Phonological Abilities of Children with Dyslexia in Jordan: A Whole-Word Approach

Abstract

Dyslexia is a learning disability mostly evident in inaccurately recognizing a word, mainly because of the deficit of the phonological components of a language. This research aimed to investigate the phonological abilities of Jordanian Arabic (JA) speaking children with and without dyslexia using whole-word measures. Data from Jordanian dyslexic children were compared between three reading groups (poor readers, typical readers, and advanced readers) through three tests: (i) phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU), (ii) the Percentage of Consonant Correct (PCC) and (iii) the Proportion of Whole-Word Proximity (PWP). Findings show that the typical and the advanced readers had a relative score in pMLU, PWP and PCC, which were significantly higher than those registered by dyslexic and poor readers. Additionally, three phonological processes were found in Jordanian dyslexic children’s readings: omission, substitution, and metathesis. Omission was the most frequent process employed by Jordanian dyslexics, particularly in di- and polysyllabic nonsense words. The study concludes that whole-word measures can reflect the phonological abilities of children using both real and nonsense words.