Auditory and Visual Rhyme Judgements Reveal Differences and Similarities Between Normal and Disabled Adolescent Readers

Auditory and visual rhyme judgement tasks were administered to 16 adolescent dyslexics (age range 13–18 years, mean age 15½) and 16 age-matched normal readers. Dyslexics and controls demonstrated orthographic facilitation in both tasks, i.e. rhymes with matching orthography, e.g. king, sing, were responded to faster than rhymes with dissimilar orthography, e.g. chair, dare, thus indicating short term memory storage of orthographic information during visual presentations, as well as activation of orthographic information during auditory presentations. Despite this facilitation dyslexics made significantly more errors and responded significantly slower than controls in both tasks. Dyslexics had extremely high error rates for visual rhyme judgement trials in which phonological and orthographic information were inconsistent, i.e. rhymes that had different orthographic endings, e.g. chair, dare, and non-rhymes that had similar orthographic patterns, e.g. food, blood. The dyslexics' high error rates and slow reaction times are discussed in terms of poor phonological processing, lack or orthographic flexibility and slow processing speeds. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.