| Abstract | It has been frequently reported that reading acquisition is facilitated by, and perhaps depends on, the ability to segment words into smaller phonologic units (for reviews see Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Shankweiler & Liberman, 1989). Previous reports have also revealed that disabled readers have poor understanding of morphologic relations (Leong, 1989) and that reading performance in children is positively correlated with the ability to apply morphologic rules to nonsense base-words (Vogel, 1975, 1983). In addition, disabled readers have difficulty applying syntactic rules in a productive manner (Bentin, Deutsch, & Liberman, 1990; Deutsch & Bentin, in press; Fowler, 1988). Finally, recent developmental studies have shown that even in very young children, emergent literacy reflects the children’s sensitivity to all these linguistic domains (e.g., Levin & Korat, 1993). Hence, the literature provides ample evidence that reading disorders are, by and large, related to poor performance in several linguistic domains (Adams, 1991; Catts, 1989; Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1986). The linguistic handicap of disabled readers is evident primarily when they are required to use linguistic rules intentionally and demonstrate explicit knowledge about the internal structure of words or sentences, but it is not evident in their spontaneous speech. Consequently it has been suggested that reading disabilities are related to a deficiency in metalinguistic skills, which may be labeled “linguistic awareness” (Mattingly, 1984). |
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