Fischer F W, Liberman I Y, Shankweiler D
Cortex. 1978 Dec;14(4):496-510. doi: 10.1016/s0010-9452(78)80025-2.
The pattern of errors in reading isolated words was studied in two groups of children with respect, particularly, to reversals of letter sequence and letter orientation. One group (the Institute group) consisted of children 8 to 10 years old who had been diagnosed "dyslexic" according to medical and psychoeducational criteria. The other (the School group) included all the children in a second-year elementary school class (see Liberman, Shankweiler, Orlando, Harris and Berti, 1971) who fell into the lowest third on a standard test of reading achievement. Although the Institute children were somewhat poorer in word recognition than the backward readers selected purely on psychometric grounds, the groups did not differ significantly in the incidence of reversal errors. Also, for both groups, reversals represented a small proportion of the total number of reading errors. The performance of the two groups differed in two respects: in relation to directional bias in letter reversals and in the presence or absence of a significant correlation between letter-reversing and word-reversing tendencies. It was concluded from this that directional problems do not loom large in importance in most cases of reading backwardness, but may provide an additional source of difficulty for some dyslexic children. Other aspects of the error pattern were remarkably the same for both groups. The bulk of reading errors made by both groups reflect their common difficulties in phonemic segmentation of words in the lexicon, in phonetic recoding, and in mastery of the orthography--difficulties, in short, with linguistic characteristics of words rather than with their properties as visual patterns.
研究了两组儿童在阅读孤立单词时的错误模式，尤其关注字母顺序和字母方向的颠倒。一组（研究所组）由8至10岁的儿童组成，这些儿童根据医学和心理教育标准被诊断为“诵读困难症”。另一组（学校组）包括小学二年级一个班级中的所有儿童（见利伯曼、尚克维勒、奥兰多、哈里斯和贝蒂，1971），他们在阅读成绩的标准测试中处于最低的三分之一。虽然研究所组的儿童在单词识别方面比纯粹根据心理测量标准挑选出的阅读落后儿童稍差，但两组在颠倒错误的发生率上没有显著差异。此外，对于两组来说，颠倒错误在阅读错误总数中所占比例都很小。两组的表现在两个方面有所不同：在字母颠倒的方向偏差方面，以及在字母颠倒和单词颠倒倾向之间是否存在显著相关性方面。由此得出结论，方向问题在大多数阅读落后的情况下并非至关重要，但可能给一些诵读困难症儿童带来额外的困难来源。两组错误模式的其他方面非常相似。两组所犯的大部分阅读错误反映了他们在词汇中单词的音素分割、语音编码以及正字法掌握方面的共同困难——简而言之，是在单词的语言特征方面存在困难，而非在单词作为视觉模式的属性方面。
