Haskins Publications

Number	263
Year	1978
Drawer	5
Entry Date	06/03/1999
Authors	Fischer, F. W., Liberman, I. Y., & Shankweiler, D.
Contact
Publication	Cortex, 14, 496-510
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0263.pdf
Abstract	The pattern of errors in reading isolated words was studied in 2 groups of children with respect to reversals of letter sequence and letter orientation. The "Institute"" group consisted of 13 children 8-10 yrs old who had been diagnosed "dyslexic"" according to medical and psychoeducational criteria. The "School"" group included all the children in a 2nd-grade elementary school class who fell into the lowest third on a standard test of reading achievement. Although the Institute Subjects were somewhat poorer in word recognition than the School Subjects selected purely on psychometric grounds, the groups did not differ significantly in the incidence of reversal errors, which reversals represented a small proportion of the total number of reading errors. The performance of the 2 groups differed in relation to directional bias in letter reversals and in the presence or absence of a significant correlation between letter-reversing and word-reversing tendencies. The bulk of reading errors made by both groups reflected their common difficulties with linguistic characteristics of words rather than with their properties as visual patterns.
Notes