| Abstract | To learn to read is to acquire a visual language skill that systematically maps onto extant spoken language skills. Learning to read places a complex burden on many emerging capacities, and in principle, reading disability could arise at any level from visual perception to general cognition. However, because reading is parasitic on spoken language, the possibility also exists that reading disability is derived from some subtle difficulty in the language domain. Research is reviewed on the association between early reading skills and spoken language skills, focusing on findings that show that many poor beginning readers possess subtle deficits in linguistic short-term memory skills that correlate with their problems in learning to read. It is suggested that ineffective phonetic representation might limit the development of syntactic knowledge and compromise sentence processing or that reading disability, ineffective phonetic representation, and comprehension deficiencies are all manifestations of a more general language impairment. |
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