Dutch children at family risk of dyslexia: precursors, reading development, and parental effects

Abstract

The study concerns reading development and its precursors in a transparent orthography. Dutch children differing in family risk for dyslexia were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. In fifth grade, at-risk dyslexic (n = 22), at-risk non-dyslexic (n = 45), and control children (n = 12) were distinguished. In kindergarten, the at-risk non-dyslexics performed better than the at-risk dyslexics, but worse than the controls on letter-knowledge and rapid naming. The groups did not differ on phonological awareness. At-risk dyslexics read less fluently from first grade onwards than the other groups. At-risk non-dyslexics' reading fluency was at an intermediate position between the other groups at the start of reading. By fifth grade they had reached a similar level as the controls on word reading, but still lagged behind on pseudoword reading. Results further showed that the parents of the groups of at-risk children differed in educational level and reading skills. Overall, the groups of at-risk children differed on pre-reading skills as well as on reading development. These differences do not seem to stem from differences in intellectual abilities or literacy environment. Instead, the better reading skills of parents of at-risk non-dyslexics suggest that these children might have a lower genetic liability.

Literacy skill development of children with familial risk for dyslexia through grades 2, 3, and 8.

“…So, it is also possible that the group of atrisk nondyslexic children in the Dutch sample included children with difficulties in accuracy but not in fluency. This possibility is supported by the finding that in that study children with typical reading skills but with the familial risk differed from control children only in pseudoword reading in Grade 5 (van Bergen et al, 2010), a task which relies heavily on accurate grapheme-phoneme decoding ability. Interestingly, in another Dutch speaking sample the family-risk non-dyslexia and control children were more similar to each other when the classification was based on word reading fluency, word reading accuracy, and spelling accuracy (Boets et al, 2010).…”

“…No differences between the two groups with or without familial risk and no dyslexia, on the other hand, have been reported in tasks where other than phonological processing could be used instead or as support of phonological decoding, i.e. in word reading (Boets et al, 2010;van Bergen et al, 2010;Snowling 2003) and reading comprehension in adolescence (Snowling et al, 2007). No differences have been reported either in reading task, where there has been no time pressure,…”

“…Van Bergen andcolleagues (2012, 2010) have also found evidence for the continuity of genetic liability of dyslexia in Dutch samples of children. At the end of Grade 2, children with familial risk but no dyslexia scored higher than children with familial risk and dyslexia, but were impaired, as compared to controls, in all literacy measures (i.e., reading accuracy and fluency), and spelling (van Bergen et al, 2012).…”

“…However, in word reading fluency the groups did not differ anymore in Grade 5. The classification of children with dyslexia was based solely on reading fluency (van Bergen et al, 2012(van Bergen et al, , 2010.…”

“…It seems, however, that differences between the groups without reading difficulty and with or without familial risk are more clearly present early in the development of skills (Boets et al, 2010;Snowling et al, 2007;van Bergen et al, 2010). In addition, typical readers with or without familial risk have performed at the same level in tasks such as word reading and reading comprehension, where it is possible to make use of skills other than phonological decoding related skills (i.e., semantic and syntactic skills and contextual cues) to facilitate reading (Boets et al, 2010;Snowling, 2008;Snowling et al, 2007;van Bergen et al, 2010) or when there is less pressure, such as no time limit (Snowling et al, 2007).…”