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The aim of our study was to examine the relationship between NL (Native Language: Polish) phonological processing skills (verbal and phonological short-term memory, phoneme segmentation and blending, rapid automatised naming (RAN)) and the accuracy and fluency of NL and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) word and nonword decoding and word recognition skills of Polish students with and without dyslexia. Sixty-three (45%) high school and junior high school students with and 78 (55%) without dyslexia participated. We found that dyslexia, years of studying EFL at school and privately, NL phoneme blending and RAN predicted word reading accuracy in EFL, and dyslexia, years of studying EFL privately, and NL RAN predicted EFL word reading fluency. Dyslexia and NL phoneme blending predicted the accuracy, and NL RAN—the fluency of EFL nonword decoding. These findings confirm that difficulties in FL acquisition result from NL phonological processing deficits, characteristic of dyslexia. Our results also showed relationships between NL phonological processing and EFL reading that were analogical to the ones observed for NL. The pattern of relations between NL phonological processing, NL reading, and EFL reading was similar for reading fluency, but not for reading accuracy in the compared groups. Both NL phonological processing and NL reading facilitated EFL reading, though it was more conspicuous in the control group, which suggests that readers with dyslexia benefit less from their NL reading skills when learning to read in FL.

BackgroundThe aim of our study was to compare free writing skills in English as a native language and a foreign language (in English and Polish students respectively). English and Polish have dissimilar orthographies in terms of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules that is why we were curious to examine whether native and foreign speakers of English exhibit some similarities and/or differences in terms of writing and vocabulary, controlling the dyslexia factor at the same time.Participants and procedure28 English junior high school students: 13 with dyslexia (ED), 15 without (END), and 32 Polish junior high school students: 16 with dyslexia (PD) and 16 without (PND) participated. They completed tests measuring free writing and vocabulary in English as a native (ED and END) and a foreign (PD and PND) language.ResultsWe found that both PD and PND knew fewer words of different difficulty, made more grammar errors, wrote shorter compositions, and composed shorter sentences than ED and END, demonstrating the influence of a NL and a negative linguistic transfer between synthetic Polish and analytical English. In a free writing task, tough, they committed an equal number of phonological and orthographic errors, probably choosing best-known words, which did not allow to demonstrate the expected deficits of students with dyslexia due to phonological deficit.ConclusionsGenerally, both PD and PND, despite having studied EFL for on average 7 years, failed to equal their ED and END peers’ performance in a simple free writing task. Dyslexia and/or related spelling errors correlated with vocabulary in both Polish and English students, confirming that dyslexia may limit one’s mental lexicon for both NL speakers and FL learners.

The aim of our study was to examine the relationship between access to the mental lexicon, working memory and knowledge of English (L2) vocabulary. Analyses were undertaken amongst monolingual speakers of Polish (26 with dyslexia, 24 without) who studied English as a second language as part of their compulsory educational programme at school.We assumed that students with dyslexia would manifest deficits in access to the mental lexicon and verbal working memory, and would have a limited L2 vocabulary. We also assumed that better access to the mental lexicon facilitates knowledge of English (L2) vocabulary, and that this relationship is present in both the criterion and the control group. All of the students participated in both parts of the assessment, the group part (i.e., questionnaire, IQ test, two vocabulary tasks) and the individual part (i.e., psychological measures: verbal working memory, RAN, verbal fluency, and single word reading in L1 task). We found that students with dyslexia exhibited deficits in the speed of access to data from the mental lexicon. The predictive function of memory for vocabulary was more conspicuous in the control group; in the criterion group, the result might constitute a risk factor for L2 vocabulary acquisition in dyslexia, which may manifest with increased proficiency in word knowledge. Poor vocabulary knowledge renders the L2 learning experience difficult, as it impairs students’ reading comprehension, writing and conversational skills.