.” That the phonology of this pseudohomophone-
nonword letter string activated its semantic meaning is consistent with
the phonological coherence hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, “the
various processes leading to a pronunciation of a letter string, or a decision
about its lexical status, or a judgment about its semantic category, rely on
the initial achievement of a coherent phonological code” (Lukatela, Carello,
Savic, Urosevic & Turvey, 1998). Evidently, then, access to the phonologic
form of a printed word comes first, occurring very quickly, within about 15 ms
from seeing the word. In fact, our human “spellchecker” which detects errors
in visuo-orthographic form of a misspelt word, e.g. a homophone-substitute
error, is activated only later (Liberman, 1999). Given these findings, what
makes the dual-route theory unsatisfactory is its proposal of two different
and incompatible standards for the beginning and the skilled reader, respec-
tively (Ehri, 1992; Shankweiler, 1999). Increasingly, then, evidence appears
to implicate phonology as a source of poor readers’ difficulties.
 PHONOLOGICAL BASIS IN READING DISABILITY 27

Speech perception deficits in poor readers: Auditory or phonologic?

As mentioned earlier, poor readers’ difficulties with phonological processing

are also evident in their performance on phoneme identification and discrimi-
nation, nonword repetition and perception of speech in noise. Several studies
also show poor readers to be slower and less accurate on tests of rapid naming
than normal controls (Katz, 1986; Snowling, Wagtendonk & Stafford, 1988;
Wolf & Obregon, 1992). Common to all these tasks is the need to have
available, in working memory, fully specified phonological representations.
However, poor readers’ difficulty with phonological coding results in under-
specified representations that interfere with their phonological processing. A
growing body of evidence points to the resulting deficit in speech perception
as a source of subtle, but ramifying deficits in reading-impaired children and
adults (Brady, Shankweiler & Mann, 1983; Godfrey, Syrdal-Lasky, Millay
& Knox, 1981; Reed, 1989; Steffens, Eilers, Gross-Glenn & Jallad, 1992;
Werker & Tees, 1987).
The nature and origin of these perceptual deficits in poor readers has been
a matter of debate for several years. According to proponents of a phono-
logic hypothesis, these deficits are seen as specific and closely related to
a deficit in verbal working memory, which is also often observed in poor
readers (Adlard & Hazan, 1998; Bradley & Bryant, 1991; Brady et al., 1983;
Shankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler & Fischer, 1979). Thus, despite their
normal auditory capacities, poor readers have difficulty extracting phonemes
from the ongoing stream of speech due to their poorly coded phonological
representations of these sounds. Such individuals fail to develop an awareness
of the segmentability of speech, which makes the mapping of a printed word
to its spoken form, as is required in reading, a challenge for the poor reader.
An alternative account acknowledges the difficulty as phonological but
sees it as stemming from a general auditory deficit in “temporal processing”
(Tallal, 1980). According to proponents of this view, reading-disabled
children cannot easily process brief and/or rapidly changing acoustic events,
whether speech or nonspeech. They, therefore, have difficulty in judging
the temporal order not only of brief, rapidly presented nonspeech tones,
but also stop-consonant-vowel syllables, contrasting in their initial formant
transitions. These formant transitions are hypothesized to pose a problem as
they incorporate rapidly changing acoustic events occurring in tens of milli-
seconds. The language problems of developmental dysphasics and aphasic
adults have similarly been attributed to such a deficit in rapid auditory
“temporal processing” (Tallal, Miller, Bedi, Byma, Wang, Nagarajan et al.,
1996; Tallal & Newcombe, 1978; Tallal & Piercy, 1973, 1974, 1975).
Setting aside the fact that the concept of “temporal processing” as used
by Tallal confuses rapid perception with temporal perception (see Studdert-
28 MARIA MODY

Kennedy & Mody, 1995, for a complete review of this issue), the studies
by Tallal and colleagues have come under serious criticism (for review,
see Brady, Scarborough & Shankweiler, 1996) due to the lack of proper
controls and failure to find support for their claims by independent researchers
(Aram & Ekelman, 1988; Best & Avery, 1999; Bishop, Carlyon, Deeks &
Bishop, 1999; Blumstein, Tartter, Nigro & Stattlander, 1984; Nicolson &
Fawcett, 1994; Nittrouer, 1999; Pallay, 1980; Riedel & Studdert-Kennedy,
1985; Watson & Miller, 1993). A recent study aimed at more directly testing
the primary auditory deficit account also failed to find any support for this
hypothesis. Mody, Studdert-Kennedy and Brady (1997) tested two groups
of good and poor readers using both synthetic speech stimuli (/ba/-/da/) and
nonspeech sine wave stimuli whose second and third formant trajectories
followed the paths distinguishing /ba/ from /da/. Whereas the poor readers
were significantly worse on speech discrimination compared to the good
readers, the authors found no significant difference between the groups for
the nonspeech stimuli on the same task.
Why then do some dyslexics who perform poorly on speech percep-
tion also perform poorly on nonspeech tests involving tone discrimination
and/or identification? Is this linked with their reading problems? Results
from a selective choice reaction time task to tones and a lexical decision
task led Nicolson and Fawcett (1994) to conclude that these are independent
deficits, viz. “. . . a phonological deficit in lexical access speed, together with
a nonphonological deficit in stimulus classification speed” (p. 46). Thus,
poor readers’ difficulties with tones are unrelated to their difficulties with
reading. In fact, this co-occurrence of phonological impairments and other
cognitive problems are in keeping with real world findings of multiple defi-
cits in reading-disabled children. The important point to note is that whereas
such co-occurring deficits are more variable in occurrence as shown by the
repeated finding that some poor readers fall within the normal range on a tone
temporal order judgment task (e.g. Bedi, 1994; Reed, 1989; Tallal, 1980),
phonological deficits, by contrast, are present in virtually every poor reader
(Shankweiler, Crain, Katz, Fowler, Liberman, Brady et al., 1995).

fMRI evidence for dyslexia as a phonologically-based disorder

The case for a primary role of phonological processing in word recognition

has gained increasing support from recent studies in brain imaging. Func-
tional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain has made it possible
to identify cortical regions associated with various component processes
involved in complex cognitive tasks. In one such study with normal right-
handed adults, Fulbright, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, Pugh, Skudlarski, Constable
et al. (1997) found the inferior frontal gyrus to be significantly activated on
 PHONOLOGICAL BASIS IN READING DISABILITY 29

a task of phonological processing, whereas the superior and middle temporal

gyri, although active during phonological processing, were most active during
lexical-semantic processing. In a follow-up study with dyslexics and normal
readers, Shaywitz and her colleagues found significant differences in these
sites between the groups, on the tasks involving phonological analysis (Shay-
witz et al., 1998). More specifically, poor readers showed greater activation
of frontal sites (i.e., Broca’s area) than the good readers, whereas posterior
sites were more active in good readers than the poor readers. As mentioned
earlier, this difference between the groups in the relative activation of Broca’s
area was taken as evidence of poor readers’ struggle with phonological
analysis in word recognition. In fact, the increase in inferior frontal gyrus
activation in poor readers compared to good readers corresponded to the
increase in phonologic demands of the tasks. However, the reduced activation
in posterior brain regions in poor readers, compared to good readers, could
not be accounted for by the same explanation. That is, the posterior regions
did not show any task-related increases in activation as a function of the
relative degree of phonologic demands of the tasks. Instead, “this differential
activation by the two groups in posterior cortical areas (like Wernicke’s area,
the angular gyrus, the extrastriate cortex and the striate cortex) that previous
investigators have assumed to be adapted for reading, plausibly reflects a
functional disruption in a system critical for carrying out such operations”
(Shaywitz et al., 1998). The authors conclude that this difference in the
relative activation of anterior vs. posterior brain regions serves to validate
the phonologic basis of the difference between good and poor readers and
may provide a neural signature for phonological difficulties characterizing
dyslexia.
Functional imaging may, thus, provide us with a sensitive diagnostic tool
for dyslexia while helping to characterize the problem.

What makes phonological awareness difficult to achieve?

In the previous section, we outlined some of the major deficits in reading

disability, highlighting the importance of phonological processing skills. We
know that reading, unlike speaking, is not automatic. In order to learn to
read, one must be aware that words possess an internal phonologic structure,
that orthographic symbols may be used to represent this sound structure and
that the orthographic form of a word represents the phonologic structure of
its spoken form. It is clear from the results of the numerous studies cited
that poor readers lack such phonological awareness. The question is why
is phonological awareness difficult to achieve for some children and adults?
30 MARIA MODY

Perhaps a look at some of the characteristics of the speech signal may help
answer this question.
Speech, as we know, is not a string of discrete events bound together
by the acoustic glue of formant transitions. It is a highly complex signal
made up of coarticulated segments, with acoustic information for each
segment (consonant or vowel) overlapping extensively with information
from neighboring segments (Joos, 1948; Liberman, 1970; Liberman, Cooper,
Shankweiler & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967). This describes not just the lack
of invariance (there is no one-to-one correspondence between the acoustic
signal and a speech sound) but also the characteristic redundancy in the
speech signal (i.e., a coarticulated signal contains information about both the
consonant and the vowel). So, for example, in producing the word “land,”
the velum, which moves relatively slowly, starts lowering early on in the
utterance, in anticipation of the [n] to come, thereby giving the vowel a nasal
quality. For listeners, the nasalization of the vowel may indicate the iden-
tity of the following consonant. Other phonetic effects of coarticulation may,
however, be more subtle, requiring the ear of a phonologically aware listener
to tease them out. An example of this would be the production of “phone
booth” as [fombuθ]. Here the [n] of [fon] assimilates the bilabial feature
of [b] from [buθ] while simultaneously maintaining its voicing (+ voiced)
and manner (nasal) features. The result is a phonetic change that crosses a
phonemic boundary resulting in a new phoneme [m] in lieu of the original
[n]. These examples may represent slightly oversimplified illustrations of
what happens in normal speech, but the implications are clear. The developing
child is faced with the task of having to discover the phonemic units of speech
from a complex interwoven phonologic structure. In order to achieve full
phonemic awareness the child must learn to differentiate between the under-
lying gestures, as well as master their temporal relationships to each other
in the realization of speech sound sequences (Studdert-Kennedy & Goodell,
1994).
An added challenge for the language-acquiring infant, is the fact that some
sounds are harder to perceive than others. This is because speech sounds
differ on an intelligibility scale some being more vulnerable to mispercep-
tion than others, especially under degraded listening conditions (Miller &
Nicely, 1955). In keeping with this, a recent study found children with early
histories of otitis media to have significantly greater difficulty discriminating
/sa/ from / a/ than /ba/ from /da/ compared to their otitis-free peers (Mody,
Schwartz, Gravel & Ruben, 1999). Despite both pairs of sounds differing only
on a single feature (viz., place of articulation), performance on /sa/-/ a/ was
more affected. The authors attribute this to /sa/-/ a/ being a voiceless pair
of high frequency sounds, containing less energy acoustic energy compared
 PHONOLOGICAL BASIS IN READING DISABILITY 31

to voiced /ba/ and /da/. Consequently, /sa/-/ a/ may have been more vulner-
able to the fluctuating hearing loss associated with otitis media. The lack
of a consistent speech signal during the critical years of language learning
may have resulted in incomplete coding of certain speech sounds by these
children. Their underspecified phonological representations prevented them
from differentiating between the phonetically similar (and confusing) but
phonologically contrastive stimulus pairs.
The poor readers in Mody et al. (1997) found /ba/-/da/ difficult to discrim-
inate but had no problem with the non speech sine wave analogs that followed
the acoustic trajectories of F2 and F3 that differentiate /ba/ from /da/. Thus,
the poor readers’ problems with the speech syllables could not be explained in
auditory-acoustic terms. Like poor readers in numerous other studies (Brady,
Mann & Schmidt, 1987; Hall, Wilson, Humphreys, Tinzmann & Bowyer,
1983; Hurford & Sanders, 1990), these children had difficulty identifying and
differentiating between poorly coded phonological representations (see also
Elbro, 1996, for “distinctness” hypothesis). Thus, the improvement in speech
perception reported for poor readers and language impaired children (Tallal
et al., 1996) under conditions of slowed down speech using extended formant
transitions may be interpreted differently in the light of these findings. Rather
than espousing a deficit in “rapid temporal processing” as do Tallal and
colleagues, one may attribute the improvement to the increased time being
made available to a disabled language system to form a phonetic representa-
tion or disambiguate poorly coded ones. Thus poor readers are vulnerable
on all tasks of phonological processing which tap into their phonological
representations, as these show up their deficits in phonological coding.

Phonological awareness training and reading remediation: A gestural

approach

In summary then, evidence suggests that poor readers’ difficulties stem from
“weak” phonological coding as indicated by their subtle deficits in speech
perception. That some of these poor readers may also have difficulty on a
nonspeech tone judgment task seems to be purely correlational and inde-
pendent of their deficits in reading (Mody et al., 1997; Nicholson & Fawcett,
1994; Studdert-Kennedy & Mody, 1995; Watson & Miller, 1993).
We also know that the perception of an acoustic cue depends on whether
or not it cues a phonetic percept (Bentin & Mann, 1990; Best, Morrongiello &
Robson, 1981; Grunke & Pisoni, 1982; Vorperian, Ochs & Grantham, 1995;
Whalen & Liberman, 1987). So, for example, one’s crossover boundary for
distinguishing a voiced from a voiceless sound along a VOT continuum (e.g.
/ba/-/pa/) differs from one’s crossover point for distinguishing “a short sound”
32 MARIA MODY

from “a long sound” along an analogous duration continuum presented as

nonspeech. Thus, what perception of the phonological segmental structure
of speech requires, beyond normal auditory capacities, is sensitivity to the
coarticulatory patterns that “. . . mark serial position by variations in acoustic
shape, making the transitions for stop consonants in /bi/ and /ib/ for example,
into mirror images, causing them to carry information simultaneously about
consonant, vowel, and their order” (Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Brady,
Fowler, Mody & Shankweiler, 1995; also refer to Gottfried & Strange, 1980;
Liberman, 1970; Rakerd & Vebrugge, 1987; Strange, 1989).
Perhaps, then, developing phonological awareness entails discovering
such coarticulatory markings as a child learns to listen and speak. Perhaps
infants’ preference for the sound patterns of their language marks the begin-
ning of their discovery. Much early work found that young infants possess
identification and discrimination abilities that are very similar to those of
adults (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk & Vigorito, 1971; for review, also see
Aslin, Pisoni & Jusczyk, 1981). But this is probably the universal starting
point for every child. Later cross-linguistic studies of speech perception have
revealed that exposure to a language alters an infant’s perceptual abilities
so as to reflect the phonological, phonotactic and prosodic characteristics of
that language (Boysson-Bardies, 1993; Boysson-Bardies & Vihman, 1991;
Jusczyk, Friederici, Wessels, Svenkerud & Jusczyk, 1993; Werker & Lalonde,
1988). This phonological sensitivity is also evident in speech production
abilities: infants as young as six months of age reveal intonation patterns
in their babbling that resemble those of their ambient language (Boysson-
Bardies, Halle, Sagart & Durand, 1989). Similarly, five-month old infants
were found to produce specific speech sounds after a short-term exposure
to them in a laboratory setting (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1996). Thus, language
input provides “a rich and detailed source of information that instigates,
before word learning, a process of species specific mapping of information
by the brain, a process that alters the infant’s perceptual and perceptual-
motor system to conform to a specific language” (Kuhl, Andruski, Chistovich,
Chistovich, Kozhevnikova, Ryskina et al., 1997).
These early mappings may yield only coarse-grained representations
of speech, lacking much fine detail. As Fowler (1991) suggests, a very
young child probably stores words as loosely organized articulatory gestures.
Through systematic trial and error along with maturing gestural control,
the child learns to refine the mappings between the acoustic patterns and
speech gestures. Evidence from children’s systematic errors suggests in fact
that children’s first words may represent preferred holistic patterns that
are then gradually differentiated into their gestural and segmental compo-
 PHONOLOGICAL BASIS IN READING DISABILITY 33

nents (Goodell & Studdert-Kennedy, 1993; Nittrouer, Studdert-Kennedy &

McGowan, 1989).
Evidence for a gestural basis to phonological processing comes from
recent work by Brady and colleagues who showed that phonological aware-
ness training with an articulatory emphasis yielded improvements on a
speech production task (Brady, Fowler, Stone & Winbury, 1994). Simi-
larly, Wise and Olson (1995) found that articulatory phonological awareness
training might particularly help children at risk for reading problems. Given
that dyslexic children are deficient in articulatory awareness (Montgomery,
1981), these results suggest that poor readers’ phonological representations
may be underspecified in their articulatory precision which makes for poor
mapping between the speech gestures and phonemic percepts. One possible
consequence would be a potential for increased errors due to confusions
among similar gestures composing different speech sounds. This would
account for the improved performance of reading-disabled subjects who
received articulatory-based phonological awareness training (Wise & Olson,
1995).
In keeping with a gestural account, the development of speech perception
abilities would then involve the discovery of the coarticulatory markings in
the speech signal through a process of gradual differentiation and integra-
tion of speech gestures. With phonological development, the child refines his
grouping and sequencing of speech gestures, allowing him to move from
a more coarse-grained syllabic level to a finer-grained phonemic level of
speech processing. It appears then that poor readers must have discovered
the “coarticulatory markings” that specify speech gestures, since for the most
part they have learned to talk normally. Despite difficulties with rapid articu-
lation evident only under conditions of experimental stress (e.g. use of tongue
twisters as stimuli in a word repetition task), these children show every sign of
having differentiated the speech signal into its component gestures correctly
in normal speech. What appears to be their problem, however, is the integra-
tion of recurrent gestural patterns (e.g. lip closure + glottal approximation
= /b/; or, tongue tip approximation to the alveolar ridge + glottal opening
+ tongue grooving = /s/) into segmental control structures (Fowler, 1991;
Studdert-Kennedy & Goodell, 1994). It is this integration of gestures into
independent phonemic control structures (Menn, 1983) that is thought to
underlie the rapid acquisition of new words and spur the development of
multiword utterances. This would explain the relatively smaller vocabularies
of reading disabled children compared to their normally developing peers.
In summary, it is not the coarticulatory complexity that causes the diffi-
culty for the reading-impaired child, but the failure to integrate the recurrent
gestural patterns into segmental units. Insofar as these recurrent gestural
34 MARIA MODY

patterns constitute the identity of individual phonemes, which serve as the

foundation of alphabetic literacy, such a failure would result in unstable
grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, an important component in learning to read.
The key, then, to reading remediation evidently lies in early phonological
awareness training that incorporates the productive characteristics of speech.
This would translate into well-defined phonological representations, paving
the way for higher-level linguistic processing. In conclusion, the linking of the
perceptual and production characteristics of speech as a strategy to enhance
phonemic awareness holds considerable promise in reading intervention.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health
(NIDCD) to the author.

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Address for correspondence: Maria Mody, Massachusetts General Hospital, NMR Center
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Phone: +1-617-726-6913; Fax: +1-617-726-7422; E-mail: maria@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu