Dyslexia : the Journal of the British Dyslexia Association

The Rose Report (Rose, Independent review of the primary curriculum (England); 2009) outlined a set of recommendations for the management of dyslexia in the United Kingdom after a range of issues were found. Despite these recommendations, recent reports indicate that issues are still prevalent in the diagnosis process and support offered for dyslexic children. The Delphi method was employed to gain parental consensus as to the most significant barriers to diagnosis and delivery of support for children with dyslexia, as well as solutions to overcoming these barriers...

This study had two overriding goals, (1) examine the stability of rapid automatized naming (RAN) in predicting reading achievement while taking into account two other frequently studied constructs, phonological awareness and fluid intelligence (Gf) and (2) examine the predictive power of RAN measured at age 4 on reading ability. The stable pattern of RAN development found in a previously reported growth model was challenged by relating phonological awareness and Gf to the model. Children (N = 364) were followed from age 4 to age 10...

The expanded simple view of reading (SVR) model suggests that word decoding, language comprehension and executive functions are necessary for reading comprehension. Children with reading difficulties (RDs) often have deficits in critical components of reading established in the expanded SVR model and alterations in brain function of reading-related regions. Maternal education could provide children with advantageous educational opportunities or resources that support reading acquisition. The primary goal of this study was to examine the contributions of maternal education to the behavioural and neurobiological correlates of the expanded SVR model...

Recent research indicates that awareness of the prosodic information present in spoken language could be an important factor for literacy development, and that adults with developmental dyslexia show impaired awareness of lexical prosodic information, while the phonological representations remain intact. We investigated lexical prosodic representation and awareness in Japanese children with and without developmental dyslexia. Lexical prosodic representation was investigated using a cross-modal fragment priming task, and awareness was examined using a fragment identification task...

Poor readers have lower academic achievement and increased anxiety, including reading anxiety, which may perpetuate lower academic achievement. We explored reading anxiety in university students, investigating whether the association between reading ability and academic achievement is mediated by reading anxiety (independent of general anxiety). Participants were students (n = 169, 69% female, age = 20.70) at an Australian university who completed an online reading assessment (decoding skills, phonological awareness, orthographical knowledge and comprehension), and a survey examining reading anxiety, trait anxiety and self-reported reading history...

Research has shown that children with dyslexia and children with a low socioeconomic status (SES) fall behind in terms of literacy acquisition, but a question remains regarding the cumulative effect of dyslexia and SES on linguistic, cognitive and reading skills. To examine the impact of cognition and environment on literacy development, we returned to the data set of 1,441 elementary school children (223 dyslexic readers and 1,241 typical readers) from low and medium-high SES backgrounds within Palestinian society in Israel who had participated in the development study of a comprehensive battery of tests in oral and written Arabic...

Perceiving and producing English phonemic vowel length contrasts is challenging for non-native speakers. According to multi-time resolution models, endogenous slow/fast rhythms contribute, respectively, in the right/left hemispheres, to long/short acoustic cue processing. This study introduced a perceptual training method implementing dichotic stimulation to improve /i:/-/ɪ/ processing by promoting hemispheric complementarity. Twenty non-dyslexic and 20 dyslexic French adults received 1 hr-training over 3 days...

The goal of this paper is to observe revision during handwritten text production of French students with and without dyslexia. Subjects with typical language development automate spelling during childhood and adolescence, progressively with experience, this enables them-according to capacity theory applied to written text production (McCutchen, Educational Psychology Review, 8, 1996, 299)-to allocate more cognitive resources to higher-level processes (Bereiter & Scardamalia, The psychology of written composition...

INTRODUCTION: Parents of children with dyslexia may be at elevated risk for parenting stress and mental health concerns. Our aim was to explore the emotional experience of growing up with dyslexia in Australia from parents' perspectives. In so doing, we also developed an understanding of parents' own mental health and support needs informed by their lived experience. METHODOLOGY: Seventeen interviews with mothers of children (9-14 years; 16 with a diagnosis of dyslexia) were analysed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis approach...

Accelerated reader (AR) is a computerized reading program commonly used in schools. The program aims to enhance students' reading achievement and encourage students to read more through goal setting and frequent reading practice. A meta-analytic review of the AR was conducted to analyse its effectiveness as an evidence-based intervention for improving student reading achievement, attitude, and motivation. This study investigated potential moderating variables, including publication type, participant, and study characteristics that impact student reading outcomes...

Expository paragraph writing is difficult to learn and teach. For many students, particularly those with learning disabilities, it is difficult to manage the multiple, simultaneous complex processes required for success. And for their teachers, writing is the content area in which they feel least prepared to teach. This intervention applied the concept of reverse engineering to instructional design to teach expository paragraph writing using a color-cued graphic organizer. The study evaluated the effects of using a systematic color code to highlight the alignment of where ideas originate in a graphic organizer to their development into a sentence within a well-organized expository paragraph...

Reading and spelling skills are important to communicate in today's literate society, however, the underlying processes of spelling skills are under-researched compared to reading skills. Our goals were to (a) study how the component skills of phonological, orthographic and morphological awareness are different in adults with and without reading difficulties, and (b) characterize the relationship between the component skills and reading and spelling performance in both skilled and poor readers. Participants (N = 37, N = 15 with reading impairments and N = 22 skilled readers) took part in the study where they completed several literacy-based measures...

Children with dyslexia, compared with typically reading peers, are at increased risk of internalising (e.g., anxiety) and externalising (e.g., aggression) mental health concerns; why this is the case is largely unknown. Our aim was to explore the socio-emotional experience of growing up with dyslexia from both child and parent perspectives. In so doing, we aimed to gain a better understanding of self-esteem and mental health in the context of dyslexia. One-to-one semi-structured interviews with 17 children with reading difficulties (aged 9-14 years; 16 with a diagnosis of dyslexia) and their mothers (interviewed separately) were analysed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis approach with a neurodiversity lens...

Dorsal stream is an important pathway for visual information transmission. As a part of the dorsal pathway, the middle temporal visual motion areas (V5/MT+) are mainly responsible for visual motion processing and the ability of visual motion processing is closely related to reading. Compared with alphabetic scripts, the visual structure of Chinese characters is more complex and there are no clear grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. So the ability of visual analysis plays an important role in Chinese character processing...

The aim of the study was to examine the accuracy of Estonian teachers' and support specialists' judgements of students' spelling skills and reading fluency and to investigate the provision of special education services to students as a factor influencing teachers' judgements. The sample included 11 classroom teachers, 8 support specialists, and 187 third-grade students. The judgements were collected using scales, and students' literacy skills were assessed using group and individual tests. The results indicated that judgements of reading fluency were less accurate than those of spelling skills...

The visual attention span (VAS) deficit hypothesis in developmental dyslexia posits that a subset of dyslexic individuals shows a multielement parallel processing deficit due to reduced visual attention capacity. However, the attention-based interpretation of poor performance on VAS tasks is hotly debated. The purpose of the present paper is to clarify this issue through a critical review of relevant behavioural and neurobiological findings. We first examine the plausibility of alternative verbal interpretations of VAS performance, evaluating whether performance on VAS tasks might reflect verbal short-term memory, verbal coding or visual-to-verbal mapping skills...

In many countries, intervention costs are not covered by public health care. A critical basis for deciding whether an intervention is covered or not is to analyse the relation between benefits and costs of the intervention, and to quantify the consequential costs. In this study, a cost-utility analysis was computed to investigate the costs of individualized dyslexia intervention while quantifying the benefit in terms of health-related quality of life in a sample of 36 individuals with dyslexia. In addition, educational outcomes and costs of untreated dyslexia for the society were estimated using information for class repetition, school success, and unemployment rates from previous studies and official statistics...

Children with dyslexia are at risk of poor academic attainment and lower life chances if they do not receive the support they need. Alongside phonics-based interventions which already have a strong evidence base, specialist dyslexia typefaces have been offered as an additional or alternative form of support. The current study examined whether one such typeface, Dyslexie, had a benefit over a standard typeface in identifying letters, reading words, and reading passages. 71 children, aged 8-12 years, 37 of whom had a diagnosis of dyslexia, completed a rapid letter naming task, a word reading efficiency task, and a passage reading task in two typefaces, Dyslexie and Calibri...

Magnocellular (M) deficit theory indicates that individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) have low sensitivity to stimuli with high temporal frequencies (HTF) and low spatial frequencies (LSF). However, some studies found that temporal processing and spatial processing were correlated with different reading-related skills. Chinese is a logographic language, and visual skills are particularly important for reading in Chinese. It is necessary to investigate the temporal and spatial processing abilities in the M pathway of Chinese children with DD...

Educational experiences often influence self-concept. Thus, readers with dyslexia can have low self-esteem and self-efficacy, and perceive themselves as less intelligent than their peers. They may develop creativity to succeed despite their difficulties but findings are inconsistent and rarely consider the effect of age of assessment on self-perception. This study included 145 university students (Mage = 24.43 years), 72 with dyslexia; of these, 53% had been assessed in childhood (Mage = 11...