A previous study (Hurford & Sanders, 1990) found that children with reading disabilities were deficient in their performance on a phonemic discrimination task. It was hypothesized that the deficit was related to the inability of disabled readers to process the phonemic information within syllables. The present study further investigated this discrimination deficit by examining the ability of 78 second, third, and fourth grade disabled and nondisabled readers to discriminate between syllables that were vowels and CV syllables that began with liquid and plosive consonants. As hypothesized, the disabled readers performed significantly worse than nondisabled readers. The disabled readers also performed significantly worse on the syllables that contained formant transitions. Unexpectedly, the younger disabled readers were as deficient processing the syllables that began with liquid consonants as they were processing the syllables with plosive consonants. © 1992.
