12 Oct 2004

Catherine Dickie

The Phonological Representations Hypothesis put forward by Snowling (2000) proposes that dyslexia is caused by poor underlying phonological representations. The study presented here suggests that sensitivity to the wordlikeness of nonsense words is one indicator of the quality of an individual's phonological representations - highly wordlike nonwords will be easier to repeat for dyslexics than nondyslexics. However, conventional clinical/psycholinguistic methods of assessing phonological representations do not target phonological knowledge in a linguistically motivated way. Results were inconclusive with respect to my wordlikeness hypothesis, but they do highlight problems with the Phonological Representations Hypothesis as well as focusing on ways to construct stimuli that will explicitly target phonological knowledge.

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