Dyslexia最新文献

Primary school teachers should be able to identify struggling learners who may have dyslexia type learning difficulties, in order to facilitate early intervention. Considering this importance, a nationwide survey was conducted in Sri Lanka with 705 primary school teachers among randomly selected schools in order to investigate teacher readiness to identify learners with dyslexia. Teacher readiness was measured based on three variables (a) teachers' self-reported basic knowledge of dyslexia, (b) their self-reported awareness of local tools and processes used to identify dyslexia and (c) their self-reported attitudes towards engaging in identifying dyslexia. Data were gathered through a structured questionnaire. Logistic regression analyses revealed that the participants had minimal readiness to engage in identifying learners with dyslexia. However, most of them showed positive attitudes towards actively engaging in identifying dyslexia.

This research was carried out according to the Italian Consensus Conference on Specific Learning Disability guidelines for screening initiatives. It describes a three-year screening project involving 2.469 students, aged 8-15 years, from various classes of primary, lower and upper secondary schools of Sicily. Students were assessed for reading and spelling skills. Overall, 4.9% met the risk criteria for suspected reading disorder, 6.1% for spelling disorder, while 8.5% for both conditions. Results showed that out of 932 pupils in the primary school, 4.6% met the risk criteria for reading disorder and 6.5% for spelling disorder; out of 855 pupils of the lower secondary school, 5.3% for reading disorder and 5.5% for spelling disorder; out of 652 pupils of the upper secondary school, 4.9% for reading disorder and 6.1% for spelling disorder. No significant difference in the prevalence of students at risk of reading disorder or spelling disorder, within the three grade-levels over 3 years, was found. At project conclusion further clinical investigation to verify the screening results on student sub-sample (57%) was carried out. The percentage of students with SLD was equal to 3.15%, in the primary school, 3.76% in the lower secondary school and 2.51%, in the upper secondary school.

Dyslexia is a reading disability that is characterized by when an individual has trouble in rapid and accurate word decoding. This study developed, piloted and assessed the validity and reliability of three instruments: Rapid Automatized Scale (RANS), Arabic Reading Ability Scale (ARAS) and Phonological Awareness Scale (PAS), on a sample of 700 students (aged 8-9 years). Four groups (n = 30) were formed based on the participants' results of the three instruments; Double Deficit (DD), Rapid Automatized Naming Deficit (RAND), Phonological Awareness Deficit (PAD) and No Deficit groups. Content validities of the instruments were supported using published reports; though educational experts further revised RANS. It found a significant inverse correlation between the PA test score and RAN (mistakes and time) score (r = -.44; p < .001), and a significant positive correlation between RAN mistakes and RAN time (r = .47; p < .001). Acceptable internal reliability of the RANS was demonstrated by a Cronbach's alpha test coefficient of α = .85 (>.70; acceptable). High inter-rater reliability tests were observed for the three instruments (r ≥ .86, p < .001). The three instruments can predict reading difficulties and dyslexia in Arabic-speaking populations.

Previous research has investigated how psychologists identify dyslexia in school-aged children. However, it is presently unclear how psychologists diagnose dyslexia in adults. This study aimed to explore psychologists' understandings and experiences in how they assess adults for dyslexia. Nine psychologists in Australia were recruited from professional associations and interviewed using a semi-structured schedule. After member checks, transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The results suggested that participants' assessment practices with adults were similar to those used with children. However, participants were not confident in assessing adults due to a lack of an empirical base and training, and appropriately normed tools. Moreover, participants relied on their clinical judgment to help overcome barriers unique to the assessment of adults including obtaining an accurate developmental history and determining the relevancy of academic intervention for a formal diagnosis. Participants recommended (better) training and accessible research about how to efficaciously diagnose adults with dyslexia. The robustness of current diagnostic tools for equitably identifying adults with dyslexia was questioned by some participants. There is a need for national guidelines in Australia to support psychologists in identifying adults with dyslexia. International research and guidelines have an important role to play in informing this process.

Background: Dyslexia is a neurobiological condition affecting phonological processing and characterized by reading and phonological awareness difficulties. We assessed correlations between dyslexia knowledge and five independent variables among early elementary teachers in Massachusetts.

Methods: We designed a survey based on two published assessment tools and surveyed 92 early elementary teachers. Using univariate and multivariate linear regression models, we assessed the relationships among knowledge (dependent variable) and confidence, feelings of preparedness, years of teaching experience, informal education and professional development opportunities (independent variables).

Results: The mean knowledge score was 68 ± 14%; teachers performed best on questions about perceptions of dyslexia, classroom management/teaching strategies and some dyslexia characteristics. Informal education and years of teaching experience were consistently positively associated with knowledge.

Discussion and conclusions: Formal training and professional development opportunities may need to focus more specifically on learning disabilities and dyslexia. Teachers should also have input on professional development needs. Our findings suggest a need for additional studies on strategies to improve educator knowledge of dyslexia and assess outcomes.

Auditory research in developmental dyslexia proposes that deficient auditory processing of speech underlies difficulties with reading and spelling. Focusing predominantly on phonological processing, studies have not yet addressed the role of the speaker-related (indexical) properties of speech that enable the formation of phonological representations. Here, we assess auditory processing of indexical characteristics cueing a speaker's regional dialect and gender to determine whether dyslexia constraints recognition of dialect features and voice gender. Adults and children aged 11–14 years with dyslexia and their age-matched controls responded to 360 unique sentences extracted from spontaneous conversations of 40 speakers. In addition to the original unprocessed speech, there were two focused filtered conditions (using lowpass filtering at 400 Hz and 8-channel noise vocoding) probing listeners' responses to segmental and prosodic cues. Compared with controls, both groups with dyslexia were significantly limited in their abilities to recognize dialect features from either set of cues. The results for gender suggest that their comparatively worse gender recognition in the noise-vocoded condition was possibly related to poor temporal resolution. We propose that the deficient processing of indexical cues by individuals with dyslexia originates in peripheral auditory processes, of which impaired processing of relevant temporal cues in amplitude envelope is a likely candidate.

The primary purpose of this study was to compare the working memory performance of monolingual English-speaking second^-grade children with dyslexia (N = 82) to second-grade children with typical development (N = 167). Prior to making group comparisons, it is important to demonstrate invariance between working memory models in both groups or between-group comparisons would not be valid. Thus, we completed invariance testing using a model of working memory that had been validated for children with typical development (Gray et al., 2017) to see if it was valid for children with dyslexia. We tested three types of invariance: configural (does the model test the same constructs?), metric (are the factor loadings equivalent?), and scalar (are the item intercepts the same?). Group comparisons favoured the children with typical development across all three working memory factors. However, differences in the Focus-of-Attention/Visuospatial factor could be explained by group differences in non-verbal intelligence and language skills. In contrast, differences in the Phonological and Central Executive working memory factors remained, even after accounting for non-verbal intelligence and language. Results highlight the need for researchers and educators to attend not only to the phonological aspects of working memory in children with dyslexia, but also to central executive function.

The current study investigated the extraction of orthographic and phonological structure of written words in adults with dyslexia. In adults without learning difficulties, Chetail and Content showed that orthographic structure, as determined by the number of vowel letter clusters, influences visual word length estimation. The authors also found a phonological effect determined by the number of syllables of words. In the present study, 22 French-speaking students diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood and 22 students without learning disabilities were compared. All participants performed the task of estimating word length. The pattern of results obtained by Chetail and Content was replicated: length estimates were biased by both the number of syllables and the number of vowel letter clusters. The study showed a significant interaction between phonological bias and group. The phonological effect was less important in students with dyslexia, suggesting reduced sensitivity to phonological parsing in reading. In contrast, the orthographic effect did not differ significantly between groups, suggesting that the sensitivity to the orthographic structure of written words is preserved in students with dyslexia despite their low-quality orthographic representations. We conclude that there is no systematic association between sensitivity to the structure of representations and quality of their content.

The goal of this study was to examine the reading performance of French typically developing readers and dyslexic adolescents from grades 6 to 9 in English as a second language (L2) learned in a school context. Lexicality effects and the impact of two sub-lexical variables, that is cross-language orthographic markedness and congruency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), were investigated in three tasks: L2 reading aloud and lexical decision, and L2-to-L1 translation. English words and nonwords were divided into three conditions: (a) marked condition in which items have an L2-specific orthographic pattern (e.g., town), (b) unmarked congruent condition in which items have an L1/L2 shared orthography and similar GPCs across languages (e.g., fast) and (c) unmarked incongruent condition that contains incongruent GPCs across languages (e.g., dirt). The results yielded a significant deficit in dyslexic readers in all three tasks, suggesting poor decoding but also poor lexical orthographic representations in L2 and difficulties in connecting form to semantic representations. This deficit was mostly observed for the unmarked incongruent conditi-on, highlighting the need to carefully manipulate the sub-lexical features of items when examining L2 reading. The results are discussed in relation to the cross-language transfer hypothesis and to mono- and bilingual models of reading.