Nature of reading difficulties in Brazilian children with development dyslexia

Abstract

According to an information processing approach, different reading strategies prevail at different stages and depending on print characteristics.The first stage, logographic, is marked by the prevalence of the logographic strategy in which recognition is limited to a few familiar words and plagued with paralexias. The second stage, alphabetical, is marked by the prevalence of a phonological strategy, based on grapheme-phoneme decoding, which permits reading new words, provided their spelling is regular. The third stage, orthographic, is marked by the prevalence of a lexical strategy, based on visual recognition, which permits reading irregularly-spelled words, provided they are familiar. Reading Competence Test (RCT) analyzes systematically the ability of using each strategy. RTC is made of seven types of print-picture pairs, i.e., a print (either a word or a nonword) associated with a picture. The task is to circle correct print-picture pairs and to cross out incorrect ones. The former consist of either regularly-spelled words or irregularly-spelled words associated with their corresponding pictures. The latter consist of either words associated with unrelated pictures, or nonwords nonwords that look similar to words, nonwords that sound similar to words, nonwords that neither sound nor look similar to words. Using RCT, this study analyzed reading strategies used by 13 dyslexic children and compared them to those used by 2196 1st-7th grade normolexic students. Results revealed that the difficulty presented by dyslexic children is eminently phonological: In word reading, dyslexic children performed equivalent to normolexic children, whereas in nonword reading, they performed significantly worse, especially for nonwords that look or sound similar to words. The study corroborated the notion that phonological processing is a major component of alphabetical reading and spelling, and that phonological processing disorders are mainly responsible for the specific reading difficulties that characterize developmental dyslexia.