Persistence of phonological awareness deficits in older children with dyslexia

Three groups of children with dyslexia, with mean age 8, 13 and 17 years, together with three groups of normally achieving children matched for age and IQ with the dyslexic groups, undertook tests of sound categorization and phoneme deletion. The design allowed comparison not only across chronological age but also across reading age. The children with dyslexia performed significantly worse even than their reading age controls on both tasks. Indeed, overall performance of the 17 year old children with dyslexia was closest, but inferior, to that of the 8 year old controls. Since the sound categorization task was designed to minimize working memory load, the results extend previous findings on the phonological awareness deficits in dyslexia by dissociating the deficit from memory load and by showing that it persists at least into late adolescence.