Naming ability and oral fluency in dyslexic adolescents

Abstract

Twenty-one dyslexic boys, aged between 11¾ and 18, were presented with drawings of familiar objects and asked to name the part of the object to which an arrow pointed, for example the flex of an iron and the mane of a horse. They were also asked to explain the meanings of six words with only one meaning, six homophones (pier/peer), and six homographs (bat/bat). Nineteen control boys from the same background were also given the tests. No time constraints were imposed.

It was found that the dyslexics were no less successful than the controls in finding the names for the parts of the objects and that they had no distinctive difficulty over homophones or homographs. However, when an analysis of errors was carried out, it was found that, in comparison with the controls, they produced more distortions of words (for instance bucker for buckle), gave fewer “don’t know” responses, and showed a greater tendency to repeat the parent word. In the case of the word-explanation tasks, they produced more examples of inappropriate usage (for example, in response to pier, “is what people walk along and fishing off”), more incomplete sentences, more repetitions, more misunderstandings of words, and more unnecessary amplifications of their original response. There was an equal tendency in both groups to ignore the indefinite article (for example, a bat. What is a bat?—“To bat a ball”). The dyslexics used fewer relative clauses, and there was marginal evidence for more frequent use of you and your and of er, um, and well.

It is argued that among dyslexic adolescents, there remains a residual uncertainty which affects their oral language, and it is suggested that teachers should pay more attention to this weakness, since if a pupil cannot express himself adequately in speech, he is likely to show similar difficulties in his written work.