Isabelle Y. Liberman’s research while affiliated with University of Connecticut and other places

Hall, Ewing, Tinzmann, and Wilson (1981) presented findings that are claimed to disconfirm the hypothesis that young children who are poor readers make less effective use of phonetic coding in short-term memory than do those who are good readers. The counterevidence they present does not stand up to scrutiny.

Evidence from a number of investigations suggests a considerable overlap between reading disability (RD) and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We investigate the relationship between RD and ADHD in a cohort of 186 children 7.5–9.5 years of age, recruited explicitly to address classification and definitional issues in these disorders. Using multivariate methods, we examine the hypothesis that RD and ADHD represent separate diagnostic entities that frequently co-occur in the same individual. The results suggest that RD is characterized by deficits within the language system, in particular a subcomponent within that system, phonological processing; in contrast, such linguistic deficits are not characteristic of ADHD unless ADHD is associated with RD. When children with both RD and ADHD are examined, both the linguistic deficits associated with RD and the behavioral characteristics associated with ADHD are apparent, but these deficits are not synergistic. We conclude that RD and ADHD represent separate disorders that frequently co-occur.

ABSTRACT Adult illiterate and semiliterate speakers of Serbo-Croatian were assessed on reading, writing, phonological, and control tasks. Most subjects had acquired measurable literacy skills despite a documented lack of formal instruction. The individual differences in these skills were highly specific. They were related to measures of phoneme segmentation and alphabet knowledge, but only weakly related to general cognitive abilities. Three groups, categorized with respect to the subjects' ability to identify the letters of their Cyrillic alphabet, differed on phoneme deletion and phoneme-counting tasks, but not on syllable-counting, picture vocabulary, or tone-counting tasks. Alphabet knowledge was more tightly coupled with phoneme awareness than has been found in speakers of English. Cross-language similarities and differences are discussed, highlighting the role that phonological transparency of the orthography may play in the acquisition of literacy.

Growth of word reading skills was examined in first and second year Italian school children by analysis of the pattern of reading errors. The study was designed to investigate the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography. The selection of reading material was tailored to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. The results showed that, in Italian as in English, spatially-related errors (such as confusingb andd) constituted a minor proportion of the total errors. Errors on vowel and consonant letters that are not spatially confusable accounted for the greater proportion of the total. Moreover, the co-occurrence of spatial and phonological confusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurred without the other. Vowel position in the syllable had no systematic effect on errors. In beginning readers of Italian, consonant errors outnumbered vowel errors by a wide margin; the reverse pattern was found in previous studies on English-speaking children at the same level of schooling. It is proposed that differences between Italian and English in the phonological structure of the lexicon and in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences account in large part for the differences in quantity and distribution of the errors.

Examined the validity of distinguishing children with reading disabilities according to discrepancy and low-achievement definitions by obtaining 4 assessments of expected reading achievement and 2 assessments of actual reading achievement for 199 children (aged 7.5–9.5 yrs). These assessments were used to subdivide the sample into discrepancy and low-achievement definitional groups who were compared on 9 cognitive variables related to reading proficiency. Results did not support the validity of discrepancy vs low achievement definitions. Although differences between Ss with impaired reading and Ss without impaired reading were large, differences between Ss with impaired reading who met IQ-based discrepancy definitions and those who met low reading achievement definitions were small or not significant. Measures of phonological awareness were robust indicators of differences between Ss with impaired reading and Ss without impaired reading regardless of how reading disability was defined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

The effect of syntactic context on auditory word identification and on the ability to detect and correct syntactic errors in speech was examined in severely reading disabled children and in good and poor readers selected from the normal distribution of fourth graders. The poor readers were handicapped when correct reading required analysis of the sentence context. However, their phonological decoding ability was intact. Identification of words was less affected by syntactic context in the severely disabled readers than in either the good or poor readers. Moreover, the disabled readers were inferior to good readers in judging the syntactical integrity of spoken sentences and in their ability to correct the syntactically aberrant sentences. Poor readers were similar to good readers in the identification and judgement tasks, but inferior in the correction task. The results suggest that the severely disabled readers were inferior to both good and poor readers in syntactic awareness, and in ability to use syntactic rules, while poor readers were equal to good readers in syntactic awareness but were relatively impaired in using syntactic knowledge productively.

Promoters of Whole Language hew to the belief that learning to read and write can be as natural and effortless as learning to perceive and produce speech. From this it follows that there is no special key to reading and writing, no explicit principle to be taught that, once learned, makes the written language transparent to a child who can speak. Lacking such a principle, Whole Language falls back on a method that encourages children to get from print just enough information to provide a basis for guessing at the gist. A very different method, called Code Emphasis, presupposes that learning the spoken language is, indeed, perfectly natural and seemingly effortless, but only because speech is managed, as reading and writing are not, by a biological specialization that automatically spells or parses all the words the child commands. Hence, a child normally learns to use words without ever becoming explicitly aware that each one is formed by the consonants and vowels that an alphabet represents. Yet it is exactly this awareness that must be taught if the child is to grasp the alphabetic principle and so understand how the artifacts of an alphabet transcribe the natural units of language. There is evidene that preliterate children do not, in fact, have much of this awareness; that the amount they do have predicts their reading achievement; that the awareness can be taught; and that the relative difficulty of learning it that some childen have may be a reflection of a weakness in the phonological component of their natural capacity for language.

This investigation explores Latin study as a possible route to superior spelling proficiency. The spelling ability of two groups of academically able eleventh graders — students of Latin and students of other second languages — is compared. It was found that the Latin students were superior in general spelling ability and were particularly proficient at spelling words of Latin origin. In addition, analysis of the spelling of derivatives for which knowledge of Latin could either facilitate or mislead the speller shows that Latin students were differentially affected by the two types of derivatives. In contrast, students of other second languages, lacking the knowledge of Latinate derivatives, simply made more errors on both types of words. Thus, it appears that Latin study does have an effect on spelling performance. Whether it can fully account for the superior spelling proficiency of the Latin students, however, remains a question to be answered by a prospective longitudinal investigation. Implications for instruction drawn from the present study are discussed.

The research of my colleagues and me has, for many years, been guided by the assumption that most problems in learning to read and write stem from deficits in the language faculty, not from deficiencies of a more generally cognitive or perceptual sort. A paper by Alvin Liberman (1988) says in detail how and why we were initially led to that assumption. My aim here is rather to describe the assumption itself, offer data in support, and finally to develop the implications for the teacher and clinician.