The ability to establish visual-phonological associations correlates strongly with reading ability. Yet, the cognitive processes underlying paired associate learning trajectories of individuals with typical and atypical reading profiles are still somewhat unclear. Here, this gap is addressed via three research questions: 1) How do task-irrelevant episodic details modulate visual-phonological binding performance in individuals with and without dyslexia?, 2) Is there a specific cross-modal binding deficit in adults with developmental dyslexia, even in the absence of spoken output demands?, 3) Can online measures elucidate paired associate learning mechanisms in beginning readers? And what is the relationship between paired associate learning response accuracy and reading outcomes in these children? To this end, I created novel visual-phonological associations involving Kanji characters, unfamiliar to the participants, and consonant-vowel-consonant pseudowords that follow English phonotactics. Over four empirical chapters, I establish that: 1) when retrieving newly learnt visual-phonological associations from memory, individuals with dyslexia appear to rely heavily on episodic cues, particularly on consistent contextual information, a behavioural pattern that suggests that this group may have more fragile memory representations than their typical reading counterparts; 2) the evidence for a persistent cross-modal binding deficit in adult developmental dyslexia in the absence of phonological output remains somewhat unclear. Different experimental paradigms employed in this thesis yielded different results, thus highlighting the need for further investigation to determine the circumstances under which PAL without phonological output elicits a deficit in dyslexia; 3) the relationship between paired associate learning and reading appears to be mediated by rapid automatised naming, an ability that involves cross-modal associative mechanisms that are similar to those employed in PAL, albeit with overlearned stimuli; 4) even when accurate, individuals at the lower end of the reading spectrum are less confident about their knowledge of newly learnt visual-phonological associations. This thesis has made significant contributions to the field of reading research by shedding new light on some of the cognitive processes involved in paired associate learning of visual-phonological associations.