The Association between Reading Strategies in Poor Readers and their Visual and Phonological Segmentation Skills

Poor readers’ visual and phonological segmentation skills were assessed in order to see whether strengths and weaknesses on these tasks were associated with differing reading strategies. The most striking pattern of performance was found in the subgroup 1 poor readers, who had visual segmentation skills appropriate for their chronological age but whose phonological segmentation skills were appropriate for their reading age. These children showed a logographic approach to word reading, and their nonword naming skills were worse than would be expected for their level of phonological segmentation ability. However, they made a high proportion of phonetic spelling errors, indicating that it was only in reading that they were unable to use their phonological skills effectively. Subgroups 2 and 3 had impairments in both visual and phonological segmentation ability for their chronological age, the latter group being phonologically impaired even for reading age. These subgroups showed less distinctive patterns of reading performance, but both showed signs of attempting to use a phonological approach to reading in some of the tasks. Neither group showed signs of a logographic approach to reading, despite having visual segmentation skills similar to their reading age controls, who used both logographic and phonological approaches to reading. This suggests that logographic reading in poor readers is the product of a high level of visual segmentation skill coupled with much weaker phonological segmentation ability.