The impact of dyslexia in higher education

Good literacy skills are a prerequisite for higher education. Even though reading and writing are considered subconscious processes, some students fail to perform well on these skills, and therefore experience problems during their studies. Higher education students who suffer from these difficulties are frequently diagnosed with dyslexia. The understanding of the neurocognitive profiles of higher education students with dyslexia has increased. Previous research showed that these students encounter difficulties with word reading and word spelling, but also with other skills ranging from phonological processing to working memory. Nonetheless, the impact of dyslexia is wider. Students with dyslexia also demonstrate problems with reading comprehension, writing and second language (L2) learning, skills that are essential for academic success. However, research on these topics is limited, as few studies have focused on these so-called secondary consequences of dyslexia. This thesis investigates the wide-range impact of dyslexia in higher education, such as its effect on word and text reading – investigated by means of the novel Flamingo Test – as well as L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) reading comprehension and writing. By comparing students with dyslexia to a matched control group, we found that students with dyslexia perform significantly poorer on word and text reading in Dutch. Both groups perform similarly on answering true/false and open questions after reading a text in Dutch, but poorer in English. Summary writing showed to be significantly more difficult in both languages for the students with dyslexia. Altogether, these findings stress the wide-reaching impact of dyslexia in higher education

The Flamingo Test:A new diagnostic instrument for dyslexia in Dutch higher education students

In this study, we present a new diagnostic test for dyslexia, called the Flamingo Test, inspired by the French Alouette Test. The purpose of the test is to measure students' word decoding skills and reading fluency by means of a grammatically correct but meaningless text. Two experiments were run to test the predictive validity of the Flamingo Test. In the first experiment, we compared reading times, error rates and, sensitivity and specificity of the Flamingo Test for samples of students with and without dyslexia. In the second experiment, we compared performance on the Flamingo Test with reading performance on two Dutch standard word reading tests: the Leestest Een Minuut voor Studenten (LEMs; 'one-minute word reading test for students') and the Klepel, a one-minute pseudo-word reading test. Again, students with dyslexia and matched non-dyslexic students were included. Our results show that sensitivity and specificity, as well as the positive predictive value (PPV), of the Flamingo Test are high, with even slightly higher PPVs for the Flamingo Test than for LEMs and Klepel. Together with the fact that the test is short and easy to administer, we believe that the Flamingo Test is a valuable new diagnostic instrument to assess reading skills

Distributive, collective and "everything"in between:interpretation of universal quantifiers in child and adult language

In this paper we studied the interpretation of sentences with the Dutch universal quantifiers alle (all) and elke (each) in collective, distributive and cumulative situations. In the first experiment, 25 adults and 30 children from 5 and 6 years old performed a truth-value judgement task. Adults and children show similar interpretations for collective and distributive, but perform different for cumulative. As a follow-up we performed a preference task. Participants gave their preferences for the three situations for both quantifiers. Children, regardless of the quantifier, prefer the distributive situation. Adults have a strong preference for distributive for elke, showing a wider range of interpretation for alle. These data clearly indicate that Dutch children do not yet have acquired the full range of restrictions for the quantifiers alle and elke.</jats:p