Strengths and weaknesses in reading skills of youth with intellectual disabilities.
Poor word reading in students with ID stems from weak phonological processing, so prioritize phonological awareness and memory instruction.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Channell et al. (2013) compared reading skills in youth with intellectual disability to typically developing peers matched on verbal ability.
They tested word recognition, phonological decoding, phonological awareness, and memory.
What they found
Students with ID scored lower on word recognition and phonological decoding.
The gap was driven by weaker phonological awareness and memory skills.
How this fits with other research
Grove et al. (2017) extends this work by showing phonological deficits shift with age. Young kids with ID struggle with rhyming and blending sounds. Older kids struggle with segmenting words into individual sounds.
Imam (2001) seems to contradict the negative finding, showing similar rime-recognition between beginning readers with cognitive disabilities and typical peers. The difference is that Imam (2001) only tested children already reading at second-grade level, a group with milder deficits.
Takahashi et al. (2023) places the reading gap in a bigger picture. Their meta-analysis found large movement-skill deficits across all domains in kids with ID, reminding us that reading is one of many areas needing support.
Why it matters
For your next literacy session, start with phonological awareness and memory drills before moving to word reading. Use brief auditory games like clapping syllables or deleting first sounds from words. Track which phonological skills each student lacks, and adjust targets as they age. Pair these drills with motor or participation goals to build whole-child programs.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Reading-related skills of youth with intellectual disability (ID) were compared with those of typically developing (TD) children of similar verbal ability level. The group with ID scored lower than the TD group on word recognition and phonological decoding, but similarly on orthographic processing and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Further, phonological decoding significantly mediated the relation between group membership and word recognition, whereas neither orthographic processing nor RAN did so. The group with ID also underperformed the TD group on phonological awareness and phonological memory, both of which significantly mediated the relation between group membership and phonological decoding. These data suggest that poor word recognition in youth with ID may be due largely to poor phonological decoding, which in turn may be due largely to poor phonological awareness and poor phonological memory. More focus on phonological skills in the classroom may help students with ID to develop better word recognition skills.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2012.10.010