Miscue analysis in school-age children

It has been suggested that children who have trouble learning to read may use less effective decoding strategies than children who learn to read typically. The present investigation examined reading miscues (errors) made by typically developing children and children who demonstrated below-average language and reading abilities to answer the following questions: (a) Do typically developing children and children with below-average language and reading skills evidence similar types of miscues while reading aloud? (b) Do typically developing children make more grapho-phonernically similar errors (in which the error resembles the text word in two or more phonemes) and more nonsense-word errors than children with below-average language and reading ability and, (c) What is the relationship between the nature of reading miscues and comprehension performance? Results suggested that typically developing children made more miscues that preserved the meaning of the text than children with below-average language and reading abilities. Groups were equally likely to make errors that were grapho-phonernically similar and/or nonsense words. Comprehension performance for both groups was best predicted by omission of content words and phonologically similar real-word errors that maintained the meaning of the text. Analysis of oral-reading errors may be useful in prescribing specific intervention to improve automaticity and efficiency in reading for children with language-learning disorders.