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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]