Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | As an introduction to the Special Issue, a tutorial examination of recent developments important to understand current research on reading acquisition is offered. The accent is put on the interrelations between studies of skilled adult performance, of effects of neurological damage and of early reading. The central puzzle of reading research is to identify the causes of the specific difficulties which acquiring literacy appears to entail. The problem has generally been attacked through correlational methods, based on the comparison of better and poorer achievers. The merits and shortcomings of that approach are examined and the need for linking differential studies to a general theoretical conception of the reading process and of its development is emphasized. The line of studies stemming from the hypothesis that a major difficulty in acquiring alphabetic literacy is to manipulate language at the level of phonemic segments is examined, and also the way the results of these studies can be related to current theories of lexical access. The limitations of the approach consisting of deriving hypotheses about development from theories of the adult stage are discussed and illustrated by data from studies of the reading performance of both children with normal reading achievement and developmental dyslexics. Finally, the possibility that sources of acquisition difficulties might be found at levels beyond that of word recognition is discussed. © 1986. |
