The phonological and visual basis of developmental dyslexia in Brazilian Portuguese reading children

Abstract

Evidence from opaque languages suggests that visual attention processing abilities in addition to phonological skills may act as cognitive underpinnings of developmental dyslexia. We explored the role of these two cognitive abilities on reading fluency in Brazilian Portuguese, a more transparent orthography than French or English. Sixty-six children with developmental dyslexia and normal Brazilian Portuguese children participated. They were administered three tasks of phonological skills (phoneme identification, phoneme, and syllable blending) and three visual tasks (a letter global report task and two non-verbal tasks of visual closure and visual constancy). Results show that Brazilian Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia are impaired not only in phonological processing but further in visual processing. The phonological and visual processing abilities significantly and independently contribute to reading fluency in the whole population. Last, different cognitively homogeneous subtypes can be identified in the Brazilian Portuguese population of children with developmental dyslexia. Two subsets of children with developmental dyslexia were identified as having a single cognitive disorder, phonological or visual; another group exhibited a double deficit and a few children showed no visual or phonological disorder. Thus the current findings extend previous data from more opaque orthographies as French and English, in showing the importance of investigating visual processing skills in addition to phonological skills in children with developmental dyslexia whatever their language orthography transparency.

Visual attention span deficits and assessing causality in developmental dyslexia

“…http://dx.doi. org/10.1038/nrn3836-c1 (2015)) 2 , Lobier and Valdois bring together 12 of their studies to argue that a visual attention (VA) span deficit meets the criteria that are required to demonstrate causality in developmental dyslexia [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] . Unfortunately, all of the studies that were discussed used letters to assess VA span; thus, the demonstrated deficit only affects letters and is causally ambiguous , as the individuals with dyslexia and control individuals that were studied differed dramatically in their experience of recoding letters to sound.…”

Desempenho de escolares com transtorno do déficit de atenção com hiperatividade em habilidades metalinguísticas, leitura e compreensão leitora

“…The identification and manipulation skills of phonemes are considered as complex, since the student is required to perform two operations. Besides demanding greater attention to the stimulus, the student must retain and execute the requested instruction, organize and plan the response, besides retrieving the information stored for some time in his/her memory 25,[34][35][36] .…”

“…When considering ADHD diagnosis, it becomes important to highlight the factors which interfere in the metalinguistic tasks performance, such as attention deficit, behavioral maladaptation, difficulties in following instructions and the necessity of longer periods to complete tasks 30,35 .…”

PROLEC-T - prova de compreensão de texto: análise de suas características psicométricas

“…As PROLEC são amplamente utilizadas na clínica fonoaudiológica e na psicopedagógica para o rastreio de distúrbios específi -cos de aprendizagem, em especial a dislexia, e também como um guia para orientar programas de recuperação. Além dessa utilidade clínica, segundo seus autores, é também recomendada para pesquisadores da área da saúde e da educação, sendo já utilizada em diferentes estudos (Germano, Reilhac, Capellini, & Valdois, 2014;Macedo, Santos, Oliveira, & Martins-Reis, 2015;Machado & Almeida, 2014;Nalom, Soares, & Cárnio, 2015).…”