Speech perception and speech production as indicators of reading difficulty

In order to investigate the relation between reading accuracy and speech processing, 20 children, from grades 2 and 3 who were skilled in reading were compared with 20 less skilled readers on a speech perception and production task. The two groups of readers were indistinguishable in their production of the two-syllable words dippy, deepy, tippy, and teepy and in their perception of the stop consonants /d/ versus /t/. Less skilled readers were significantly less accurate than the skilled readers in a vowel identification task involving the lax and tense high vowels /I/ and /i/. The error pattern for vowel identification was similar across groups, with both groups making fewer errors when short and longer segments were alternated. The results imply that vowel phonemes are less securely represented in the perceptual system of less skilled readers than are consonant phonemes. In addition, the results raise the possibility that a selective perceptual impairment underlies at least some of the phonemic awareness problems that have been associated with poor reading.