Phonological and surface profiles of reading difficulties among very low birth weight children : Converging evidence for the developmental lag hypothesis.

• The purpose of this study was to test the developmental lag hypothesis, which assumes that a surface pattern of reading difficulties should be attributed to a general developmental delay rather than to specific deficits in the acquisition of orthographic decoding skills. We compared a sample of very low birth weight children (less than 1,500 g), known to be at higher risk of a general developmental delay, with a group of same-age, normal readers. Following the same regression-based procedures seen in the work of Castles and Coltheart (1993); Manis, Seidenberg, Doi, McBride-Chang, and Petersen (1996); and Stanovich, Siegel, and Gottardo (1997), we found that only 1 very low birth weight child could be classified as phonologically dyslexic, whereas 12 out of 60 very low birth weight children were identified as surface dyslexic. This subgroup of children with surface dyslexia was impaired not only in all reading measures employed in this study, but also in several behavioral domains associated with a developmental lag.

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