PART III

Cross-linguistic Aspects of Literacy

Development and Dyslexia
 Phonology, Reading Development, and
Dyslexia: A Cross-linguistic Perspective
Usha Goswami

Institute of Chid Health, University College London

London, England

In this paper, I present a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of

the role of phonological awareness in reading development and devel-
opmental dyslexia across languages. My assumption is that the pri-
mary deficit in developmental dyslexia in all languages lies in
representing speech sounds: a deficit in "phonological representation."
I will argue that this deficit manifests in somewhat different ways, de-
pending on orthography. I will also argue that the phonological deficit
in dyslexia is initially at the syllable and onset-rime levels of phono-
logical awareness, with the development of "phonemic" awareness
being a consequence rather than a precursor of reading. Finally, I will
suggest that some of the processes underpinning language acquisition
are disrupted in dyslexia, in particular, the detection of rhythm in
speech.

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS A N D LEARNING TO

READ ACROSS LANGUAGES

One of the most robust findings to emerge from research in cog-

nitive d e v e l o p m e n t a l psychology across languages is that there
is a causal connection b e t w e e n a child's phonological awareness
a n d his or her reading a n d spelling d e v e l o p m e n t (Goswami &
Bryant, 1990). This has been d o c u m e n t e d in n u m e r o u s studies,
Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 52, 2002
Copyright ©2002by The International Dyslexia Association@
ISSN 0736-9387
141
142 CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

many of which have also shown that there is an apparently

language-universal sequence in the development of phonologi-
cal awareness (e.g., Cisero & Royer, 1995; Durgunoglu & Oney,
1999; Goswami & East, 2000). Children first seem to develop an
awareness of syllables, followed by an awareness of the intra-
syllabic units of onset and rime (the onset corresponds to the
initial consonant phonemes in any syllable and the rime corre-
sponds to the vowel and any following phonemes as in "s-ee,"
"s-eat, .... sw-eet," "str-eet." The linguistic term "rime" is used
because multisyllabic words have more than one rime. Whereas
"mountain" and "fountain" rhyme, each word has two rimes, "-
ount" and "-ain." "Mountain" and "counting" do not rhyme,
even though they share the initial rime "-ount"). Awareness of
phonemes, the abstract units in the speech stream represented
by letters, seems to develop as a consequence of learning to
read and write (or as a consequence of direct phonemic train-
ing). If the spoken lexicon of phonological forms (the "phono-
logical representations" of words in the child's vocabulary) is
not organized in terms of phonemes prior to literacy, then read-
ing acquisition cannot be conceptualized as a process of seg-
menting the words in one's vocabulary into phonemes and
matching letters to these phonemes. Rather, it seems that learn-
ing about letters causes a phoneme-based reorganization of the
mental lexicon (see Goswami, 2002). This process of learning
about phonemes may be either facilitated or inhibited by the
nature of the orthography that the child is learning to read.
There is evidence from a number of languages that children's
ability to recognize syllables, onsets, and rimes precedes learning a
particular spelling system. Syllable awareness is usually present
by about age three, and onset-rime awareness by about age four
to five. For example, Bradley and Bryant (1983) developed the
oddity task to measure the development of onset and rime aware-
ness. In this task, children are given a set of words and asked to
spot the "odd word out" that differs in terms of either its initial
sound ("bus," "bun," "rug"), its medial sound ("pin," "bun,"
"gun") or its final sound ("doll," "hop," "top"). The initial sound
task is usually described as an onset task, and the medial and
final sound tasks as rime tasks (Bryant, 2002; Kirtley, Bryant,
Maclean, & Bradley, 1989). English four- and five-year-olds were
very proficient at the oddity task, performing at above-chance
levels in all versions, although rime awareness was easier than
onset awareness. Performance with the onset version of the task
was around 56% correct whereas performance with the rime ver-
sion of the task was around 71% correct. Wimmer, Landerl, and
 A CROss-LINGUfSTZCPERSPECTWE 143

Schneider (1994) showed a very similar developmental pattern

for German. Their German version of the oddity task was given
to prereaders aged, on average, six years. Wimmer et al. also
found that performance was above chance on both versions of
the task, and that the onset task was more difficult than the rime
task for these children (44% correct versus 73% correct, respec-
tively). Finally, Siok and Fletcher (2001) developed an oddity task
for Chinese children in first grade. The Chinese children were
54% correct in the rime version of the task compared to 44% cor-
rect for the onset version. Chinese prereaders (mean age three
years 11 months) were given the oddity rime task only by Ho and
Bryant (1997). The average score was 68% correct. In all lan-
guages so far tested, therefore, awareness of onsets and rimes is
present before reading is taught.
Other studies have compared syllable and phoneme aware-
ness skills. For example, Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, and
Carter (1974) used a tapping task to measure syllable and
phoneme awareness in American children. The children, who
were aged from four to six years, were given words that had ei-
ther one syllable or p h o n e m e ("dog," 'T'), two syllables or
phonemes ("dinner, .... my"), or three syllables or phonemes
("president," "book"). They were asked to tap once with a
wooden dowel for each of the syllables or phonemes in the
words. A criterion of six consecutive correct responses was set
as evidence for segmentation ability. Liberman et al. found that
46% of the four-year-olds in their study could segment the
words into syllables, whereas 0% of this age group reached cri-
terion for phonemes. For the five-year-olds, the figures were
48% and 17%, respectively. Only the six-year-olds, who had
been l e a r n i n g to read for about a year, s u c c e e d e d in the
p h o n e m e task with 70% able to s e g m e n t the stimuli into
phonemes and 90% into syllables. A replication with Italian
children s h o w e d a similar d e v e l o p m e n t a l pattern (Cossu,
Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988). Cossu et al. asked
preschool Italian children (aged four and five years) and older
children already at school (seven- and eight-year-olds) to tap
once for each syllable in words like "gatto, .... melone," and "ter-
mometro," and once for each p h o n e m e in words like "mi,"
"per" and "sale." Criterion at the syllable level was reached by
67% of the four-year-olds, 80% of the five-year-olds, and 100%
of the school-age sample. Criterion in the phoneme task was
reached by 13% of the four-year-olds, 27% of the five-year-olds,
and 97% of the school-age sample. Italian children thus showed
a remarkably similar response pattern to American children.
144 CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

They showed good syllabic awareness prior to entering school

and poor phonemic awareness until reading was taught.
This pattern of good syllabic awareness prior to entering
school and poor phonemic awareness until reading is taught
has also been shown by studies of syllable and phoneme count-
ing in different languages. For Norwegian preschoolers, perfor-
mance in syllable counting was 83% correct and in phoneme
counting, 56% correct (Hoien, Lundberg, Stanovich, & Bjaalid,
1995). For German preschoolers, performance was 81% correct
in the syllable version of the counting task and 51% correct in
the phoneme version (Wimmer, Landerl, Linortner. & Hummer,
1991). For Turkish kindergartners, performance was 94% correct
in the syllable task compared to 67% correct in the phoneme
task (Durgunoglu & Oney, 1999). For French kindergartners/
first graders, the figures were 73% correct for syllable counting
and 32% correct for phoneme counting (Demont & Gombert,
1996). Finally, for Greek children in kindergarten, performance
was 85% correct in the syllable trials and 0% correct in the
phoneme trials (Harris & Giannouli, 1999). By early first grade,
performance was 98% correct with syllables and 50% correct
with phonemes.
Although more research is needed, current evidence from
typically-developing children suggests that the developmental
sequence of phonological awareness is language-universal.
Syllables, onsets, and rimes are represented prior to literacy.
Phonemes are represented only as the alphabet is learned and
literacy is taught. Once alphabetic learning begins, this process
of phonemic representation can be very rapid. If phonemic de-
velopment depends on literacy, then we would expect to find
differences in the rate of phonemic development, depending on
orthography.

THE IMPACT OF O R T H O G R A P H Y O N
P H O N O L O G I C A L REPRESENTATION A N D
READING STRATEGIES

A child who needs to become literate is immediately faced with

a mapping problem (Brown & Ellis, 1994). The child needs to
understand how the alphabet codes sound. The most accessible
phonological units for that prereading child are the syllable,
onset, and rime, all relatively "large" units of phonology. The
most accessible unit in print is the single letter. Accordingly, ini-
tial reading teaching in almost all languages begins from the let-
 A CROSS-L~NGUISTICP~RSPECTWa 145

ter. For children learning to read consistent orthographies, let-

ter-sound learning proceeds rapidly. For children learning to
read less consistent orthographies, it proceeds more slowly. An
analysis of the mapping problem across languages suggests
why this might be so.
For children learning to read consistent alphabetic orthogra-
phies with an open (consonant-vowel or CV) syllable structure,
the mapping problem is least difficult. In such languages, like
Italian and Spanish, onset-rime segmentation (available prior to
literacy) is equivalent to phonemic segmentation (theoretically
l e a r n e d t h r o u g h literacy) for m a n y words (e.g., "casa,"
"mama"). The typically developing child who has organised his
or her spoken vocabulary in terms of the intrasyllabic units of
onset and rime is thus well placed to acquire alphabetic literacy.
This child is learning an orthography where one letter consis-
tently maps to one phoneme. Many of those phonemes are al-
ready represented in his or her spoken lexicon because they are
onsets and rimes (e.g., for a word like "casa," the onset-rimes
are / c / / A / / s / / A / and so are the phonemes). For children
learning to read consistent alphabetic orthographies with more
complex syllable structures such as German, the mapping prob-
lem is a bit more difficult. In such languages, onset-rime seg-
mentation (available prior to literacy) is not often equivalent to
phonemic segmentation (theoretically learned through literacy)
for most words, as most words either have codas after the
vowel (e.g., Hand), or complex (consonant cluster) onsets (e.g.,
"Pflaum" [plum]). Nevertheless, for reading, one letter consis-
tently maps to one phoneme. Hence, letters are a consistent clue
to phonemes. The German child is still at an advantage.
The children faced with the most serious mapping problem
are those learning to read orthographically inconsistent lan-
guages that also have complex syllabic structure such as English.
Not only is onset-rime segmentation rarely equivalent to phone-
mic segmentation in English, but also one letter does not consis-
tently map to one phoneme for reading. Accordingly, phonemic
awareness develops relatively slowly in such orthographies, and
so does the use of grapheme-phoneme recoding strategies for
reading single words. In orthographies like English, children
with good onset-rime skills can exploit larger regularities in the
spelling system, for example, by using rhyme analogies to help
them build up a reading vocabulary Clight"--"fight," "beak"--
"weak"). At the same time, they need to learn some words as
holistic patterns ("the," "choir,.... people"), whereas other words
(e.g., "cat," "cap," "can") are amenable to grapheme-phoneme
146 CROSS-LINGUISTICASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

recoding. The need to develop multiple strategies for successful

reading may be one reason why grapheme-phoneme recoding
strategies develop relatively slowly in children learning to read
inconsistent orthographies (see Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, &
Schneider, 2001, in press, for a fuller discussion). Another rea-
son, however, is that this strategy is not reliable in the same way
that it is reliable for children learning to read orthographies like
Italian, Spanish, and German.
These different potential solutions to the mapping problem
suggest that children will develop different reading strategies in
response to differences in orthographic structure across or-
thographies. In languages with consistent alphabetic orthogra-
phies, children will rely heavily on g r a p h e m e - p h o n e m e
recoding for reading. In languages with less consistent or-
thographies, children will develop strategies at multiple psy-
cholinguistic "grain sizes," whole word, onset-rhyme analogy,
and grapheme-phoneme recoding. This developmental analysis
makes two predictions. The first is that once reading instruction
begins, children learning to read more consistent orthographies
should develop phonemic awareness more quickly than chil-
dren learning to read less consistent orthographies. The second
is that children learning to read more consistent orthographies
should develop g r a p h e m e - p h o n e m e recoding skills more
quickly than children learning to read less consistent orthogra-
phies. There is good evidence for both of these predictions.
The ideal test for the hypothesis that children learning to
read more consistent orthographies should develop phonemic
awareness more quickly than children learning to read less con-
sistent orthographies would be to give the same measures of
phonemic awareness to children from different countries who
are in the early stages of learning to read, and who have been
matched for other potentially important variables such as age,
vocabulary size, and general intellectual ability. This require-
ment is met by almost no studies. However, many studies in a
single language have used phoneme counting to measure
phonemic awareness. These studies generally report high levels
of phonemic awareness for children learning to read consistent
orthographies within the first year of instruction, and lower lev-
els of phonemic awareness for children learning to read incon-
sistent orthographies. Comparing studies of children tested
during first grade, representative performance levels are 100%
correct for Greek children (Harris & Giannouli, 1999; Porpodas,
1999), 97% correct for Italian children (Cossu et al., 1988), 94%
correct for Turkish children (Durguno~u & Oney, 1999), 92%
 A CROSS-DNGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE 147

correct for German children (Wimmer et al., 1991), and 83% cor-
rect for Norwegian children (Hoien et al., 1995). Phonemic
awareness is thus close to ceiling in most orthographies during
the first year of being taught to read. In contrast, performance
levels for children learning less consistent orthographies such
as French and English are less impressive. In a study of French
children, Demont and Gombert (1996) reported 61% success in a
phoneme counting task at the end of first grade. Perfetti, Beck,
Bell, & Hughes (1987) reported 65% correct responding by
American English children at the end of second grade.
Ideally, the hypothesis that children learning to read more
consistent orthographies should develop grapheme-phoneme
recoding skills more quickly than children learning to read less
consistent orthographies also requires the administration of
matched items to children from different countries in the early
stages of learning to read who have been matched for variables
such as age, vocabulary size, and general intellectual ability.
Although there is no published study that meets these strict
criteria perfectly, the study that comes closest is the cross-
language study of grapheme-phoneme recoding abilities in
first grade in 14 European languages performed by the COST-
A8 Action team led by Heikki Lyytinen. The acronym COST
refers to the European Concerted Action on Learning Disorders
as a Barrier to Human Development. Participating scientists
from the European community countries developed an approx-
imately matched set of items of simple real words and non-
words that were given to children from each country during
the first year of learning to read (this study is reported in
Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, in press). The most striking finding
from the study was that the children who were acquiring read-
ing in orthographically consistent languages were close to ceil-
ing in both word and nonword reading by the middle of first
grade (see table I). The only languages to deviate from this pat-
tern were Portuguese (73% correct), Danish (71% correct),
French (79% correct), and English (34% correct). Almost identi-
cal patterns by language were found for nonword reading, also
shown in table I.
There are probably a number of reasons for this striking pat-
tern of rapid acquisition of grapheme-phoneme recoding skills
in orthograpically consistent languages. One reason is that
young learners of these languages can focus exclusively on the
"small" psycholinguistic grain size of the phoneme without
making many reading errors. A second is that the consistent
feedback received in terms of achieving correct pronunciations
148 CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

TABLE I. Data (% correct) from the COST A8 study of grapheme-

phoneme recoding skills in 15 European languages, taken from Seymour,
Aro, & Erskine, in press.
Language Familiar real words Monosyllabic Nonwords
Greek 98 97
Finnish 98 98
German 98 98
Austrian German 97 97
Italian 95 92
Spanish 95 93
Swedish 95 91
Dutch 95 90
Icelandic 94 91
Norwegian 92 93
French 79 88
Portuguese 73 76
Danish 71 63
Scottish English 34 41

probably facilitates strategy acquisition. And a third is that the

teaching of consistent orthographies is usually based on the sys-
tematic introduction of grapheme-phoneme relations. Although
the Scottish children in Seymour et al.'s (in press) study were
also receiving systematic tuition in g r a p h e m e - p h o n e m e corre-
spondence, they cannot have received consistent feedback from
the o r t h o g r a p h y w h e n a t t e m p t i n g to use these strategies in
practice. Following a further year of tuition, the Scottish chil-
dren's performance was m u c h better (76% correct for real words
and 74% correct for nonwords). Even so, 76% correct is quite
distant from the ceiling levels of performance shown m u c h ear-
lier in the acquisition process by Finnish, Greek, and German
children. As noted above, the most logical reason for this dis-
crepancy is that children learning to read English must develop
multiple strategies in parallel in order to be successful readers.
They need to develop w h o l e - w o r d recognition strategies and
rhyme analogy strategies, in addition to grapheme-phoneme re-
coding strategies. In fact, there is m o r e consistency in English
s p e l l i n g at t h e r h y m e l e v e l t h a n at t h e p h o n e m e l e v e l
 A CRoss-LiNgUiSTiC PERSPECTIVE 149

(Goswami, 1999; Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-

Welty, 1995).

IMPLICATIONS OF A CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ANALYSIS OF N O R M A L LITERACY A C Q U I S I T I O N
FOR DYSLEXIA

The primary deficit in developmental dyslexia in all languages

appears to involve problems in phonological representation (the
"phonological representations" hypothesis: see Goswami, 2000a,
b; Snowling, 2000, for overviews). This hypothesis is well sup-
ported by many studies in developmental psychology, genetics,
and brain imaging that will not be surveyed here. For example,
studies in a number of languages have shown that dyslexic chil-
dren have persistent problems in tasks reliant on the phonologi-
cal system such as phonological awareness tasks, short-term
memory tasks, and speeded naming tasks (e.g., Bradley &
Bryant, 1978; Denckla & Rudel, 1976; Porpodas, 1999; Wimmer,
1993). These problems with phonological representation also
cause problems for literacy acquisition as the basic representa-
tional system on which reading builds is subtly deficient.
However, this "phonological deficit" affects reading in somewhat
different ways, depending on orthography. Literacy problems are
greater for dyslexic children learning to read inconsistent or-
thographies (e.g., English) than consistent orthographies (e.g.,
Italian, German, Greek). According to the cognitive analysis de-
veloped in the first part of this paper, this is not surprising.
Given this cross-linguistic analysis, dyslexic children who
are trying to learn to read different languages will face different
levels of the mapping problem. Dyslexic children learning lan-
guages with a simple syllabic structure who are also learning to
read consistent orthographies probably face the least difficulty.
For these children, as discussed earlier, onset-rime segmenta-
tion (available prior to literacy) is equivalent to phonemic seg-
mentation (theoretically learned through literacy) for many
words (e.g., "casa," "mama"). Nevertheless, letter-sound learn-
ing cannot build easily on the existing (onset-rime) level of
phonological representation at the beginning of reading, as
even this level of representation is thought to be deficient.
However, dyslexic children learning languages such as Spanish
and Italian can refine their phonological representations at both
the onset-rime and the phonemic level with the help of the 1:1
letter-sound correspondences that they are taught in reading.
150 CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

These letter-sound correspondences may map to both pho-

nemes and onset-rimes, helping to crystallize phonological rep-
resentations at both levels. Even when letters do not map to
both levels of phonology, the consistency of the m a p p i n g
should facilitate the further development of both phonemic
awareness and grapheme-phoneme recoding skills. These skills
would, therefore, be expected to develop more slowly in
dyslexic children learning to read such consistent orthographies
(because of their phonological problems), but they would not be
expected to be massively disrupted.
Dyslexic children learning to read languages with more com-
plex syllabic structures but consistent orthographies for reading
should theoretically face a more difficult mapping problem. Even
for them, however, orthographic consistency can go a long way
toward helping to refine their phonological representations. The
fact that letters always map to the same phonemes can bootstrap
the development of phonological knowledge and will facilitate
the development of grapheme-phoneme recoding strategies. It is
dyslexic children who are learning to read languages with com-
plex syllabic structures and less consistent orthographies for
whom the learning problem is compounded. Onset-rime repre-
sentation is deficient, it does not map onto phonemic representa-
tion, and the orthography does not easily support the refinement
of either onset-rime representation or the development of phone-
mic representation through learning letters. This is because there
are relatively few 1:1 mappings between letters and sounds, and
the mappings are often contradictory (e.g., "a" in "cat," "car,"
"call" in English). In such orthographies, children must develop
recoding strategies at multiple grain sizes (whole word, onset,
rhyme, phoneme), and these grain sizes are not easily accessible
to them in either the phonology or the orthography because of
their problems in phonological representation. Consequentl~ the
development of both phonemic awareness and grapheme-
phoneme recoding skills would be expected to be extremely slow
and inefficient compared to nondyslexic children, and possibly to
be massively disrupted. Although other factors such as morpho-
logical transparency may also affect reading acquisition in
dyslexic children, it can be predicted that the consistency of map-
pings from graphemes to phonemes in different languages will
have a marked effect on the development of phonemic awareness
and of grapheme-phoneme recoding strategies.
There are relatively few studies of dyslexic children that fit
neatly into this developmental framework. However, data from
the studies that do exist support both hypotheses. Taking the
 A CROSS-LINGUISTICPERSPECTIVE 151

development of phonemic awareness first, suggestive results

have been found in both Greek and German for first graders
considered to be "at risk" for dyslexia. In Greek Porpodas (1999)
found significant differences in phoneme awareness between
Greek first graders with literacy difficulties and chronological-
age-matched (CA) control children. The Greek children were
given two phoneme awareness tasks: phoneme segmentation of
real words and phoneme deletion (initial phoneme). The "at
risk" children scored 88% correct in the segmentation task com-
pared to 100% for the CA controls, and 78% correct in the dele-
tion task compared to 98% for the CA controls. As the two
groups were matched for IQ, the difficulty of the deletion task
cannot simply be attributed to the extra cognitive demands of
deletion. A similar study of "at risk" German first graders was
reported by Wimmer (1996). He retrospectively examined the
performance of a cohort of German dyslexic children on a
phoneme awareness task in Grade 1 before they were diag-
nosed as dyslexic. Large differences in comparison to the con-
trol children were found. The task used was phoneme reversal
for two-phoneme items (e.g., "ob" to '%o"). The to-be-dyslexic
children scored on average 22% correct in this task in Grade 1,
compared to an average of 69% correct for the control children.
Forty-two percent of the dyslexic children could not attempt the
task at all. Wimmer concluded that German dyslexic children
exhibit the same difficulties in phonemic segmentation exhib-
ited by older English dyslexic children, but only in the earliest
phase of learning to read. This is consistent with the results for
Greek "at risk" children reported by Porpodas (1999).
When dyslexic children learning to read consistent orthogra-
phies are studied during the later phases of learning to read, evi-
dence for a phonemic deficit in terms of accuracy of performance
is difficult to find. For example, Wimmer (1993) studied the six-
year-old dyslexic children who had exhibited difficulties in
phoneme reversal again as 10-year-olds. This time, he used a
phoneme substitution task to measure phoneme awareness. In
this task, the children had to substitute a phoneme such a s / ( /
for another such a s / ( / ( e . g . , "Mama ist krank" became "Mimi ist
krink'). The dyslexic children made correct substitutions on 86%
of trials, as did younger reading level matched (RL) control chil-
dren. The CA control children made correct substitutions on 95%
of trials, a significant difference.
In contrast to the patterns found in German, virtually all the
research studies that I am aware of for English have found phone-
mic deficits in dyslexic children compared to both RL and CA
152 CROSS-LINGUISTICASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

matched children. This seems to be true irrespective of the task

used to assess phonemic awareness. For example, Bruck (1992)
used a phoneme deletion task with nonword stimuli. She asked
dyslexic children aged eight to 15 years to delete either the initial
or the final sound in nonwords like "snup" and "lusk." The
dyslexic children performed correctly in 47% of trials compared to
72% of trials for the RL matched children and 77% of trials for the
CA matched children. In this stud3¢ the phoneme deficit appar-
ently persisted into adulthood. When Bruck compared dyslexic
adults to Grade 3 normally progressing readers, she found that
the children were significantly better than the adults at phoneme
deletion. Clearly, it takes longer to establish phoneme-based
phonological representations in English, even if you are a typi-
cally developing child without a phonological deficit. For dyslexic
children, however, the phonemic deficit is extremely pervasive.
W h a t about our second prediction, w h i c h was that
grapheme-phoneme recoding skills should also develop rela-
tively slowly in dyslexic children, even in dyslexic children who
are learning to read consistent orthographies? Grapheme-
phoneme recoding skills are most usually measured by giving
dyslexic children nonword reading tasks. Unfortunately, there are
relatively few studies of nonword reading by dyslexic children in
consistent orthographies with the exception of the studies by
Wimmer and his colleagues and by Porpodas. Porpodas (1999)
gave his Greek "at risk" first graders a set of 24 two- and three-
syllable nonwords to read based on real words. The nonwords
were created by changing the initial and middle letters of the real
words. Porpodas found that the Greek dyslexic children read
93% of these nonwords correctly compared to 97% for the CA
controls (a significant difference). Clearly, even the children at
risk for dyslexia had developed extremely accurate grapheme-
phoneme recoding skills within the first year of reading instruc-
tion. They were significantly slower at nonword reading than the
normally progressing children, however, taking on average four
seconds to read the nonwords compared to two seconds for the
controls.
In his retrospective s t u d y of to-be dyslexic children,
Wimmer (1996) also detected some difficulties in nonword read-
ing accuracy at the beginning of reading acquisition in German.
He found that seven out of 12 German children who later be-
came dyslexic read less than 60% of simple nonwords like
"Mana" and "Aufo" accurately, compared to an average perfor-
mance of 96% correct for beginning readers who did not subse-
quently become dyslexic. However, by the time that they were
 A CROSS-DN6UISTICP~RSPECTWE 153

10 years old, this accuracy deficit in nonword reading had vir-

tually disappeared. When they were aged 10, Wimmer (1993)
gave the same children a timed nonword reading task based on
Italian type nonwords with open syllables ("ketu," "heleki,"
"tarulo'). Both the dyslexic children and a group of matched RL
German controls found these nonwords relatively easy to de-
code, scoring, on average, 92% correct. A group of CA matched
control children performed at 96% correct. These high levels of
accuracy are probably partly due to the simple construction of
the nonword items, but are nevertheless highly impressive. Like
the Greek children, however, the dyslexic German children
showed a significant deficit in reading time per item, taking al-
most twice as long to read the nonwords as the younger RL
control children.
In contrast, most studies of grapheme-phoneme recoding
skills in English dyslexic children, like most studies of phonemic
awareness, find nonword reading deficits in comparison to both
RL and CA matched control children. A comprehensive review of
nonword reading in developmental dyslexia in English was pro-
vided by Rack Snowling, and Olson (1992). Many of the studies
that they reviewed found nonword reading deficits in dyslexic
children compared to RL matched children. Error rates were high,
typically between 40% and 60%. The nonword reading difficulties
were particularly marked when the nonwords were constructed
to be dissimilar to real words (e.g., "tegwop," " t w a m k e t "
(Snowling, 1980). Rack, et al. (1992) noted that English studies,
which did not find a nonword reading deficit in dyslexia in com-
parison to an RL match, typically used young readers (seven
years) as controls, and used nonwords with relatively familiar or-
thographic patterns (e.g., "loast" [toast]). They argued that
younger English readers are relatively poor at nonword reading,
and that nonwords with familiar large-unit analogies (like "-oast"
in "loast") are not the best tests of grapheme-phoneme recoding
skills. Both of these points are very important given that young
readers of English are learning phonological recoding skills at
multiple levels of psycholinguistic grain size.
More recent nonword reading studies of dyslexic and con-
trol English readers support Rack et al.'s conclusions. For exam-
ple, in their study of English and German dyslexic children,
Landerl, Wimmer, and Frith (1997) used nonwords that were ei-
ther one, two, or three syllables in length. The one- and two-
syllable nonwords were constructed by changing the onsets of
real words (e.g., "ball"--"grall," "butter"--"sutter;" these non-
words are amenable to rhyme analogy reading strategies). The
154 CROSS-LINGUISTICASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

three-syllable nonwords were constructed by syllable substitu-

tion ("semater, .... chacustre;" consequently these words made
greater demands on grapheme-phoneme recoding procedures).
Overall, the English dyslexic children found the nonword read-
ing task significantly more difficult than their RL controls (scor-
ing 48% correct compared to 65% correct). These difficulties
were found at all syllable lengths, but both groups performed
particularly poorly with the difficult three-syllable nonwords.
For these items, the English dyslexic children performed at
about 30% correct and the English RL controls performed at
about 40% correct. In comparison, the German dyslexic children
had difficulties with the three-syllable nonwords only, reading
75% of these items correctly. Overall, the German dyslexic chil-
dren read 86% of the nonwords correctly while the RL controls
read 90% of the nonwords correctly (a significant difference).
The German dyslexic and normally reading children were thus
much more accurate in nonword reading of the same items com-
pared to the English dyslexic and normally reading children. In
fact, as noted by Landerl et al. in their paper, the German
dyslexic children read the most difficult three-syllable non-
words more accurately than the English dyslexic children read
the easier one-syllable nonwords (at 75% correct versus 55%
correct). Again, this is consistent with the view that grapheme-
phoneme recoding skills take longer to develop in inconsistent
orthographies, particularly for dyslexic children.
As with phonemic awareness, therefore, there is a subtle
grapheme-phoneme recoding deficit early in reading acquisition
in dyslexia in consistent orthographies, but it quickly disap-
pears. In consistent orthographies, learning about letters leads to
accurate grapheme-phoneme recoding procedures and accurate
phonemic awareness, even in dyslexic children. This accuracy, of
course, requires considerable processing effort, as performance
is still very slow. Nevertheless, this cross-linguistic analysis sug-
gests that a deficit in phonemic awareness per se cannot be a
causal factor in developmental dyslexia across languages (see
also Landerl & Wimmer (2000). Rather, any deficits in phonemic
awareness are products of the preexisting poorer phonological
skills of dyslexic children. Logically, therefore, it is possible that
poor mapping of letter-sound relationships by dyslexic children
are caused by problems in phonological representation earlier in
the process of normal language acquisition. The most likely
source of these difficulties is a deficit in representing phonologi-
cal information at earlier developing levels of phonology: the
syllable, onset, and rime.
 A CROSS-LINGUISTICPERSPECTIVE 155

BASIC AUDITORY P R O C E S S I N G DEFICITS IN

DYSLEXIA: THE P-CENTRES HYPOTHESIS

In seeking causes for the deficit in phonological representation

in developmental dyslexia, one popular class of theories has
suggested that there must be lower-level deficits in basic audi-
tory processing (see McArthur & Bishop, 2001, for an over-
view). Since the sensory information processed by the ears is
quite complex, it seems logical that there could be problems in
processing this information in dyslexia that, in turn, lead to
problems in representing it accurately. Speech in particular is
a very complex signal, requiring spectral, temporal, and
frequency-based analysis. Particular interest in dyslexia has fo-
cused on the temporal aspects of speech processing (e.g., Tallal,
1980; Wright, Bowen & Zecker, 2000). If dyslexic children turn
out to have problems with the temporal processing of sound,
then this could explain their consequent difficulties in phono-
logical representation.
In the remainder of this article, I will briefly explore one
such temporal processing theory of dyslexia. This is our own
hypothesis that a likely perceptual cause of the characteristic
difficulties in phonological representation found in dyslexia is a
deficit in the p e r c e p t u a l experience of r h y t h m i c t i m i n g
(Goswami et al., 2002). Speech rhythm is one of the earliest cues
used by infants to discriminate syllables. Rhythmic timing is de-
pendent on "P-centre" processing. Adults hear alternating sylla-
bles like "ba" and "la" as nonrhythmic in timing when syllable
onset-onset times are isochronous. This is because adults attend
to s y l l a b l e - i n t e r n a l events called " p e r c e p t u a l centres"
(P-centres) or "stress beats" to determine speech rhythm, and
not to syllable onsets. These stress beats (P-centres) are princi-
pally determined by the acoustic structure of amplitude modu-
lation at relatively low rates in the signal. In particular,
rhythmic timing in speech is determined by the amplitude rise
time associated with vowel onset. The P-centres hypothesis of
dyslexia is based on the proposal that P-centre detection is im-
portant for the representation of onset-rime segments in sylla-
bles. As onset-rime representation is important for reading
development across languages, develops prior to the onset of
reading, and is known to be poor in dyslexic children, the
P-centres hypothesis offers a plausible explanation of the source
of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia.
Rhythm in speech is a property of the slow amplitude mod-
ulation (AM) of the waveform, corresponding roughly to the
156 CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ASPECTSO• LITERACYDEVELOPMENT

AM associated with syllables. Previous studies have shown that

dyslexic children have difficulty in detection of amplitude and
frequency modulation at rates (2-10 Hz) similar to those seen at
the syllable level in speech (Rosen, 1992; Talcott et al., 2000;
Witton et al., 1998). To investigate the impact that these difficul-
ties might have on the perception of rhythm in acoustic signals,
we carried out a study based on a "stress beat detection" task.
This is a perceptual task in which amplitude modulation is var-
ied in order to affect the perception of distinct, discrete "beats"
in the auditory stream. Potential differences in the psychometric
functions for "beat" detection between dyslexic and matched
control children, and between precocious readers and their
matched controls, were investigated.
The beat detection task was based on a rate of amplitude
modulation change detection procedure. This psychophysical
task takes advantage of the relationship between beat percep-
tion and the shape of amplitude modulation change (Scott,
1998). The task was based on a sinusoid that was modulated in
amplitude to a depth of 50%. Within this, the rate of amplitude
change only was varied by varying the rise time of the modula-
tion, while the overall rate of modulation was held constant at
0.7 Hz (see Figure 1). Very slow rise times (>250ms) give the
percept of a continuous sound that varies in loudness. When
the rise time is sufficiently shortened, however (e.g., to 120 ms),
the percept changes to that of a continuous sound with a loud
"beat" occurring rhythmically at the same rate as the modula-
tion (Bregman, 1993; we argue that this beat corresponds to the
P-centres of the rhythmic sequence). Given that aspects of sylla-
ble processing (i.e. onset-rime awareness) are poorer in dyslexic
children, we predicted that they would have poorer sensitivity
to the perceptual consequences of amplitude modulation than

Tim~/~)

Figure 1. Examples of the stimulus wave orm for times

ms (Panel A) and 300 ms (Panfe; B). rise of 15
 A CROSS-LINGUISTICPERSPECTIVE 157

control children. As rise time is varied, dyslexic children should

evidence less change in amplitude modulation-related experi-
ences of beat perception than their controls.
In our study of 72 children (24 nine-year-old dyslexics, 24
CA controls, 24 RL controls), this was the case. A significant dif-
ference was found between the group of dyslexic children and
their CA controls in the slope of the categorization function, the
dyslexics showing flatter slopes as predicted (mean slope =
-0.03 for dyslexics [s.d. = 0.04) and -0.12 for controls [s.d. =
0.08], p < 0.000). The reading age match controls showed inter-
mediate slopes (mean slope = -0.06, s.d. = 0.05). Detection of
beats in AM signals was, therefore, poorer in the dyslexic chil-
dren than in their peers, and seemed to vary with reading level.
What about exceptional readers? In a further study reported in
Goswami et al. (2002), we also gave a cohort of precocious read-
ers the beat detection task. These children were aged 11 years at
the time of testing, but had been studied since the age of four
years because they had taught themselves to read on the basis
of superior phonological skills. Theoretically, our P-centres hy-
pothesis would predict that these superior phonological skills
had developed in part because of superior beat detection. The
precocious readers were also given the rate of amplitude change
task, as were a group of matched control children who had also
been followed since the age of four (and who were also reading
above grade level, although not at the exceptional levels of the
precocious readers). The precocious readers were significantly
better at the beat detection task than their controls, with signifi-
cantly sharper psychometric functions (young early readers,
mean slope = -0.14 [s.d. 0.06], matched controls = -0.10 [s.d.
0.04], p < .04). This suggests that superior stress beat detection
may underlie the development of superior phonological aware-
ness, just as deficits in stress beat detection may underlie the de-
velopment of poor phonological awareness.
In the study of 72 children reported by Goswami et al.
(2002), the sample of children was large enough to allow multi-
ple regression analyses to determine predictive relationships.
These analyses showed that beat detection was indeed a signif-
icant predictor of phonological awareness (accounting for 13%
of the variance in rime oddity after controlling for age, nonver-
bal IQ, and vocabulary: p < .001). It was an even stronger pre-
dictor of progress in reading and spelling (accounting for 25%
of the variance in both reading and spelling after controlling
for age, nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary: p's < .0001). In contrast,
the same children's performance in a second temporal processing
158 CROSS-LINGUISTICASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

task, Tallal's rapid frequency detection or RFD task (see Tallal

& Piercy, 1973), accounted for only 10% of the variance in read-
ing, 9% of the variance in rime oddity, and did not predict
spelling (spelling difficulties are usually the critical measure
for diagnosing dyslexia in languages other than English). The
dyslexic children were also mildly impaired in a temporal
order judgement task (TOJ, deciding whether a dog bark or car
horn sounded first); this task predicted 6% of the variance in
reading. Whereas the RFD and TOJ tasks are thought to tap the
ability to detect rapid acoustic change (at a timescale of <40
ms), the rise times that yield the perceptual experience of beats
are considerably longer in duration (up to 150 ms or more).
Theoretically, therefore, the "rapid spectrotemporal integra-
tion" or RSI tasks (RFD and TOJ) are operating at a different
timescale to the beat detection task. The RSI tasks measure the
importance of rapid changes in the signal, which should affect
the child's ability to detect changes in speech at the segmental
level (e.g., "p" versus "b"). The beat detection task measures
the importance of the syllabic information given by amplitude
envelope onsets that in speech affect suprasegmental attributes
of the vowel onsets.
However, whereas most of the variance in reading predicted
by these RSI tasks was shared with the beat detection task, this
was not true of the variance in reading predicted by the beat de-
tection task. In order to determine any overlap in the variance in
reading accounted for by the beat detection and RSI tasks, a pair
of five-step multiple regression equations were computed, both
entering age, nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary, followed by the two
auditory measures in either order. When entered last, the beat de-
tection measure accounted for an additional 19% of the variance
in reading (p < .001). The RFD measure entered last accounted for
an additional 4% (p < .02). To determine whether individual dif-
ferences in these basic processing abilities would still be predic-
tive of r e a d i n g even w h e n p h o n o l o g i c a l a w a r e n e s s was
controlled, a second pair of five-step multiple regression equa-
tions were computed, entering age, nonverbal IQ, vocabulary,
phonological awareness, and beat detection or RFD. Here, only
beat detection remained a significant predictor of reading, ac-
counting for an additional 9% of the variance (p < .001; the oddity
measure accounted for 31% of the variance).
As discussed previously, the detection of beats in AM se-
quences such as those employed in our work corresponds theo-
retically to the detection of P-centres in acoustic signals.
P-centres are the psychological moments of occurrence of
 A CaOSS-DNGUISTIC PERSP~CTCCE 159

speech, musical, a n d o t h e r s o u n d s (Morton, Marcus, &

Frankish, 1976). Early work exploring adults' judgements of
rhythmic timing in speech established that rhythm perception
(and production) was not based on the onset of acoustic energy
for each word. It was hence postulated that timing depended on
the "P-centre" of each word, assumed to be a syllable-internal
event. More recent work has established that P-centres are not
back-calculated after each auditory event but are determined by
the characteristics of onsets of signals (Scott, 1998). The P-centre
is a theoretical construct that refers to the perceptual temporal
segregation of continuous sensory input streams and also to the
production of rhythmic speech (or motor) events. Hence, P-centres
relate both to the perception of the syllabic structure of the
speech stream and to the production of rhythmic speech (speak-
ers time vowel onsets to a rhythm when producing regularly
timed speech). P-centres as a construct thus form a link between
the basic auditory processing of amplitude modulation, the
acoustic structure of syllables, and the interaction between pro-
duction and perception. From a speech development perspec-
tive, they may constitute a nonspeech-specific mechanism for
segregating syllable onsets and rimes.
Working from the association of AM-driven beats in a per-
ceptual sequence and P-centres, our hypothesis is that the pri-
mary auditory processing deficit in dyslexia is related to
P-centre perception and production of speech and nonspeech
sounds. AM rise time contributes to this perceptual primitive,
and thus other observed auditory deficits (e.g., auditory stream
segregation, backward masking) (Helenius, Uutela, & Hari,
1999; Wright et al., 2000) may arise in part because the stimuli
used in these judgement tasks of necessity have P-centres. A
P-centre hypothesis can also explain dyslexic children's difficul-
ties in producing speech in time with a metronome, and finger
tapping in time with a metronome or an internally-generated
rhythm (Wolff, Michel & Ovrut, 1990; Wolff, 2002). It further ex-
plains why a focus on rhyme and rhythm in preschool (e.g.,
clapping out nursery rhymes, which gives children practice in
coordinating a manual rhythm with the P-centres of certain syl-
lables) is important for later literacy development across lan-
guages (Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988; Schneider, Roth, &
Ennemoser, 2000). Note, however, that the potential P-centre
deficit in dyslexia is a subtle one. The deficit is not sufficient to
interfere markedly with the acquisition of spoken language, al-
though spoken language processing in metalinguistic tasks re-
mains effortful and slow.
160 CROSS-LINGUISTIC
ASPECTS OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, I have argued that phonological awareness

emerges as a b y - p r o d u c t of normal language acquisition
processes. One very important such process is the perception of
s u p r a s y l l a b i c aspects of the speech stream, which gives
information about the P-centres of syllables and also information
relevant to their segmentation into their constituent onsets and
rimes. Dyslexic children have a deficit, probably neural in ori-
gin, in representing phonology. One important aspect of this
deficit appears to be a problem in perceiving aspects of the
suprasyllabic information in speech. This deficit interferes with
the development of phonological awareness at the syllable,
onset, and rime levels prior to literacy acquisition, and it also
interferes with the representation of phonemic information once
literacy is taught. However, orthographic consistency facilitates
the development of phoneme awareness for both typically
developing and dyslexic children, and so dyslexic children
learning consistent orthographies can use letter-sound corre-
spondences as an aid to represent phonology at both the onset-
rime and phoneme levels. This means that dyslexic children
who are learning to read consistent orthographies can compen-
sate to some extent for their difficulties with phonological rep-
resentation by using letter knowledge to restructure their
existing phonological representations to accurately represent
onset-rime and phonemic information.
Dyslexic children learning to read less consistent orthogra-
phies, such as English, are not afforded this bootstrapping pro-
cess. For English, developing readers need to learn connections
between orthography and phonology at multiple levels of psy-
cholinguistic grain size. To cope with orthographic inconsis-
tency, English children have to learn about letter sequences that
connect to rhymes and letter sequences that connect to whole
words as well as learning individual grapheme-phoneme corre-
spondences. This has the effect of both slowing the acquisition of
grapheme-phoneme recoding skills and slowing the develop-
ment of phonemic awareness. This lag is c o m p o u n d e d in
dyslexic children learning to read English who may never
achieve full phonemic awareness or fully reliable grapheme-
phoneme recoding procedures.
According to this cross-linguistic analysis, a deficit in
phonemic awareness is not really a cause of dyslexic children's
reading problems. Rather, it arises from a preexisting problem
with phonological representation, which impedes learning
 A CROSS-LINoUZSTIC PERSPECTIVE 161

a b o u t letters a n d l e a r n i n g a b o u t p h o n e m e s . A l t h o u g h d y s l e x i c
c h i l d r e n l e a r n i n g to r e a d c o n s i s t e n t o r t h o g r a p h i e s like G r e e k
and German do acquire highly accurate phonemic awareness
a n d g r a p h e m e - p h o n e m e r e c o d i n g skills, b e c a u s e of t h e i r p e r -
s i s t i n g p h o n o l o g i c a l p r o b l e m s , t h e s e p r o c e s s e s are n e v e r as effi-
cient as in their t y p i c a l l y d e v e l o p i n g peers. C o n s e q u e n t l y , e v e n
in c o n s i s t e n t o r t h o g r a p h i e s , c h i l d r e n w i t h d y s l e x i a are m u c h
s l o w e r in a n y t a s k i n v o l v i n g p h o n o l o g i c a l p r o c e s s i n g , i n c l u d i n g
r e a d i n g . D y s l e x i c c h i l d r e n w h o are l e a r n i n g to r e a d i n c o n s i s t e n t
o r t h o g r a p h i e s like E n g l i s h are e v e n w o r s e off. E n g l i s h d y s l e x i c
c h i l d r e n s h o w a p e r s i s t i n g deficit at t h e p h o n e m e level, p e r h a p s
e v e n w h e n t h e y are a d u l t s , a n d so are c h a r a c t e r i s e d b y both
s p e e d a n d a c c u r a c y deficits in p h o n o l o g i c a l tasks. T h e s e persist-
i n g deficits m u s t be d u e , in p a r t , to the i n c o n s i s t e n t n a t u r e of
t h e o r t h o g r a p h y t h a t t h e y n e e d to l e a r n to read.

A d d r e s s c o r r e s p o n d e n c e to: U s h a G o s w a m i , Institute of C h i l d
H e a l t h , 30 G u i l f o r d Street, L o n d o n W C I N 1EH U.K. Tel.: 44 020
7831 0975; fax: 44 020 7381 7050. E-mail: u.goswami@ich.ucl.ac.uk.

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