Persistence of Dyslexics' Phonological Awareness Deficits

This study examined the phonological awareness skills of dyslexic children, adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia, and good readers at various age levels. Comparisons of the dyslexics to good readers of the same age or the same reading level indicated that dyslexics do not acquire appropriate levels of phoneme awareness, regardless of their age or reading levels, although they eventually acquire appropriate levels of onset-rime awareness. Even adults with fairly high levels of word recognition skill show phoneme awareness deficits. For normal readers reliable increases in phoneme awareness were associated with age and reading level, whereas for dyslexic subjects these associations were not reliable.