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