Characteristics of Reading Disabilities: "Bottom-Up" Areas

Areas that are not deficient:

• Basic visual information-processing
• Use of sentence boundary as a recoding cue
• Naming speed

Areas of deficit:

Word recognition and decoding

• Automatization of decoding
• Awareness of the sound structure of speech (phonological awareness)
• Use of a phonetic code in short-term memory (using an auditory code to process visual material)

Characteristics of Reading Disabilities: "Top-Down" Areas

Areas that are not deficient:

• Use of content to speed word recognition
• General language comprehension
• Organization of long-term memory
• Automatic semantic processing

Areas of deficit:

• Knowledge about orthographic structure
• Purposive semantic processing
• Strategic short-term memory deficits
• Use of partial information

Sources:

    Spear, L.C., & Sternberg, R.J. (1987). An information-processing framework for understanding reading disability. In S.J. Ceci (Ed.), Handbook of cognitive, social, and neuropsychological aspects of learning disabilities (vol. 2, pp. 3-32). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Spear-Swirling, L.C., & Sternberg, R.J. (1994). The road not taken: An integrative theoretical model of reading disability. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27, 91-103, 122.

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