This study compared spoken word recognition in 39 reading disabled and 61 normally achieving children on a speech gating task and examined the relationships among speech recognition, phonemic awareness, and reading. Children listened to increasingly longer segments of the speech input from word onset and guessed the identity of the target word. Words were either high or low frequency and had few or many similarly sounding word neighbors in the listener's lexicon. Reading disabled children needed more of the speech input than normally achieving peers to identify target words with few similarly sounding neighbors. The amount of speech input for recognition predicted the youngest children's reading performance, after variance due to measures of phonemic awareness and receptive vocabulary were accounted for. The argument is developed that spoken word recognition may be developmentally delayed in those with reading disabilities and may play a causal role in these children's failure to acquire adequate alphabetic knowledge.
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