Naming, reading, and the dyslexias: A longitudinal overview.

In research in the cognitive and neurosciences, a co-occurrence between naming and reading disorders has been found in children and aphasic adults. Evidence from a completed cross-sectional study will be briefly summarized and an ongoing longitudinal study will be presented to suggest that factors disrupting specific stages of the naming process can impede the development of children's reading in particular, perhaps predictable, ways. Based on the components of a neurolinguistic model of naming, a battery of naming and reading tests was administered to a longitudinal sample of 115 children before, during, and after reading acquisition. Preliminary trends indicate that poor readers are significantly different (p<.001) from average readers on all naming tests except those emphasizingreceptive vocabulary perception. Tests emphasizing retrieval rate are best able to predict patterns of naming performance and errors characterize specific subgroups of the dyslexias.