Reading and Spelling Skills in Adults of Low Literacy

Abstract

We tested the basic reading and spelling skills of 50 men of low literacy, from prisons. We describe in detail their skills in decoding and encoding, performance IQ and short-term memory, judgments of phonetic similarities, and segmentation, all measured with multiple tasks. Compared with children at the same grade levels in reading, the men performed better on some tasks but worse on those that required a knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences, on which they resembled children who are poor readers. The men in this sample were surprisingly uniform in lacking segmentation and decoding skills. Our measures of segmentation turned out to be of two types, one of which is closely related to the ability to read and spell new words.