Late-emerging reading disabilities.

Abstract

Literacy, language, and cognitive skills were compared for 35 4th5th graders with early-identified reading disabilities (RD), 31 with late-identified RD (first seen after 3rd grade), and 95 normally achieving students. Late-identified reading deficits were heterogeneous; some children were weak in both comprehension and word-level processing, whereas others had deficiencies in 1 component of reading but were unimpaired in the other. Although most reading skill deficits were about as severe for late- as for early-identified RD, and profiles of associated characteristics were similar, few of the former had yet been identified by their schools. Third-grade achievement, retrospectively examined, had been higher for the group with late-identified RD, suggesting that their reading difficulties were not just late identified but actually late emerging. A great deal of knowledge and understanding about children’s reading disabilities has been amassed over the past few decades. The focus of most research has been early-emerging difficulties that are identified prior to the fourth grade. As noted by Chall (1983), however, there also occurs a smaller “second wave” of students who appear to undergo a “fourth-grade slump” in reading achievement. There has been almost no investigation of the nature and severity of these less typical reading disabilities (RD) that emerge after the primary grades. In this study, we compared the reading and spelling abilities and literacy-related skills of children with early- versus late-emerging RD. In practice, during the elementary and middle school years, there is typically an increasing emphasis on reading comprehension in curricula, instruction, and assessments (Anderson, Hiebert,