Predicting dyslexia from kindergarten: The importance of distinctness of phonological representations of lexical items

Af Carsten Elbro, Ina Borstrøm & Dorthe Klint Petersen

This article presents results from a longitudinal study of children of dyslexic and of normally reading parents. The children were followed from the beginning of kindergarten (at the age of 6,1 year before reading instruction in Denmark) until beginning of the second grade. Children of dyslexic parents were found to have an increased risk of dyselxia (a 4.3 odds ratio) when dyslexia was defined as poor phonological recoding (poor reading of nonwords and pseudohomophones of real words). All language measures in kindergarten were statistically significant predictors of dyslexia. Logistic regression analyses with backwards stepwise selection indicated that three measures contributed independently to the predition of dyslexia: letter naming, phoneme identification, and distinctness of phonological representations. The measure of distinctness of phonological representations also contributed significantly to the prediction of poor phoneme awareness in Grade 2 - even when differences in early syllable and phoneme awareness, articulation, and productive and receptive vocabulary were accounted for. The results suggest that the quality of phonological representations in the mental lexicon is a determinant of the development of both segmental (e.g., phoneme) awareness and of the acquisition of phonological recoding skills in reading.

Elbro, C., Borstrøm, I. & Petersen, D. K. (1998). Predicting dyslexia from kindergarten. The importance of distinctness of phonological representations of lexical items. Reading Research Quarterly, 33 (1), 36-60.