Fluent reading requires the effective integration of orthographic and phonological information in addition to intact processing of either type. The current study used a rhyme decision task to examine phono-orthographic interaction in children with reading disabilities (RD) as compared to typically achieving (TA) children. Word pairs were presented auditorily, visually, or a combination of both, and varied in terms of the phonological and orthographic similarity of their endings. Phono-orthographic interaction was assessed first by comparing conditions with more versus fewer visually presented words, thus requiring different degrees of orthographic-to-phonological conversions, and secondly by comparing conditions in which the word pairs were conflicting (similar orthographically but dissimilar phonologically) versus non-conflicting (similar in both regards). RD children were particularly impaired relative to the TA group for conflicting conditions when one or more words were presented visually. Furthermore, the RD group showed a stronger relationship between nonword decoding and phono-orthographic conflict in the visually presented rhyme task than did the TA group. Together, such findings may indicate that increasing the phono-orthographic mapping demands of the task places a larger burden on RD children, and deficiencies in this mapping process may be an underlying factor in their reading disability. The current study also explored the alternative hypothesis that the ability to control attention to the task-relevant phonological information over the task-irrelevant orthographic information may contribute to the degree of phono-orthographic interaction, in addition to group differences in the integrity of the phono-orthographic mapping process. To this end, Garner Interference tasks using nonlinguistic auditory and visual stimuli were administered to assess attentional control abilities of RD participants and explore the relationship of conflict in this task to phono-orthographic conflict in the rhyme decision task as well as to reading skill. The lack of significant such relationships in our findings, however, suggests that the observation of stronger phono-orthographic conflict effects in RD children is most likely due to their difficulty with the linguistic orthographic-to-phonological mapping process. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]