Phonological Awareness Deficits in Children With Dyslexia: The Impact of Working Memory as a Function of Modality of Test Administration

This study examined whether the phonological awareness (PA) deficit in Arabic speaking dyslexic children could be impacted by the presence vs. absence of verbal working memory (WM) as function of the sensory modality of administration (auditory vs. visual) of the phonological tests. Three phonological awareness (PA) tasks, i.e., phoneme manipulation, phoneme deletion, and spoonerism task, were administered in two sensory modalities: auditory and visual supported, along with verbal working memory tasks. Results showed that subjects with dyslexia (n = 19) performed significantly lower than typical readers (n = 30) in both PA modalities and working memory tasks. Differences were mainly found between the auditory and visual supported modalities in phoneme deletion and spoonerism for both groups. These results indicate that the PA deficit in children with dyslexia is not specific to the auditory modality and suggest that phonological representations are likely to be impaired in children with dyslexia. Findings shed further light on the issue of whether dyslexia is characterized by poor phonological representations or reduced access to these representations.