During the last two decades a clear body of evidence has been developing in favor of phonological processing deficit and/or speed of lexical retrieval – also known as naming speed – as explanations for reading difficulties (see Scarborough, 1998; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005 for reviews). It has been consistently showed that children at risk for reading failure and those identified with dyslexia often perform poorly on measures referring to phonological awareness (Elbro, Borstrøm, & Petersen, 1998; Schneider, Ennemoser, Roth, & Küspert, 1999) and the retaining of phonological information in working memory or successive processing (Papadopoulos, 2001; 2002a; Papadopoulos et al., 2004; Porpodas, 1999; Schneider, Roth, & Ennemoser, 2000) and/or naming speed (Wimmer, Mayringer, & Landerk, 2000). This has led researchers to an attempt to remediate reading difficulties by training phonological awareness and/or, particularly, letter naming speed skills in children early on (e.g., Schneider et al., 1999; 2000). There is, however, also growing agreement in regard to the limitations of such training studies. For instance, a recent meta-analysis of phonological awareness training studies reported that experimentally manipulated phonological awareness explains about 12 percent of the post-test word reading variance, and that the long-term effect is smaller (Bus & van Ijzendoorn, 1999).

An additional difficulty confronting designers of reading intervention schemes for children with special needs is that of devising a scheme that is both effective and cost-effective. The consensus of the above studies appears to be that schemes that specialize in just one component of the reading process prove not to be very effective and schemes that are not based on a systematic approach are not effective at all. For an approach to be effective, it needs to be systematic, comprehensive – covering all aspects of the early reading processes – and individual.

To answer this quest, we examined whether two different theory-based remedial programs, the PASS Reading Enhancement Program (PREP) and the Dyslexia Early Screening Test-Remedial Tool (DEST-RT) can be matched to at-risk children’s aptitudes, treating efficiently their reading problems. By comparing different cognitive and neuropsychological approaches we also try to answer the essential query why some children fail to benefit from remediation while others do, when their cognitive profiles are known. PREP was designed to improve selected aspects of children's information processing skills with ultimate aim to increase their word reading and decoding abilities (see original work by Das, Mishra, & Pool, 1995). DEST-RT, in turn, was based on a model of literacy development including both writing and reading, and their interaction. Three separate aspects of literacy were also considered – phonics, fluency, and meaning, as well as some aspects of hand-eye coordination, manipulation and motor skills and balance, in line with the Cerebellar Deficit Theory (Nicolson, Fawcett, & Dean, 1995).

Method

Twenty-eight children aged 6.6, matched on the basis of age, gender, parental education levels, non-verbal and verbal ability, were assigned to two experimental groups (n =14 in each group) and compared before and after a four-week intervention, in Grade 1, on a set of dependent measures including phonological (6 tasks tapping broad-  and 4 narrow- phonological skills), cognitive (successive and simultaneous processing from the Cognitive Assessment System–CAS; Naglieri & Das, 1997, and the Dyslexia Early Screening Test–DEST; Nicolson & Fawcett, 2004), rapid automatized naming (pictures, colors, digits, and letters), word reading (for both accuracy and fluency), spelling (orthographic choice and word chains) and passage comprehension tasks. A third group of children (n = 19) also experiencing difficulties with reading did not receive any treatment and was included as a control group (RD-C). All participants had been screened from kindergarten as being at-risk for developing reading difficulties, a finding confirmed a year later, as their word identification and word attack scores were below the 25^th percentile compared to norming data.

Results and Discussion

Preliminary results obtained through a series of Repeated Measures ANOVA, for each of the dependent measures, indicated group improvement in all measures over the course of development. In relation to remediation, PREP group appeared to perform comparatively better than both the DEST-RT and RD-C groups in all instances that were tested. However, the only significant interaction was observed in pseudoword fluency score F(2, 44) = 4.19, p < .05. The lack of other significant interactions is explained in part from the careful matching of the groups on the basis of their cognitive performances and their relatively low reading scores observed before the remediation (in both Kindergarten and Grade 1 pre-test). It is also possible that the follow up will yield stronger interaction effects.

Discussion revolves around the need for devising remedial schemes that will be both theoretically driven and cost-effective, leading, consequently, to substantial improvements in reading and spelling early interventions.