Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Typical Readers and Dyslexics Readers

Reading involves decoding and comprehension components and, to become efficient, it requires a large number of cognitive and linguistic processes. Among those, the phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, the decoding, the fluency, the lexical development and the text comprehension development. The reading comprehension is strongly related with the development of vocabulary, oral language, linguistic skills, memory skills and ability to make inferences, and the world experiences of each individual. These processes become important only when the professional needs to deal with students presenting difficulties in learning how to read. The difficulty using the knowledge of conversion rules between grapheme and phoneme to the word reading construction characterizes the dyslexia, which is a specific learning disorder with a neurological source. These difficulties presented by students with dyslexia interfere in their learning process impairing the learning development. Knowing and following the reading development and its processes, as well as obtaining the punctuation of fluency abilities and students comprehension allow us to understand what happens when the student presents difficulties to read. This could help in the identification of learning disabilities and in the development of intervention programs

Screening Protocol for Early Identification of Brazilian Children at Risk for Dyslexia

Early identification of students at risk of dyslexia has been an educational challenge in the past years. This research had two main goals. First, we aimed to develop a screening protocol for early identification of Brazilian children at risk for dyslexia; second, we aimed to identify the predictive variables of this protocol using Principal Component Analysis. The major step involved in developing this protocol was the selection of variables, which were chosen based on the literature review and linguistic criteria. The screening protocol was composed of seven cognitive-linguistic skills: Letter naming; Phonological Awareness (which comprises the following subtests: Rhyme production, Rhyme identification, Syllabic segmentation, Production of words from a given phoneme, Phonemic Synthesis, and Phonemic analysis); Phonological Working memory, Rapid naming Speed; Silent reading; Reading of words and non-words; and Auditory Comprehension of sentences from pictures. A total of 149 children, aged from 6 years to 6 and 11, of both genders who were enrolled in the 1st grade of elementary public schools were submitted to the screening protocol. Principal Component Analysis revealed four factors, accounting for 64.45% of the variance of the Protocol variables: first factor (“pre-reading”), second factor (“decoding”), third factor (“Reading”), and fourth factor “Auditory processing.” The factors found corroborate those reported in the National and International literature and have been described as early signs of dyslexia and reading problems

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

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