Abstract
Most theories of reading development stress the importance of phonological awareness to the acquisition of reading skill. These theories are supported by findings that pre-school measures of phonological awareness predict later reading success and that training phonological skills benefits reading development (Goswami and Bryant, 1990; Brady and Shankweiler, 1991 for reviews). The corollary of this is that poor readers show phonological processing deficits which are a plausible cause of their reading problems (Shankweiler et al, 1995; Stanovich and Siegel, 1994; Snowling, 1995). However, becoming a skilled reader requires more than just phonological awareness. As Gough and Tunmer (1986; see also Tunmer and Hoover, 1992) have argued, reading is well described as the product of two relatively independent skills, decoding and linguistic comprehension. Both of these skills are necessary, but neither alone is sufficient, for successful reading. It follows from Gough and Tunmer’s argument that children can have difficulties with either of these fundamental aspects of reading.
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Snowling, M., Nation, K., Muter, V. (1999). The Role of Semantic and Phonological Skills in Learning to Read: Implications for Assessment and Teaching. In: Nunes, T. (eds) Learning to Read: An Integrated View from Research and Practice. Neuropsychology and Cognition, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4826-9_11
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