The focus of this project is the relationship between reading ability and lexical phonology and how thatrelationship is changed for (1) disabled readers and (2) individuals whose dialect of English differs fromstandard English. The act of reading requires matching printed words and morphemes to their phonologicalcounterparts in the internal lexicon. The successful decoding of an unfamiliar letter string (through theapplication of knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences) requires linking the pronunciation generated bythe decoding process to the lexical representation of the word. In order to study the linking process, wecompare reading disabled and non-impaired young adults on a wide variety of measures designed toassess: speech perception/production and phonological learning. In addition, utilize a theory thatcharacterizes the phonological representation of words in gestural/articulatory terms and look for differencesbetween reading disabled and non-impaired individuals in the perception and integration of cross-modalspeech information. Our experimental design assesses each individual on reading ability measures, on alltests of access, perception, production, and acquisition of phonological representations. Combined withfunctional MRI scans for a subset of our participant sample, we collect a broad array of information related tophonological representations and reading. This permits a very comprehensive analysis of theinterrelationships of all factors. Finally, the project studies a group of African-American children, some ofwhom speak African-American Vernacular English in order to determine if (and how) the mismatch betweentheir lexical representations and the standard English writing system affect the acquisition of reading.
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