Formation of Orthographic Representations in Spanish Dyslexic Children: The Role of Syllable Complexity and Frequency

Abstract

Recent studies have suggested that Spanish children with dyslexia have difficulty storing orthographic representations of new words. But given that the syllable plays an important role in word recognition in Spanish, it is possible that the formation of orthographic representations is influenced by the characteristics of the syllables that make up the words. The objective of this study was to determine whether syllabic frequency and syllabic complexity influence orthographic learning in children with dyslexia. We compared the performance of a group of dyslexic children with that of a group of typical readers on a task that involved reading short and long pseudowords six times; we manipulated the frequency and complexity of the syllables from which the pseudowords were constructed. The results showed that dyslexic children do not benefit from syllabic simplicity or frequency when it comes to storing orthographic representations as the length effect in the dyslexic group remained was unchanged after repeated readings, regardless of stimulus characteristics. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Neurophysiological Correlates of Top-Down Phonological and Semantic Influence during the Orthographic Processing of Novel Visual Word-Forms

“…This process is particularly important for the efficient use of new vocabulary [ 3 , 4 ]. Indeed, such cross-level network representation likely operates during the reading process, contributing to the parallel activation of various information types, and hence to the efficient whole-form recognition [ 2 , 5 , 6 ]. In contrast, when the activation and mapping across different levels of representation is reduced or impossible due to the lack of experience at one or more levels, the word processing likely becomes more effortful, slower, and possibly more serial in nature.…”

Investigating L2 reading aloud and silent reading in typically developing readers and dyslexic adolescents from grades 6 to 9

“…Indeed, the lower d' scores reveal particular difficulties to distinguish the real words from the nonwords. This is consistent with previous monolingual studies by Suárez‐Coalla and colleagues who found that dyslexic children took more time to develop new lexical orthographic representations, as evidenced by the extra time needed to show a decrease of the length effect, an index of the sub‐lexical (also referred to as phonological) reading procedure, after being presented with pseudowords during a training session (Suárez‐Coalla, Ramos, Alvarez‐Cañizo, & Cuetos, 2014; Suárez‐Coalla & Cuetos, 2017; see also Binamé, Danzio, & Poncelet, 2015), while a decrease of this effect is seen in typical readers with the same age or reading level.…”

Outcomes of a Readers´ Theatre Program on Oral Reading Prosody: An Exploratory Study in Different Environments

“…One of the characteristic deficits of dyslexic students is the inability to read fluently (Lyon et al, 2003), for whom the processes of learning to read and become skilled readers are arduous tasks. Studies show that no matter the language, dyslexics are more inaccurate and slower in reading single words, as in pseudowords and texts (Pae et al, 2017;Schaars et al, 2017;Suárez-Coalla & Cuetos, 2017;Ziegler et al, 2003). This seems to be related to the difficulty of acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and difficulty in developing orthographic representations of words (Suárez-Coalla & Cuetos, 2017), consequently, they fail to develop reading fluency.…”