Cross-National Comparisons of Developmental Dyslexia in Italy and the United States

Abstract

This study was designed to examine whether the phonetic regularity of a language can significantly influence the prevalence and pattern of developmental dyslexia. Demographically matched samples of fifth-grade children in Italy (N = 448) and the United States (N = 1,278) were evaluated to identify children with specific reading disabilities. Reading disabled children with average intelligence were compared to normal controls on a series of neuropsychological tests to evaluate specific cognitive deficits associated with reading disorders in each country. The findings suggested that (a) dyslexia is more prevalent in the United States than in Italy, (b) reading disabilities are strongly associated with disorders of verbal processing in both countries, although some American dyslexics also show visual-motor deficits, and (c) there is a greater dissociation between reading comprehension and decoding in Italian than in English.

Cognitive Skill Transfer in English Reading Acquisition: Alphabetic and Logographic Languages Compared

“…Likewise, Wydell and Butterworth (1999) showed that orthographic knowledge in Japanese did not contribute to reading and spelling in L2 English. Such findings support the SDH (Liberman et al, 1974;Lindgren et al, 1985).…”

“…Identical findings were reported regarding Circassian-English (Abu-Rabia, 1997b), Dutch-English (Morfidi et al, 2007) Hebrew-English (Shimron & Sivan, 1994), and Korean-English (Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003). These findings support the SDH (Liberman et al, 1974;Lindgren et al, 1985), i.e., that orthographic skills are not transferred between languages but are rather language-specific.…”

“…Findings that demonstrate cross-language transfer of morphological skills support Cummins's IH (1979, 1981, while findings of non-transfer of morphological awareness from English to other languages with shallow orthographies support the SDH (Liberman et al, 1974;Lindgren et al, 1985).…”

“…Conversely, the above studies proved that phonological awareness does not transfer between languages differing in orthographic characteristics (logographic, alphabetic, shallow and deep), supporting the SDH (Liberman et al, 1974;Lindgren et al, 1985).…”

“…Furthermore, each language develops independently from another. The main focus of this hypothesis is consideration of the characteristics of the L1 orthography during the reading acquisition process of the different orthographies of the L2 (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter 1974;Lindgren, De Renzi, & Richman, 1985).…”