01 NRDC Dyslexia 1-88 update - Texthelp

Developmental dyslexia in adults: a research review 47
The reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability
Phonological awareness clearly influences the acquisition of alphabetic skills. Is it true, as we
might assume, that this influence travels in a single direction? Evidence suggests that the
relationship is interactive, in that early phonological skills are crucial in learning to read
(Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Rayner et al., 2001), while learning to read in an alphabetic system
enhances phonological awareness (Morais et al., 1987); and similarly, phonemic awareness
assists learning to spell (Caravolas et al., 2001), while learning to spell enhances phonemic
awareness (Ventura et al., 2001). The relationship between phonological awareness and
reading ability thus involves reciprocal causation (Korkman et al., 1999; Snowling et al.,
1996b; Tunmer & Chapman, 1996).
However, a pattern of interaction between reading ability and phonological awareness is not
inevitable. People may learn to read without fully grasping the fundamental structure of the
writing system (Byrne, 1998), in which case their reading ability could depend more on sightword
recognition and contextual clues than upon the decoding skills associated with
phonological awareness. Such readers will have no difficulty in reading either regular or
irregular words so long as these words are familiar, but they will have difficulty with
pseudowords and unfamiliar real words. While spelling can be learned implicitly through
exposure to print (Bryant, 2002), learning to read is usefully supplemented by explicit
instruction in spelling (Caravolas et al., 2001; Viise, 1996).
The identification of unfamiliar words by playing ‘psycholinguistic guessing games’ (Goodman,
1970) is seldom a viable alternative to decoding: context may help (Archer & Bryant, 2001) and
it may be especially useful to readers with low levels of literacy skill (Snowling, 1996), but it
depends on existing semantic and syntactic knowledge (Rego & Bryant, 1993) and accurate
guessing may require a high level of predictiveness in the word to be guessed at (Gough &
Wren, 1999). For less skilled readers, psycholinguistic guessing games are inadequate, both
because there is an extraordinary number of synonyms or near-synonyms in English and also
because successful prediction is possible only where the predicted word violates the basic
communicative convention of conveying non-redundant information. Natural language does
have a built-in level of redundancy (sufficient to infer what is said against a background of
some noise and what is written when text has been to an extent degraded), but this level is
almost always too low to predict individual words uniquely.
Although early research suggested that skilled readers recognise words without noticing the
letters that compose them (Huey, 1908), we now know that this is not so (Rayner, 1998;
Reichle et al., in press); if it were so, then proof-reading would be impassible—as readers
now see. Psycholinguistic guessing games are at best an emergency strategy; they are not a
substitute for learning about the alphabetic principle (Chapman et al., 2001; Liberman &
Liberman, 1992). Moreover, reliance on conscious predictions from context in word reading
may reduce available working memory capacity and thus impair comprehension (Bruck,
1998). The routine use of context as a strategy to compensate for poor decoding skills may
well lead to future reading difficulties (Liberman & Liberman, 1992; Nicholson et al., 1991).
Learning to read and write in an alphabetic system helps and is helped by, the development
of phonemic awareness.