It is important to recognize that not all students with dyslexia are alike and there is no standard or “classic” diagnostic profile for dyslexia beyond the core problem with word recognition and spelling. Although the majority will be weak on tests of phoneme awareness, not all will. Some students have a more prominent problem establishing automatic or fluent word recognition (“sight” word recognition) than learning to recognize speech sounds in spoken words.
Those students often score low on measures of Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN). These students sound out words even after seeing them many times and tend to spell phonetically but not accurately. This subgroup generally has milder difficulties with reading than students with more serious impairments of phonological processing.
