A Randomized Controlled Trial on The Beneficial Effects of Training Letter-Speech Sound Integration on Reading Fluency in Children with Dyslexia

Abstract

A recent account of dyslexia assumes that a failure to develop automated letter-speech sound integration might be responsible for the observed lack of reading fluency. This study uses a pre-test-training-post-test design to evaluate the effects of a training program based on letter-speech sound associations with a special focus on gains in reading fluency. A sample of 44 children with dyslexia and 23 typical readers, aged 8 to 9, was recruited. Children with dyslexia were randomly allocated to either the training program group (n = 23) or a waiting-list control group (n = 21). The training intensively focused on letter-speech sound mapping and consisted of 34 individual sessions of 45 minutes over a five month period. The children with dyslexia showed substantial reading gains for the main word reading and spelling measures after training, improving at a faster rate than typical readers and waiting-list controls. The results are interpreted within the conceptual framework assuming a multisensory integration deficit as the most proximal cause of dysfluent reading in dyslexia. Trial Registration: ISRCTN register ISRCTN12783279

Audio‐visual speech in noise perception in dyslexia

“…If a general deficit in multisensory integration is in fact the underlying cause of DD, one could expect that the impact of this impairment might be reduced by explicit interventions, preferably during early childhood. Interestingly, there is some evidence that audio‐visual training might indeed improve reading skills in DD (Ecalle, Magnan, Bouchafa, & Gombert, ; Fraga Gonzalez et al., ; Kast, Baschera, Gross, Jancke, & Meyer, ; Kujala et al., ). These training programs are mainly focused on increasing phonemic awareness and explicit learning of letter–sound associations, and typically involve tasks such as the discrimination of voicing pairs (e.g., ‘ba’ versus ‘pa’) and matching of spoken to written syllables (Hahn et al., ).…”

Contributions of Letter-Speech Sound Learning and Visual Print Tuning to Reading Improvement: Evidence from Brain Potential and Dyslexia Training Studies

“…The next question we addressed was whether the training we previously used to enhance reading fluency in dyslexic children [ 70 ] would also affect the brain potential responses that we observed to be associated with reading fluency. The training approach was inspired by the multisensory integration deficit account of dyslexia, proposing a deficit in automation of L-SS associations [ 49 ].…”

“…Thus, traditional interventions may not account for the time demands of multisensory integration at the neural level, which seems to take place within a very brief time window in skilled readers [ 76 , 77 ]. Accordingly, we employed a remediation procedure that addresses these automation demands by massive and intentional repetitive training of L-SS correspondences [ 40 , 69 , 70 ]. The training in automaticity was combined with explicit instruction to establish a strong understanding of phonemic and orthographic regularities as well as decoding skills.…”

“…Then, we review our longitudinal findings pertaining to the predictive power of our measures in relation to improvements associated with the first stages of a treatment program. The major focus here is on L-SS associations [ 40 , 69 , 70 ]. We will then review behavioral data obtained when children received extended practice enhancing their knowledge at the word level [ 71 ].…”

Underlying Skills of Oral and Silent Reading Fluency in Chinese: Perspective of Visual Rapid Processing

“…One of the most common symptoms for developmental dyslexia is a persistent failure to develop fluent reading skills, which can have severe academic, economic, and psychosocial consequences (Fraga González et al, 2015). Hence, it is necessary to explore the underlying mechanism of reading fluency in order to help these struggling readers to bring up their comprehension skills.…”