The Decoding Skills of School- aged Children with Poor Reading Skills

Background and Objects: The present study was designed to explore the decoding skills of school-aged poor readers. The study examined whether decoding skills differ between children who were poor readers and typically developing children across grades in: (a) word and non-word reading (b) grapheme-phoneme correspondent words and grapheme-phoneme non-correspondent words (c) word and non-word decoding in grapheme-phoneme correspondent words (d) word and non-word decoding in grapheme-phoneme non-correspondent words and (e) words that adhere to six phonological rules. Methods: The participants were 89 poor readers and 89 aged-matched typically developing children from grades 1 to 6. Results: The results showed that (1) poor readers performed significantly lower in all decoding tasks compared to typically developing children, (2) the decoding skills of the poor readers did differ between grades 3 to 4 and grades 5 to 6, while decoding skills of the typically developing children differed between grades 1 to 2 and grades 3 to 4, (3) both reading groups performed significantly better on the word than non-word decoding tasks, the grapheme-phoneme correspondent words than grapheme-phoneme non-correspondent words tasks, grapheme-phoneme correspondent words than grapheme-phoneme correspondent non-word tasks, and grapheme-phoneme non-correspondent words than grapheme-phoneme non-correspondent non-word tasks, and (4) the children showed similar developmental patterns on the acquisition of phonological rules, demonstrating that both groups acquired the rules of tensification and nasalization early in development, while they had not fully acquired palatalization or lateralization rules and illustrated high rates of errors. Discussion & Conclusion: Poor readers tend to acquire automaticity of word decoding during grades 5 to 6, while typically developing children acquire accurate and fluent word reading skills during grades 3 to 4. Poor readers experience difficulty with decoding of nonsense words and grapheme-phoneme non-correspondent words. Even though poor readers acquired phonological rules slower than typically developing children, the reading groups did not differ qualitatively in terms of developmental patterns of acquisition of phonological rules.