Simply a Speech Impairment? Literacy Challenges for Individuals with Severe Congenital Speech Impairments

Individuals with severe congenital speech impairments frequently experience significant difficulties acquiring even basic literacy skills. It is likely that many factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the individuals, co-occur to influence success in literacy acquisition. This paper focuses on the extent to which a severe congenital speech impairment may affect the acquisition of phonological processing skills traditionally considered to be implicated in literacy success. Results on a lexical decision task are presented and discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of the relationship between severe speech impairments, phonological working memory, and specification of phonological representations.