The aim of this study was to identify the neuropsychological characteristics of dyslexic children. Seventy-three children underwent neuropsychological assessment and were divided into two groups: a group with dyslexia (DG; n=39) and a control group (CG; n= 34). A general linear model showed a signifi cant difference between the groups regarding the following abilities: reading, writing and mathematics; forward and backward digit span tasks; semantic and phonological fl uency; number of completed categories and total number of cards in the Wisconsin Cards Sorting Test; as well as right and left discrimination on self and on other. These results suggest impairment in executive functions, phonological working memory and semantic memory among dyslexic children, rather than impairment of just phonological abilities, as suggested in previous studies. Keywords: Dyslexia, Wisconsin test, neuropsychological characteristics. ResumoO objetivo deste trabalho foi identifi car as características neuropsicológicas de crianças com dislexia. Foram incluídas 73 crianças divididas em dois grupos: um grupo composto por crianças disléxicas (GD; n=39), e um grupo controle (GC; n= 34). A análise de modelo linear geral mostrou diferença signifi cativa entre os grupos nas habilidades de leitura, escrita, matemática, dígitos ordem direta, dígitos ordem inversa, fl uência semântica e fonológica, número de categorias e total de cartas do Teste de Classifi cação de Cartas de Wisconsin, discriminação direita e esquerda em si e no outro. Esses resultados demonstram que podem existir défi cits nas funções executivas, memória operacional fonológica e memória semântica e não apenas nas habilidades fonológicas. Palavras-chave: Dislexia, Wisconsin Teste, características neuropsicológicas.

Phonological abilities demonstrated to be the main difficulty observed in children with dyslexia investigated in this study, corroborating previous studies in other languages. This demonstrates that, independently of the language regularity, phonological skills are fundamental to the diagnosis of developmental dyslexia.