Use of two alternative decoding strategies, one based on spelling-sound correspondence rules and one based on analogies, was investigated in fifth-sixth-grade dyslexic and normal children, as well as a group of younger normal readers matched on reading age to the dyslexics. Children pronounced nonwords (e.g., fody) constructed so that use of one strategy would produce a difference response from the other. Results indicated that dyslexic children lagged behind age-matched normals in the use of both strategies, and behind reading-age matched normals in use of analogies but not rules. An analysis of decoding errors indicated that normals were more likely to notice and make analogies to real words embedded in the nonsense words than dyslexics. In addition, the likelihood of an analogy response to a nonword was found to increase in all groups as the frequency of the analogy word increased. The latter finding suggests that the mechanism by which analogy words are accessed in memory is similar across groups, although dyslexics produce analogy responses less often.
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