This paper reports a study contrasting dyslexic children against a control group of children without special educational needs (SEN) and a group with varied SENs. Children's abilities were compared on tasks assessing phonological processing, visuo-spatial/motor coordination and executive/inhibitory functioning; being targeted for assessment based on theoretical proposals related to the working memory model. Primary and secondary school level children were tested: 21 assessed as dyslexic with no comorbid difficulties, 26 children assessed with difficulties including dyspraxia, emotional/behavioural problems and attention deficits, 40 children with no known education-related deficits were controls. Results indicated both SEN groups performed worse than controls on working memory phonological loop measures. However, SEN groups could only be differentiated on phonological awareness measures: the dyslexics showing lower scores. Dyslexics performed as well as controls on working memory visuo-spatial scratch pad measures and one of two additional visual-motor coordination tasks, whereas the performance of the other SEN children was lowest on the majority of these measures. Central executive and interference measures engendered mixed performances, both SEN groups showing evidence of deficits in one or more of these areas of functioning, although, of the two SEN groups, the dyslexics seem to have performed the worse when digit name processing was required.

Skilled readers' eye movements were recorded as they inspected sentences in preparation for comprehension questions. The sentences were written around target words that had uneven distributions of information, in that the words were predictable, given either the first few letters or the last few letters. Some parts of these words can be described as being more important than others for successful word recognition, and the experiments asked whether inspection patterns reflect the uneven distributions. Four types of ten-letter word were used: words with highly redundant endings (e.g. engagement), with moderately redundant endings (e.g. repatriate), with moderately redundant beginnings (e.g. superstore), and words with informative beginnings and endings (e.g. amalgamate). Redundancy was defined operationally in terms of the number of possible completions of a word given the first few or last few letters. A highly redundant ending is therefore one that occurs frequently and cannot be used to identify the word. Words gaining just one fixation received this fixation nearer to the word's centre than in the case of the first fixation upon words gaining two fixations. The single fixation also had a longer duration, giving support to the notion of a convenient viewing location, which, when achieved, can lead to a net saving in inspection time. In the case of words with redundant endings gaining just one fixation, the fixation was nearer to the beginning of the word than in the case of words with informative endings, and this influence of word type upon the location of the first fixation was interpreted in favour of the parafoveal processing hypothesis of eye guidance during reading.

This article describes a series of studies investigating the relationship between developmental dyslexia and creative talents. Tasks performed by the subjects included: finding alternative uses for objects, producing drawn objects from basic shapes, completing a self-report inventory which assessed innovative styles of thinking, and the solving of problems which required some form of insightful thinking. The data indicated both differences between dyslexics and non-dyslexics and differences across age groups. Compared with non-dyslexics, dyslexic adults presented consistent evidence of greater creativity in tasks requiring novelty or insight and more innovative styles of thinking; in contrast, dyslexic primary and secondary school children performed on a level with their non-dyslexic peers on a test which involved making drawings from a number of different shapes (figural creativity). Little evidence was found for an association between creativity and enhanced visuo-spatial skills or between creativity and handedness. Despite evidence being provided for the hypothesized creative talents of dyslexics, it was not possible to confirm that these talents were constitutional in nature or that they were associated with enhanced functioning of the right hemisphere.

This paper investigates the relationship between phonological processing and reading ability amongst grade 4 and grade 5 Arabic speaking children in Egypt. In addition to measuring reading level, the study assessed the children's ability to identify rhymes, delete individual phonemes from words, retain and manipulate sequences of digit names and rapidly access verbal labels. Further literacy and literacy-related tasks required children to decode novel letter strings, to distinguish similar words, to identify words within letter chains and to correctly spell dictated text. A non-verbal ability measure was also included to allow comparisons to be made between a group of poor readers with good non-verbal skills (dyslexics) with a control group of chronologicalage-matched normal readers with equivalent average scores on the non-verbal task. Results indicated relationships between literacy ability, decoding and phonological processing within this cohort, as well as identifying differences between dyslexic and control groups that suggest Arabic dyslexics show signs of poor phonological skills. The study supports the view that Arabic dyslexic children have impairments in the phonological processing domain.

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Groups of Grade 3 children were tested on measures of word-level literacy and undertook tasks that required the ability to associate sounds with letter sequences and that involved visual, auditory and phonological-processing skills. These groups came from different language backgrounds in which the language of instruction was Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian or Portuguese. Similar measures were used across the groups, with tests being adapted to be appropriate for the language of the children. Findings indicated that measures of decoding and phonological-processing skills were good predictors of word reading and spelling among Arabic- and English-speaking children, but were less able to predict variability in these same early literacy skills among Chinese- and Hungarian-speaking children, and were better at predicting variability in Portuguese word reading than spelling. Results were discussed with reference to the relative transparency of the script and issues of dyslexia assessment across languages. Overall, the findings argue for the need to take account of features of the orthography used to represent a language when developing assessment procedures for a particular language and that assessment of word-level literacy skills and a phonological perspective of dyslexia may not be universally applicable across all language contexts.

An experiment is reported in which dyslexics (on average ten-and-a-half years old) showed marked Stroop interference of a colour word on the naming of a colour. This interference was larger than that shown by control subjects matched for chronological age, but not larger than that experienced by a group of control subjects matched for reading age (about eight years old). Dyslexics show interference consistent with their reading age. It is hypothesized that the resources available to dyslexics for controlling automatic word reading are less than those for non-dyslexics of a similar chronological age.

This paper reports a study of the reading and spelling skills of grades 1-3 Arabic-speaking children in Bahrain. Children were tested on their literacy skills (single word reading and spelling), their ability to decode letter strings (non-word reading) and measures of phonological awareness, short-term memory, speed of processing and non-verbal ability. These tests were included to identify the best predictors of literacy skills amongst Arabic young readers. The results were consistent with the literature based on tests of English-speaking children in that measures of phonological skills (decoding and awareness) were the best predictors of variability in reading and spelling among the Bahraini children. The results are discussed in terms of the literacy experiences of the children and the use of short vowels in Arabic writing.