Presented at the 27th International School Psychology Association Colloquium. Athens, 13–17 July 2005

Subgroups of reading-disabled (RD) students are characterized by deficits involving word recognition, comprehension, and fluency. Due to the high degree of orthographic transparency in the Greek language rate deficits are expected to be more pronounced among RD students than accuracy deficits. The latter may appear less frequently given that serial decoding can be successfully employed even by novice readers. The validity of a subtyping scheme for RD, contrasting “accuracy-disabled” vs. “rate-disabled,” was examined in a stratified-random sample of 400 students in Grades 2-4 attending schools in urban and rural parts of Greece. Participating children were tested on measures of vocabulary, rapid automatized naming, phonological decoding, understanding of syntax and morphology rules, reading fluency, text comprehension, and spelling. All children were also screened for signs of mood and anxiety disorders, psychosocial adjustment problems, and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Analyses focused on children who performed in the lower quartile on text comprehension measures. First, we examined the predictive validity of individual measures and subsequently derived latent variables related to the rate and accuracy factors. Student classification (typical vs. RD) was examined in more detail using a series of linear discriminant functions based on the predictors. Results confirmed the key role of reading fluency as a contributor to text comprehension above and beyond the role of phonological decoding across grades.