Dyslexia speed problems in a transparent orthography

Abstract

This study was intended to help clarify the nature of dyslexia in Spanish. A sample of 30 children, 8 to 16 years old, participated in this study. Dyslexic children were compared to two control groups, a chronological age-matched control group and a reading level-matched control group. Measures included nonword and pseudohomophone reading (phonological procedure), homophone choice (orthographic procedure), and phonological awareness tasks (syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic level). For each task, accuracy (error percentage) and performance time were measured. Results showed a deficit in the dyslexic group on all the tasks, which was more evident when time was considered. With the results consistent with studies in other transparent orthographies such as Italian and German, speed problems seem to be more evident and relevant than accuracy problems in Spanish dyslexic children.

Eficácia terapêutica do programa de remediação fonológica em escolares com dislexia do desenvolvimento

“…Atualmente 22,23 , sabe-se que a memó-ria fonológica de curta duração ou loop fonológico não é muito e ciente nos escolares com dislexia, porém, pode-se veri car nos dados deste estudo que os escolares que não apresentam problemas de aprendizagem se bene ciaram com a instrução do programa quanto à memória de trabalho, o que gerou impacto sobre a compreensão da leitura desses escolares.…”

Does Training in Syllable Recognition Improve Reading Speed? A Computer-Based Trial With Poor Readers From Second and Third Grade

“…Reading fluency has long been neglected in interventions, most likely because of the stress on reading accuracy that has been at the center of intervention studies . However, as knowledge of the differences between languages in the manifestation of reading disabilities has accumulated, and the dysfluency of reading has been acknowledged as a universal characteristic of dyslexia across languages (Ziegler, Perry, Ma-Wyatt, Ladner, & Schulte-Körne, 2003) and as the main characteristic of RD in transparent orthographies (e.g., Protopapas & Skaloumbakas, 2007;Serrano & Defior, 2008;, research interest on reading fluency and its intervention has also increased.…”

“…Reading fluency has long been neglected in interventions, most likely because of the stress on reading accuracy that has been at the center of intervention studies . However, as knowledge of the differences between languages in the manifestation of reading disabilities has accumulated, and the dysfluency of reading has been acknowledged as a universal characteristic of dyslexia across languages (Ziegler, Perry, Ma-Wyatt, Ladner, & Schulte-Körne, 2003) and as the main characteristic of RD in transparent orthographies (e.g., Protopapas & Skaloumbakas, 2007;Serrano & Defior, 2008;, research interest on reading fluency and its intervention has also increased.The reason why reading fluency is a crucial part of successful reading is that it is associated not only with reading comprehension (Berninger et al, 2010;Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001;Kim, Petscher, Schatschneider, & Foorman, 2010;Schwanenflugel et al, 2006;Therrien, 2004;Wise et al, 2010) but also with motivation towards reading . The connection between reading fluency and comprehension is explained by an automatization process, which is thought to free processing capacity from decoding to text understanding however, see Adlof, Perfetti, & Catts, 2011).…”

Developmental Dyslexia in Spain

“…Students with reading disabilities have numerous lags in several cognitive (e.g., phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal and visual-spatial working memory, and executive processing) and academic (e.g., pseudoword reading, spelling, and vocabulary) areas, compared to average reading students. However, reading speed/fluency is considered the main indicator of dyslexia in the Spanish language, whereas reading accuracy is relatively intact [24][25][26][27][28]. Furthermore, some studies [29,30] have shown that the percentages of dyslexic subtypes in Spanish and opaque orthographies are quite different.…”

“…Because reading acquisition requires the child to learn the phoneme-grapheme correspondences, problems with phonological information lead to difficulties in reading acquisition. Different studies carried out in the Spanish language using reading-age-and chronological-age-matched designs have also found a deficit in phonological awareness in children with dyslexia [25,26,[30][31][32][33][34]. However, some studies [34][35][36] have shown that the origin of this phonological deficit is a deficit in speech perception, as they also found temporal-processing problems in speech perception in children with dyslexia [35].…”