Omissions, Substitutions, Additions

Perhaps the most common omission in a young learning disabled child’s reading is the punctuation mark. The child’s oversight of the punctuation marks causes the child’s reading to lack inflection and variation. The pauses which the child makes may be several, but they usually occur at the wrong places because of hesitations. In addition to missing punctuations, many of the smaller words such as articles are also frequently missed. Sometimes parts of words, especially the endings, or descriptive and more difficult words may be missed. For instance, the child may read /A boy went walk/ for /A boy went walking/ or /a dog/ for /a fierce dog/, etc. The learning disabled also tends to substitute letters and sometimes whole words. Instead of reading /father/, the child might read /dad/, which is a meaningful linguistic substitution but nonetheless, an error from the visual decoding aspect. Critchley noted substitutions of opposite meaning, such as /this/ for /that/, /his/ for /her/, etc. Additions are also frequently noted. For instance, if the story started with /Once there was/ the child reads /Once upon a time there was/, etc.

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