Processing of phonological, orthographic and cross-modal word representations among adult dyslexic and normal readers

This study examined the extent to which adult dyslexic readers exhibit concurrent deficits for phonological, orthographic and cross-modal word representations, and the relationship between these deficits and decoding ability. Participants were 18 phonological dyslexics and 19 normal readers at college level. Compared to normal readers, dyslexics exhibited significantly slower reaction times across tasks, and were less accurate on the unimodal orthographic task. Word pattern processing was more extensively related to decoding ability among dyslexic as compared to normal readers, but more robustly related to baseline measures of phonological and orthographic processing among normal readers. The results are discussed in the context of integrating the phonological and orthographic aspects of words, speed of processing deficits, and the importance of task selection when assessing adult dyslexic populations.