Are nonword and other phonological deficits indicative of a failed reading process?

Phonological processing problems have been considered critical in explaining developmental reading disability. Reading disabled children were compared with two matched reading-level normal control groups on indicators of phonological processing. The reading disabled children had lower nonword reading performance than the phonics taught controls. However, performance was equivalent to that of the controls without phonics teaching. Therefore a nonword reading deficit was not in itself diagnostic of developmental reading disability. The reading disabled children and the non-phonics control group who exhibited lower nonword reading did not differ from the phonics taught control group in phoneme awareness, nor in magnitude of the word regularity effect. Nevertheless, within all groups those children with higher phonemic awareness skills showed larger word regularity effects and better nonword reading. Processes involving two sources of knowledge for phonological recoding are discussed as explanations of these and many previous results on phonological deficits and of the phonological effects of phonics instruction.