Writing proficiency in English as L2 in Spanish children with dyslexia

Producción CientíficaDifferent studies have demonstrated that people with dyslexia have difficulties in acquiring fluent reading and writing. These problems are also evident when they learn a second language. The aim of our study was to investigate if there is a linguistic transfer effect for writing in children with dyslexia when they face tasks in English (L2), as well as the possible influence of other linguistic skills (spelling, vocabulary and reading) in English (L2) and in Spanish (L1). Participants completed a series of tasks both in Spanish and English: a picture naming task, a word reading task, a word spelling task, and a written composition of which we analysed its quality through different variables provided by the Coh-metrix software. Our results revealed that children with dyslexia show similar or parallel performance in written composition in both languages, which could imply a language transfer effect from L1 and L2. Besides, basic language skills are related to the characteristics of written composition to a greater extent in English than in Spanish, suggesting the impact of these on the quality of written composition.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, (grant PID2019-106868 GB-I00)Publicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCL

The role of reading fluency in children's text comprehension

Understanding a written text requires some higher cognitive abilities that not all children have. Some children have these abilities, since they understand oral texts; however they have difficulties with written texts, probably due to problems in reading fluency. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of reading fluency are related to reading comprehension. Four expositive texts, two written and two read by the evaluator, were presented to a sample of 103 primary school children (third and sixth grade). Each text was followed by four comprehension questions. From this sample we selected two groups of participants in each grade, 10 with good results in comprehension of oral and written texts, and 10 with good results in oral and poor in written comprehension. These 40 subjects were asked to read aloud a new text while they were recorded. Using Praat software some prosodic parameters were measured, such as pausing and reading rate (number and duration of the pauses and utterances), pitch and intensity changes and duration in declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences and also errors and duration in words by frequency and stress. We compared the results of both groups with ANOVAs. The results showed that children with less reading comprehension made more inappropriate pauses and also intersentential pauses before comma than the other group and made more mistakes in content words; significant differences were also found in the final declination of pitch in declarative sentences and in the F0 range in interrogative ones. These results confirm that reading comprehension problems in children are related to a lack in the development of a good reading fluency.Programa Severo Ochoa (FICYT): BP14-038 Proyecto del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: PSI2012-3191

Phonological recovery in Spanish developmental dyslexics through the tip-of-the-tongue paradigm

Recuperación fonológica en disléxicos evolutivos españoles mediante el paradigma de la punta de la lengua. Antecedentes: los disléxicos evolutivos tienen dificultades para acceder y recuperar la forma fonológica de las palabras, sin presentar un déficit a nivel semántico. El propósito de este trabajo era estudiar, a través del paradigma del fenómeno de la punta de la lengua, los problemas de acceso léxico en niños con dislexia evolutiva y su posible relación con la conciencia fonológica. Método: un grupo de niños disléxicos (14) y otro grupo sin dificultades lectoras (14), con edades comprendidas entre 7 y 12 años, realizaron una tarea de denominación de dibujos de frecuencia media - baja y una tarea de conciencia fonológica. Resultados: los resultados indicaron que los niños disléxicos generalmente presentan mayor número de fenómenos de punta de la lengua que el grupo control. A pesar de ser capaces de dar información semántica acerca del dibujo, los disléxicos presentan dificultades para recuperar la información parcial fonológica. Conclusiones: los resultados indican que los disléxicos evolutivos tienen particular dificultad para acceder a la forma fonológica de las palabras. Esto puede ser interesante para desarrollar programas de intervención para estos niños

¿Es la dislexia un trastorno perceptivo-visual? Nuevos datos empíricos

Numerosos estudios han demostrado que el origen de la dislexia evolutiva es de tipo fonológico, ya que los disléxicos tienen dificultades importantes para procesar fonemas. Sin embargo, se siguen utilizando criterios visuales para diagnosticar la dislexia, así como para desarrollar métodos de intervención. Este estudio pretende comprobar si realmente existen problemas perceptivo-visuales en los niños disléxicos. Un grupo de niños disléxicos evolutivos y otro grupo de niños sin dificultad lectora, emparejados en edad cronológica, participaron en dos experimentos. Uno de los estudios estaba basado en el test Reversal y el otro era una tarea de decisión visual, en la cual los participantes tenían que decidir si dos letras eran iguales o diferentes. Se presentaron 40 pares de letras, para medir tiempos de reacción y errores. Los disléxicos tenían un rendimiento similar a los controles en la detección de estímulos visuales diferentes. Los disléxicos evolutivos no parecen presentar problemas perceptivo-visuales, sino una dificultad específica para recuperar el código fonológico de los grafemas

Writing impairments in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia

This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8-12 years. Children with and without dyslexia (n = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by manipulating lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency and word length in a copying task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that children with dyslexia produced longer written latencies than chronological age-matched (CA) controls, more errors than CA and reading age-matched (RA) controls and writing durations similar to CA controls. Latencies were more affected by frequency, consistency and length in the DD group and the RA group than in CA controls. Children in the DD and RA groups produced longer written latencies in the copying than in the spelling-to-dictation task, while controls in the CA group were not affected by the task. Results indicate that spelling impairments in Spanish children with dyslexia affect the relative involvement of lexical and sublexical information during handwriting. Meanwhile effects on writing speed seem to be related to deficits in reading ability, accuracy scores seem to be poorer than expected by children’s reading skill

Words, better one at a time: Children with dyslexia facing the reading of words presented simultaneously

Diferentes estudios han reportado que los lectores competentes se benefician de la presentación simultánea de palabras durante la lectura. Por otra parte, la existencia de representaciones ortográficas de las palabras parece facilitar el inicio de la codificación fonológica de la palabra contigua, que se iniciaría durante el proceso de articulación de la palabra target. Sin embargo, este beneficio podría no darse en los niños con dislexia, considerando su escasa competencia lectora. El objetivo de este estudio era investigar si los niños con dislexia se benefician de la presentación simultánea de palabras escritas y si esto depende de las características de los estímulos. Para ello, niños con y sin dislexia participaron en dos tareas de lectura. En la primera tarea, las palabras, manipuladas en frecuencia y longitud, se presentaban de manera aislada; mientras que la segunda tarea se trataba de listas de tres palabras, en las que se manipulaba la frecuencia y longitud de la tercera palabra. Los resultados pusieron de relieve las dificultades lectoras en el grupo con dislexia, con peor rendimiento que el grupo control en ambas tareas. Por otra parte, ambos grupos obtuvieron ventaja de la presentación simultánea de palabras, con tiempos previos a la articulación de la palabra menores en la presentación simultánea que en la palabra aislada. Sin embargo, este beneficio no se dio en los tiempos de articulación y exactitud lectora en los niños con dislexia, especialmente cuando se trataba de palabras largas e infrecuentes, sugiriendo que los niños dislexia no alcanzan el mismo nivel de preprocesamiento que los niños del grupo control.Different studies have reported that proficient readers benefit from the simultaneous presentation of words during reading. On the other hand, the availability of orthographic representations of words appear to facilitate the initiation of phonological encoding of the contiguous word, which would be triggered during the articulation process of the target word. However, this advantage might not be evident in children with dyslexia, given their poor reading competence. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with dyslexia benefit from the simultaneous presentation of written words and whether this is dependent on the characteristics of the stimuli. For this aim, children with and without dyslexia participated in two reading tasks. In the first task, words, manipulated in frequency and length, were displayed in isolation, while the second task involved lists of three words, in which the frequency and length of the third word were manipulated. The results showed reading difficulties i n p articipants w ith d yslexia, w ith p oorer reading performance than the control group in both tasks. On the other hand, both groups demonstrated an advantage of simultaneous word presentation, with shorter pre-word articulation times in simultaneous presentation than in single word presentation. However, this benefit did not occur in articulation times and reading accuracy in children with dyslexia, especially for long and infrequent words, suggesting that dyslexic children do not reach the same level of preprocessing as children in the control group

Reading prosody in Spanish dyslexics

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic representations of words, it is possible that their use of prosody when reading differs from that of typical readers. The goal of this study was to investigate whether the reading prosody of Spanish-speaking dyslexics differs from that of typical Spanish readers. Two experiments were performed. The first experiment involved 36 children (18 with dyslexia), and the second involved 46 adults (23 with dyslexia). Participants were asked to read aloud a text which included declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences. Data on pausing and reading rate (number of pauses, duration of pauses and utterances), pitch changes, intensity changes and syllable lengthening were extracted from the recordings. We found that dyslexic people read more slowly than typical readers and they also made more inappropriate and longer pauses, even as adults with considerable reading experience. We also observed that dyslexics differed from skilled readers in their use of some prosodic features, particularly pitch changes at the end of sentences. This is probably because they have trouble anticipating some structural features of prose, such as sentence ends.Proyecto de Investigación del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: PSI2012-31913 Programa Severo Ochoa (FICYT): BP14-03