Purpose: This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise.Method: Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a 'pea'/'bee' voicing contrast was evaluated using adaptive identification and discrimination tasks, presented in quiet and in noise, and a fixed-step discrimination task. Two further tests of word perception in noise were presented.Results: There were no significant group differences for categorization in quiet or noise, for across-and within-category discrimination as measured adaptively, or word perception, but average-readers showed better across-and within-category discrimination in the fixed-step discrimination. Individuals did not show consistent poor performance across related tasks. Conclusions:The small number of group differences, and lack of consistent poor individual performance, suggests weak support for a speech perception deficit in dyslexia. It seems likely that at least some poor performances are attributable to non-sensory factors like attention. It may also be that some individuals with dyslexia have speech perceptual acuity that is at the lower end of the normal range and exacerbated by non-sensory factors.

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Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of phonological and semantic storage, and phonological and semantic processing to reading comprehension in 123 Dutch children in fifth grade. We conducted regression and mediation analyses to find out to what extent variation in reading comprehension could be explained by storage and processing capacities in both the phonological and the semantic domain, while controlling for children’s decoding and vocabulary. The analyses included tasks that reflect storage only, and working memory tasks that assess processing in addition to storage. Regression analysis including only storage tasks as predictor measures, revealed semantic storage to be a better predictor of reading comprehension than phonological storage. Adding phonological and semantic working memory tasks as additional predictors to the model showed that semantic working memory explained individual variation in reading comprehension over and above all other memory measures. Additional mediation analysis made it clear that semantic storage contributed indirectly to reading comprehension via semantic working memory, indicating that semantic storage tapped by working memory, in addition to processing capacities, explains individual variation in reading comprehension. It can thus be concluded that semantic storage plays a more important role in children’s reading comprehension than previously thought.

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Background. Executive functions have been proposed to account for individual variation in reading comprehension beyond the contributions of decoding skills and language skills. However, insight into the direct and indirect effects of multiple executive functions on fifthgrade reading comprehension, while accounting for decoding and language skills, is limited. Aim. The present study investigated the direct and indirect effects of fourth-grade executive functions (i.e., working memory, inhibition, and planning) on fifth-grade reading comprehension, after accounting for decoding and language skills. Sample. The sample included 113 fourth-grade children (including 65 boys and 48 girls; Age M = 9.89; SD = .44 years). Methods. The participants were tested on their executive functions (working memory, inhibition and planning), and their decoding skills, language skills (vocabulary and syntax knowledge) and reading comprehension, one year later. Results. Using structural equation modelling, the results indicated direct effects of working memory and planning on reading comprehension, as well as indirect effects of working memory and inhibition via decoding (v 2 = 2.46). Conclusions. The results of the present study highlight the importance of executive functions for reading comprehension after taking variance in decoding and language skills into account: Both working memory and planning uniquely contributed to reading comprehension. In addition, working memory and inhibition also supported decoding. As a practical implication, educational professionals should not only consider the decoding and language skills children bring into the classroom, but their executive functions as well. Becoming proficient in reading comprehension is an important goal of primary education. Reading comprehension, however, is a complex process, which requires several higher cognitive skills. As proposed by the 'Simple View of Reading' (Hoover & Gough, 1990) and consistently supported by other studies, reading comprehension is largely predicted by decoding and listening comprehension (i.e., the linguistic processes involved in the comprehension of oral language, which is commonly assessed with language skills such as This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.