f them do negatively impact early reading achievement in children exhibiting them. One study reported in the Journal of Learning Disabilities, conducted research on forty-five children with moderate to severe phonologic impairment and sixteen children without impairment. The ages of the subjects ranged from 3-6. Phonologic impairment causes a disruption of the speech/sound system, which makes a speaker regularly err. The results of the study suggest that there is a link between this speech disorder and poor reading achievement because of the way in which phonologic impairment impacts certain aspects of reading performance, “The children with phonologic impairment performed significantly worse than their controls on tasks of verbal working memory, phoneme segmentation, and letter identification” (Webster, Plante, and Couvillion, 1997, 1). The study found that productive phonologic impairment does affect children’s reading ability.
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