This study investigated the effects of syntactic complexity on written sentence comprehension in compensated adults with dyslexia. Because working memory (WM) plays a key role in processing complex sentences, and individuals with dyslexia often demonstrate persistent deficits in WM, we hypothesized that individuals with dyslexia would perform more poorly on tasks designed to assess the comprehension of syntactic structures that are especially taxing on WM (e.g., passives, sentences with relative clauses). Compared to their nondyslexic peers, individuals with dyslexia were significantly less accurate and marginally slower on passive sentences. For sentences containing relative clauses, the dyslexic group was also less accurate but did not differ in response times. Covarying WM and word reading in both analyses eliminated group differences showing that syntactic deficits in adults with dyslexia are constrained by both WM and word-reading ability. These findings support previous research showing that syntactic processing deficits are characteristic of dyslexia, even among high-achieving students.

This exploratory investigation examined the effects of explicit phonological awareness intervention on each subcomponent of Baddeley's verbal working memory model. Fifty school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and concurrent deficits in word reading were randomly assigned to either an experimental (n=25) or a control group (n = 25).Children in both groups received individual traditional language intervention for four, 1 hour sessions each week for 4 weeks (16 hrs). The experimental group received an additional 20 min of phonological awareness intervention each day (5.3 hrs). Participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed the children in the control group across all verbal working memory measures. The strongest effects were found for the digit recall and word list recall subtests, which were used to assess the verbal short-term memory component of the model (i.e., phonological loop). The next largest effect sizes were reported for the subtests of the verbal working memory functioning (i.e., phonological loop and central executive). The smallest change was found on the recalling sentences subtest, which was chosen to represent the episodic buffer component. These results suggest that school-age children with SLI and concomitant word-reading difficulties in second through third grade who receive explicit phonological awareness intervention can make significant gains on untrained verbal working memory skills in a relatively short period of time which underscores the importance of phonological awareness intervention beyond first grade.

This study examines morphological awareness performance in 27 low-SES Spanish-English bilingual students in Grades 4 through 7. Given that 1) reading fluency is a strong predictor of reading comprehension and 2) bilingual students with poor comprehension are often slow, albeit accurate readers, the primary goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which speed of morphological processing contributes to both reading fluency and reading comprehension in bilinguals. First, comparisons of accuracy and response times indicated that monolinguals significantly outperformed bilinguals on every measure. Further, hierarchical regression analyses showed that morphological processing speed makes significant, unique contributions to both text reading fluency and reading comprehension which are at least equal to those made by morphological processing accuracy. These results underscore the important role of morphological processing efficiency in reading comprehension and suggest that interventions targeting the speed of morphological processing may improve reading comprehension skills for bilingual students.

College students with dyslexia were significantly less facile and flexible on this spoken sentence-production task than typical readers, which is consistent with previous studies of school-age children with dyslexia. Group differences in performance were traced primarily to limited working memory, and were somewhat mitigated by strong vocabulary.

A growing body of research suggests that individuals with dyslexia struggle to use graphs efficiently. Given the persistence of orthographic processing deficits in dyslexia, this study tested whether graph interpretation deficits in dyslexia are directly related to difficulties processing the orthographic components of graphs (i.e. axes and legend labels). Participants were 80 college students with and without dyslexia. Response times and eye movements were recorded as students answered comprehension questions about simple data displayed in bar graphs. Axes and legends were labelled either with words (mixed-modality graphs) or icons (orthography-free graphs). Students also answered informationally equivalent questions presented in sentences (orthography-only condition). Response times were slower in the dyslexic group only for processing sentences. However, eye tracking data revealed group differences for processing mixed-modality graphs, whereas no group differences were found for the orthography-free graphs. When processing bar graphs, students with dyslexia differ from their able reading peers only when graphs contain orthographic features. Implications for processing informational text are discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.