This study investigated qualitative differences in poor readers relative to normally achieving readers of the same reading level. Thirty-eight 9-year-old poor readers and forty 7- and 8-year-old reading-age-matched normally achieving readers from the United Kingdom were matched in phonemic processing and then given tests of memory span and visual discrimination of letterlike characters, were required to read different word types (regular, exception, and pseudoword), and were asked to complete a homophonic pseudoword test. The poor readers were worse at reading pseudowords compared to the controls, but this difference was unrelated to phonemic length or number of letters, or to the ease of producing analogies for the pseudowords. The results suggest that although there are no differences with reading-age controls in phonological processing, poor readers have worse grapheme-phoneme conversion skills and greater reluctance to relinquish the lexical route when appropriate. The results also showed that poor readers were slightly better at visual discrimination but had poorer memory spans.
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