Towards identifying dyslexia in Standard Indonesian: the development of a reading assessment battery

Abstract

With its transparent orthography, Standard Indonesian is spoken by over 160 million inhabitants and is the primary language of instruction in education and the government in Indonesia. An assessment battery of reading and reading-related skills was developed as a starting point for the diagnosis of dyslexia in beginner learners. Founded on the International Dyslexia Association’s definition of dyslexia, the test battery comprises nine empirically motivated reading and reading-related tasks assessing word reading, pseudoword reading, arithmetic, rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, forward and backward digit span, verbal fluency, orthographic choice (spelling), and writing. The test was validated by computing the relationships between the outcomes on the reading-skills and reading-related measures by means of correlation and factor analyses. External variables, i.e., school grades and teacher ratings of the reading and learning abilities of individual students, were also utilized to provide evidence of its construct validity. Four variables were found to be significantly related with reading-skill measures: phonological awareness, rapid naming, spelling, and digit span. The current study on reading development in Standard Indonesian confirms findings from other languages with transparent orthographies and suggests a test battery including preliminary norm scores for screening and assessment of elementary school children learning to read Standard Indonesian.

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“…Reading acquisition in the SI language has not been studied extensively to date, and some of the tests we used still require further optimization and validation (see also Borleffs et al, 2018;Jap et al, 2017). Other limitations of our pilot study are the relatively small sample size and the fact that all the students stemmed from lower-to middle-socioeconomic families, attended the same elementary school, and all but one spoke SI as their first language.…”

“…The majority of the behavioral measures used were taken from a recently developed assessment battery for beginner readers of SI (Jap, Borleffs, & Maassen, 2017). Additionally, we created and presented an auditory synthesis task (modeled after a Dutch version developed by Verhoeven, 1993, drawing its content from commonly used Indonesian first-grade textbooks), as well as two subtasks from the Snijders-Oomen nonverbal intelligence test (SON-R 6-40; Tellegen & Laros, 2011).…”

Factors Predicting Reading in Indonesian Adolescents

“…As a longitudinal study by Michelsson, Byring, and Björkgren (1985) has already found, the consequences of undetected dyslexia (or late detection) can be severely debilitating to individuals. Examining potential predictors of reading in SI is a crucial preliminary step in the development of a dyslexia-screening test-part of which has been developed in Indonesia (Jap, Borleffs, & Maassen, 2017). SI may serve to be an interesting case study of reading predictors.…”

“…Aside from the measures of reading and nonverbal IQ, six empirically motivated potential predictors of reading and decoding are tested. The test battery (all measures except for nonverbal intelligence and self-reported questionnaire) is taken fromJap et al (2017).…”

Sentence analysis in broca’s aphasia

“…Meanwhile, the left hemisphere of the back of the brain functioning to understand the utterances spoken by the speaker of the speech is also not functioning properly, see. 3,4 Based on the above description, of course, the phenomenon of a people with Broca's Aphasia is very interesting to study from the perspective of scientific language. 7 It is crucial to know that the record of sentences that is capable to be produced by people with Broca's Aphasia is clearly illustrated.…”