Phonological recovery in Spanish developmental dyslexics through the tip-of-the-tongue paradigm.

BACKGROUND Developmental dyslexics have difficulties accessing and retrieving the phonological form of words, in the absence of a deficit at the semantic level. The aim of this work was to study, through the Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) paradigm, the problems of lexical access in Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics and the relationship with their phonological awareness. METHOD A group of developmental dyslexics (14) and other children without reading difficulties (14), aged 7 to 12, performed a picture naming task of medium and low frequency and a task of phonological awareness. RESULTS The results indicated that dyslexic children generally show a greater number of TOT phenomena than the control group. Despite being able to provide semantic information of the drawing, they had difficulties retrieving partial phonological information. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that developmental dyslexic children have particular difficulty in accessing the phonological form of words, which may be interesting for the development of intervention programs for these children.