Applied Psycholinguistics (1986) 7, 69-76

Printed in the United States of America

The question of essential differences in

developmental dyslexia: A response to
Seidenberg, Bruck, Fomarolo, and
Backman
MARY ANNE WOLF
Tufts University

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Maryanne Wolf, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study, Tufts University, Medford,
Massachusetts 02155

The well-constructed study by Seidenberg, Bruck, Fornarolo, and Backman

(Applied Psycholinguistics, 6(2)) is an example of the difficulties that occur
when good hypotheses and elegant designs are at variance with the realities of
developmental reading disorders. My goal in this essay is to use the Seidenberg
et al. study as a kind of informal assessment - both of progress in our approaches
to dyslexia and of the significant issues that remain, particularly the impact of
varied assumptions about homogeneity in severely impaired readers.
The first issue confronting these authors and all who conduct dyslexia research
is definition. Seidenberg et al. address the need to reconsider the older, often-
used, as often-disputed exclusionary criteria of the World Federation of Neu-
rology definition (see Critchley, 1970; Ellis, in press; Rudel, 1983). Reading-
impaired children are classified within this view as either poor readers with
assumed extrinsic causes or disabled readers with assumed intrinsic causes. The
authors rightly state that these exclusionary criteria do little to describe actual
decoding processes. In their study they set out to determine whether decoding
processes in disabled readers are qualitatively or "essentially different" from
both poor and average readers.
Such a question is at once valuable and problematic. It assumes that our
categories of poor and disabled readers are real and readily distinguishable, as
opposed to somewhat arbitrary and possibly overlapping. The authors at first
acknowledge the sample difficulties by stating that the reading-disabled children,
none of whom were in a special class, are probably not as disabled as some
children and that the poor readers, a subsample of unskilled readers in a previous
study (Backman, Bruck, Hebert & Seidenberg, 1984), might have included some
subjects who could be considered reading disabled.
After this acknowledgement, however, the authors proceed as if both groups
were fixed, entities with no overlap. Later in their conclusions, the authors

© 1986 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/86/010069-08 $2.50

Applied Psycholinguistics 7:1 70
Wolf: Developmental dyslexia

suggest that both groups form a "relatively homogeneous group" with few
essential differences between them or between them and younger average read-
ers. This conclusion complements their earlier companion study (Backman et al.,
1984), where older unskilled readers (i.e., the "poor reader" subsample here)
performed similarly to younger, average readers in their acquisition and use of
spelling - sound correspondences. Such a finding, they state in the present study,
fits Boder's early characterizations of impaired readers as developmentally de-
layed. They simply enlarge this characterization in the present study to include
disabled readers. They conclude that most poor and disabled readers are similar
in their decoding processes and that previous notions of aberrance in the decod-
ing processes of disabled readers are insubstantiated in their results.
The authors' conclusion brings us to a central, unresolved area in dyslexia
research - that is, the nature of individual variation among dyslexic children and
the effect of assumptions about variation upon research efforts. There are vary-
ing explicit and implicit assumptions of homogeneity and heterogeneity in dys-
lexia research. Much earlier research was based on notions of homogeneity
where severely impaired readers were viewed as one large group with similar
impairments. In the last decade and a half, many researchers, especially in the
neurosciences, argued against such a view through careful documentation of the
varieties of impairments found among dyslexic children (Denckla, 1978;
Doehring, Trites, Patel, & Feidorowicz, 1981; Fisk & Rourke, 1979; Fletcher &
Morris, in press; Lovett, 1983; Mattis, French & Rapin, 1975; Siegel, 1981;
Temple, in press; Temple & Marshall, 1983). Within this view, impaired readers
are seen as a heterogeneous group with considerable individual variation. As one
result of this assumption, some researchers hypothesized that heterogeneity
could be usefully characterized into discrete subgroups, and classification sys-
tems for subtyping impaired readers proliferated. The theoretical and meth-
odological advantages and problems associated with recent attempts to find
nonoverlapping reading subgroups with varying test batteries are amply dis-
cussed elsewhere (Doehring et al., 1981; Ellis, in press; Fletcher & Morris, in
press; Morris, 1982).
Other researchers proceed from an implicit assumption of heterogeneity in
dyslexic populations, but eschew attempts to find nonoverlapping subgroups.
Olson (Olson & Davidson, 1985), for example, describes individual variation
among dyslexic children in terms of a normal distribution curve with most
impaired readers similar on most tasks and with some readers at the two extreme
ends. Variation in particular learning styles, rather than simply in task perfor-
mances, is emphasized. Frith (in press), on the other hand, describes individual
differences among impaired readers in terms of developmental arrest at various
levels of reading acquisition and fluency (see also Chall, 1983; Perfetti, 1985;
and Vernon, 1980).
Although Seidenberg et al. acknowledge that individual cases of reading pa-
thology exist, their analyses of the disabled readers reflect an expanded notion of
homogeneity that includes most poor as well as disabled readers. The immediate
problem is not whether this notion is correct or incorrect, but that it shapes and
limits the classification and interpretation of data. The inevitable effect here is
that the authors circumscribe the relevancy of some information and overlook
larger data patterns; in the process, they cannot help but interpret the results
Applied Psycholinguistics 7:1 71
Wolf: Developmental dyslexia

in a particular direction (i.e., a lack of differences among impaired reader

groups).
Specifically, the most important contribution of the Seidenberg et al. study is
in its meticulous, carefully considered categories for possible decoding errors.
Their present categorization reveals that disabled readers perform significantly
worse than poor readers in the following areas: (1) longer reading latencies for
nonwords and words; (2) more totally inappropriate pronunciation for vowels in
regular words and nonwords; (3) smaller proportion of regularizations in pronun-
ciation; and (4) more substitution errors in consonant pronunciation.
The importance of each of these differences is dismissed for all purposes in
their analyses. The first finding on latencies is dismissed as quantitative dif-
ference and thus unnecessary to discuss. This decision seems at least equivocal,
given the large literature linking deficits in rate and automaticity in decoding
processes to reading failure (Guttentag & Haith, 1978; LaBerge & Samuels,
1974; Lovett, 1984; Steinberg & Wagner, 1982). Rather than dismiss the find-
ings because no word classes appeared slower than others, it would be of more
interest to link general rate problems with particular error patterns to explain
differences between impaired reading groups (cf. Lovett, 1984; Wolf, Bally, &
Morris, in press; Wolf & Goodglass, in press). Furthermore, as Frith (in press)
recently noted: "today's qualitative difference is often tomorrow's quantitive
one, depending on theory and refinement of measuring instruments" (p. 4).
From this, it also follows that the quantitative scores of the disabled third and
fourth graders may well result from earlier and, perhaps, present qualitative
differences in decoding.
The remaining areas of difference support such an interpretation. That the
findings were not given importance by the authors stems, I believe, from two
factors: (1) deemphasizing group differences assumed absent from the start; (2)
no clear a priori hypotheses about what essential differences in decoding include.
The authors use categories for classification based on previous studies without
stating what would qualify as essential differences within these categories. In the
introduction they suggest that "differences in recognition latency between these
classes of words reflect reliance upon phonological information." The crux of
essential differences in decoding is surely contained here, but how do we estab-
lish that disabled readers have more difficulty handling phonological informa-
tion? Are they slower in latency across all categories or particular classes? Do
they make more errors when more phonological processing is required, as in
vowels with their more demanding grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules?
Do their pronunciation patterns, particularly for vowels, reflect less consistent,
underlying phonological knowledge? Do they show less ability to apply these
correspondence rules to nonwords where visual memory and semantic informa-
tion is nonexistent?
The authors never discuss what quantitative and qualitative decoding dif-
ferences would be predicted. Rather, they become deflected by their focus on
possible differences between word classes. Consequently, general quantitative
problems in latency and in errors across classes of words becomes lost, and their
rich qualitative data - particularly for vowels - is neglected. If we look at the
reported vowel findings from a broader phonological perspective and without
assumptions about the groups, we learn that disabled readers show more totally
Applied Psycholinguistics 7:1 72
Wolf: Developmental dyslexia

Table 1. Mean number of errors for vowels, consonants.

words, and nonwords

Error type
Reading group Vowels Consonants Words Nonwords

Average readers 9.7 7.2 8.3 8.6

Poor 24.7 17.1 22.3 19.5
Disabled 32.6 23.7 29.6 26.7

inappropriate pronunciation for both regular nonwords and words (i.e., pho-
nological guesses). Such a finding is, if one emphasizes reliance on underlying
phonological processing, an essential qualitative difference between groups. Dis-
abled readers do not appear to use, or perhaps do not have, stable, underlying
phonological knowledge. Similarly, more general quantitative differences are
uncovered by this approach. An examination of the total mean vowel and conso-
nant errors of each group is omitted by the authors. Seen on Table 1, this analysis
reveals a clearer picture of the general difficulty disabled readers have with
vowels across classes. The data also indicate more difficulty with consonants
than previously assumed. Taken together, these qualitative difficulties with
vowels may well explain disabled readers' general, quantitative latency dif-
ferences across words and nonwords. Consistent with their assumptions, howev-
er, Seidenberg et al. emphasized only the lack of group differences in consonant
errors and minimized the significant group differences in vowel errors.
The important point here is that the qualitative group differences should not be
minimized when they occur, and the quantitative differences should not be
dismissed when poor readers are more similar to disabled than average readers.
(One would expect that most poor readers are more similar quantitatively to
disabled readers than to average readers.) Rather, qualitative and quantitative
findings should be connected. It is, in fact, the overall pattern of their group
findings that makes the Seidenberg et al. results important for dyslexia research.
For example, one unresolved question to which the present data contribute is the
relationship between level of difficulty in speech perception and reading produc-
tion errors. Briefly, Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy
(1967) showed varying complexities in the relationships between the consonant
and vowel classes and their acoustic representations. Vowels with their longer
250 millisecond cue duration are relatively easier to perceive and discriminate
than consonants, with their 50 millisecond cue durations. Tallal and Piercy
(1973) demonstrated that language-impaired children have severe difficulty with
rapid auditory discriminations in the speech stream and thus have difficulty with
consonants. Recently, Tallal (1983) described some rate-based auditory percep-
tual problems in reading-impaired children. Godfrey, Syrdal-Lasky, Millay, and
Knox (1981) investigated the ability of dyslexic children to identify synthesized,
voiced stop-consonants and found significant differences from average readers.
Lieberman, Meskill, Chatillon, and Schupack (in press) found that subgroups of
Applied Psycholinguistics 7:1 73
Wolf: Developmental dyslexia

adult dyslexics were significantly different from average reading controls in their
identification of both stop consonants and synthesized vowels.
Two issues emerge in this literature: (1) whether dyslexic children have diffi-
culties with vowel perception and (2) why beginning and dyslexic readers make
more frequent and phonetically unrelated vowel errors (Fowler, Liberman, &
Shankweiler, 1977; Vellutino & Scanlon, in press) and fewer consonant errors
that are generally related to the target (Fowler et al., 1977; Werker, Bryson, &
Wassenberg, 1985). If the consonants are more difficult to perceive, and if
dyslexic children are conclusively shown to have auditory discrimination prob-
lems in both consonants and vowels, why do vowel errors predominate in most
dyslexic readers (Vellutino & Scanlon, in press), including the sample here?
(Note, however, that Seidenberg et al. showed that their disabled readers also
made more consonant substitutions - that is, a strategy more akin to guessing.)
The combined Seidenberg et al. results help explain these questions by ex-
panding our understanding of phonemic analysis and correspondence rule prob-
lems in impaired readers (Fowler, Liberman & Shankweiler, 1977; Liberman,
Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler & Fischer, 1977; Mann, 1984; Morrison, 1984;
Vellutino, 1982). Seidenberg et al. show that disabled readers are slower in
reading latencies for words and nonwords and make more vowel errors, conso-
nant substitutions, and totally inappropriate, guesslike pronunciations. As sug-
gested earlier, this pattern is what one would expect of children who cannot use
or do not have stable, intact phonological knowledge about letters and their
sounds. The latency information tells us that the underlying processes are not
automatized, regardless of actual word tasks. The error and pronunciation data
inform us that the special demands of phonemic analysis and grar "<eme-phoneme
correspondence rules with vowels are uniquely difficult for disabled readers. The
small consonant substitution finding should be pursued, but is suggestive of a
more general phoneme-grapheme correspondence problem. In other words, there
appear essential differences in some specific decoding processes among severely
disabled readers. If this conclusion appears less dramatic because of its historical
precedents, it also appears more conclusive because of this study.
The authors came to an opposite set of conclusions about disabled readers and
summarized all of these data as revealing "clearly no . . . systematic dif-
ferences." They concluded: "for our sample of children reading disability is
simply a descriptive label indicating that such children are average to above-
average in intelligence yet read poorly." Because the authors' tacit assumption
was that most impaired readers were developmentally delayed versions of aver-
age readers and because they did not integrate their quantitative and qualitative
results, they could come to no other conclusion. It is a conclusion that fits neither
their data nor considerable past research.
In summary, the Seidenberg et al. study offers a superb approach for analyzing
decoding processes in children. The study underscores, however, major, unre-
solved issues in the application of such approaches to populations of severely
impaired readers.
Finally, the onus is upon us to understand both the general parameters of
reading breakdown and also the specific perturbations to the system that occur in
individual children at different ages. Before such well-conceived approaches to
Applied Psycholinguistics 7:1 74
Wolf: Developmental dyslexia

reading as Seidenberg, Bruck, Fornarolo, and Backman's can serve us, assump-
tions about reading breakdown that incorporate developmental change and varia-
tion must inform our definitions, our questions, and our conclusions. Perhaps
only then will our approach to reading breakdown and reading-impaired children
be as necessarily complex as reading itself.

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