Auditory Sequencing Difficulties

Basically, the temporal order of sounds in words is disturbed. The child is unable to retain in short-term memory store the sequence of sounds long enough to reproduce them in the correct order when reading out loud. Thus, while the individual letters may be associated with their sounds correctly and syllables identified accurately, when it comes time to pronounce them together the child reverts the order, as, for instance /emeny/ in place of /enemy/. Senf reported evidence of this in the learning disabled whose primary problems may be in word mixing in compound words, for example /mindwill/ instead of /windmill/, /shoehorse/ for /horseshoe/, etc. It is Denckla's observation that children with this type of problem tend to change with age from having problems in both reading and spelling to spelling alone, although they might continue to have difficulty with the phonetic aspects of a foreign language.

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