Reading difficulties are highly prevalent and frequently co-occur with other neurodevelopmental/behavioral conditions. It is difficult to assess reading routinely in pediatric clinical practice ...because of time and resource constraints. Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) is an objective, gamified assessment that children take in a web browser without adult supervision. This study's purpose was to evaluate ROAR as a screening tool for reading difficulties in a clinical setting.
A convenience sample of 6- to 14-year-old children, attending an in-person or telehealth visit in a developmental-behavioral pediatrics (DBP) clinic participated. Children took ROAR and completed the Woodcock-Johnson IV Letter-Word Identification (LWID) and Word Attack (WA). Basic Reading Skills (BRS), a standardized aggregate score of LWID and WA, was used as the gold-standard assessment. The strength of association between standard scores on ROAR and BRS was calculated. BRS scores < 90 (bottom quartile) were classified as poor readers. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to assess the quality of ROAR as a screening test.
A sample of 41 children, 78% boys, mean age 9.5 years (SD 2.0 years), completed the study. The correlation of ROAR standard score with BRS was r = 0.66, p < 0.001. ROC curve analysis with ROAR scores accurately classified poor readers with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.90.
ROAR is a useful objective screening tool to identify children at high risk for reading difficulties. Assessment of the tool during a busy clinic was challenging, and a larger replication is warranted.
The purpose of this study was to investigate New Jersey educators’ dyslexia knowledge and misconceptions, professional development perceptions and needs, and perceived preparedness regarding teaching ...students with dyslexia. A second purpose was to investigate what factors predicted New Jersey educators’ knowledge about dyslexia. A total of 705 in-service educators completed a survey about their dyslexia knowledge, perceived preparedness, and professional development perceptions. Participants had accurate overall knowledge about dyslexia, but some prevailing misconceptions were still present. The greatest predictor of dyslexia knowledge was years of experience in working with students with dyslexia. Reading specialists, educators with greater perceived preparedness and those educators who had training in multi-sensory approaches to instruction had significantly more dyslexia knowledge than other educators. Approximately half of the participants felt prepared to teach students with dyslexia and that working with students with dyslexia prepared them the most. Participants perceived that multi-sensory approaches were the most effective professional development and their undergraduate education was the least effective. Most participants were in support of further professional development on the topic of dyslexia. Implications for in-service educators’ professional development and future research directions are discussed.
Skilled reading requires specialized visual cortical processing of orthographic information and its impairment has been proposed as a potential correlate of compromised reading in dyslexia. However, ...which stage of orthographic information processing during natural reading is disturbed in dyslexics remains unexplored. Here we addressed this question by simultaneously measuring the eye movements and EEG of dyslexic and control young adults during natural reading. Isolated meaningful sentences were presented at five inter-letter spacing levels spanning the range from minimal to extra-large spacing, and participants were instructed to read the text silently at their own pace. Control participants read faster, performed larger saccades and shorter fixations compared to dyslexics. While reading speed peaked around the default letter spacing, saccade amplitude increased and fixation duration decreased with the increase of letter spacing in both groups. Lateralization of occipito-temporal fixation-related EEG activity (FREA) was found in three consecutive time intervals corresponding to early orthographic processing in control readers. Importantly, the lateralization in the time range of the first negative left occipito-temporal FREA peak was specific for first fixations and exhibited an interaction effect between reading ability and letter spacing. The interaction originated in the significant decrease of FREA lateralization at extra-large compared to default letter spacing in control readers and the lack of lateralization in both letter spacing conditions in the case of dyslexics. These findings suggest that expertise-driven hemispheric functional specialization for early orthographic processing thought to be responsible for letter identity extraction during natural reading is compromised in dyslexia.
We explored morphological decomposition in reading, the locus in the reading process in which it takes place and its nature, comparing different types of morphemes. We assessed these questions ...through the analysis of letter position errors in readers with letter position dyslexia (LPD). LPD is a selective impairment to letter position encoding in the early stage of word reading, which results in letter migrations (such as reading "cloud" for "could"). We used the fact that migrations in LPD occur mainly in word-interior letters, whereas exterior letters rarely migrate. The rationale was that if morphological decomposition occurs prior to letter position encoding and strips off affixes, word-interior letters adjacent to an affix (e.g., signs-signs) would become exterior following affix-stripping and hence exhibit fewer migrations. We tested 11 Hebrew readers with developmental LPD and 1 with acquired LPD in 6 experiments of reading aloud, lexical decision, and comprehension, at the single word and sentence levels (compared with 25 age-matched control participants). The LPD participants read a total of 12,496 migratable words. We examined migrations next to inflectional, derivational, or bound function morphemes compared with migrations of exterior letters. The results were that root letters adjacent to inflectional and derivational morphemes were treated like middle letters, and migrated frequently, whereas root letters adjacent to bound function morphemes patterned with exterior letters, and almost never migrated. Given that LPD is a pre-lexical deficit, these results indicate that morphological decomposition takes place in an early, pre-lexical stage. The finding that morphologically complex nonwords showed the same patterns indicates that this decomposition is structurally, rather than lexically, driven. We suggest that letter position encoding takes place before morphological analysis, but in some cases, as with bound function morphemes, the complex word is re-analyzed as two separate words. In this reanalysis, letter positions in each constituent word are encoded separately, and hence the exterior letters of the root are treated as exterior and do not migrate.
This study utilized a neuroimaging task to assess working memory (WM) network recruitment during single word reading. Associations between WM and reading comprehension skills are well documented. ...Several converging models suggest WM may also contribute to foundational reading skills, but few studies have assessed this contribution directly. Two groups of children (77 developmental dyslexia (DD), 22 controls) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task to identify activation of a priori defined regions of the WM network. fMRI trials consisted of familiar word, pseudoword, and false font stimuli within a 1-back oddball task to assess how activation in the WM network differs in response to stimuli that can respectively be processed using word recognition, phonological decoding, or non-word strategies. Results showed children with DD recruited WM regions bilaterally in response to all stimulus types, whereas control children recruited left-lateralized WM regions during the pseudoword condition only. Group-level comparisons revealed activation differences in the defined WM network regions for false font and familiar word, but not pseudoword conditions. This effect was driven by increased activity in participants with DD in right hemisphere frontal, parietal, and motor regions despite poorer task performance. Findings suggest the WM network may contribute to inefficient decoding and word recognition strategies in children with DD.
•Working memory contributes differently to early reading in children with dyslexia.•FMRI protocol localised working memory network during decoding and word recognition.•In strong readers, network activity increased during phonetic decoding trials only.•In poor readers, activity increased for all trial types despite lower task accuracy.•Working memory may act as compensatory system for early reading skills in dyslexia.
Introduction: Understanding silent reading fluency (SRF) is of a paramount importance, given that silent reading is the principal manner of reading for capable readers. But the assessment of SRF is ...not commonly useful for identifying students with reading difficulties and monitoring their progress. The paper presents the SRF scores of adults with dyslexia compared to SRF scores of skilled readers and discusses the power of the SRF measure in identifying adults with specific learning disorders with impairment in reading. Method: Participants recruited were 68 dyslexic and age-matched skilled adult readers (18-48 years old). Among them, 24 were skilled readers with a university degree (GRS), 22 were skilled readers with a high school diploma (DSR), and 22 participants had been diagnosed with dyslexia (DR). We used a standardized oral reading fluency (ORF) test and an original SRF task to measure the reading fluency. Results: All participants increased their reading fluency in silent mode (p < .001). Nonetheless, the average speed of the oral reading was 7.19 syllables per second (syl/s) for the GSR group, 7.11 syl/s for the DSR group, and 4.95 syl/s for the DR group. The average speed of the silent reading was 11.62 syl/s and 10.75 syl/s for GSR and DSR, respectively, and 6.15 syl/s for DR. The reading fluency differential (Δf) between ORF and SRF was significantly different among the dyslexic participants and the other two groups. Conclusions: Our results strongly suggest that dyslexic readers are less capable of significantly improve their reading speed when they read silently. Thus SRF could be considered a suitable parameter for identifying older students and adults with impairment in reading. A broader investigation of the issues surrounding silent reading is needed.
•Animal models of neurodevelopmental disorders are useful.•Animal models of some DD-candidate genes have been tested.•Imaging investigation is lacking in DD animal models.•Environmental manipulation ...has never been implemented in DD animal models.•Investigation of DD risk factors in different developmental windows is absent.
Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder and the most common learning disability among both school-aged children and across languages. Recently, sensory and cognitive mechanisms have been reported to be potential endophenotypes (EPs) for DD, and nine DD-candidate genes have been identified. Animal models have been used to investigate the etiopathological pathways that underlie the development of complex traits, as they enable the effects of genetic and/or environmental manipulations to be evaluated. Animal research designs have also been linked to cutting-edge clinical research questions by capitalizing on the use of EPs. For the present scoping review, we reviewed previous studies of murine models investigating the effects of DD-candidate genes. Moreover, we highlighted the use of animal models as an innovative way to unravel new insights behind the pathophysiology of reading (dis)ability and to assess cutting-edge preclinical models.
Whereas the neurobiological basis of developmental dyslexia has received substantial attention, only little is known about the processes in the brain during remediation. This holds in particular in ...light of recent findings on cognitive subtypes of dyslexia which suggest interactions between individual profiles, training methods, and also the task in the scanner. Therefore, we trained three groups of German dyslexic primary school children in the domains of phonology, attention, or visual word recognition. We compared neurofunctional changes after 4 weeks of training in these groups to those in untrained normal readers in a reading task and in a task of visual attention. The overall reading improvement in the dyslexic children was comparable over groups. It was accompanied by substantial increase of the activation level in the visual word form area (VWFA) during a reading task inside the scanner. Moreover, there were activation increases that were unique for each training group in the reading task. In contrast, when children performed the visual attention task, shared training effects were found in the left inferior frontal sulcus and gyrus, which varied in amplitude between the groups. Overall, the data reveal that different remediation programmes matched to individual profiles of dyslexia may improve reading ability and commonly affect the VWFA in dyslexia as a shared part of otherwise distinct networks.
This study assessed eye movement abnormalities of adolescent dyslexic readers and interpreted the findings by linking the dual-route model of single word reading with the E-Z Reader model of eye ...movement control during silent sentence reading. A dysfunction of the lexical route was assumed to account for a reduced number of words which received only a single fixation or which were skipped and for the increased number of words with multiple fixations and a marked effect of word length on gaze duration. This pattern was interpreted as a frequent failure of orthographic whole-word recognition (based on orthographic lexicon entries) and on reliance on serial sublexical processing instead. Inefficiency of the lexical route was inferred from prolonged gaze durations for singly fixated words. These findings were related to the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control. Slow activation of word phonology accounted for the low skipping rate of dyslexic readers. Frequent reliance on sublexical decoding was inferred from a tendency to fixate word beginnings and from short forward saccades. Overall, the linkage of the dual-route model of single word reading and a model of eye movement control led to a useful framework for understanding eye movement abnormalities of dyslexic readers.
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects the development of literacy and language-related skills, unrelated to intellectual ability. While the impact of parenting an individual with ...dyslexia (IWD) for married parents has been widely studied, little is known about the impact on single parents. This study explored the lived experiences of single parents of an IWD. Six female participants completed semi-structured interviews discussing their experience of the diagnostic process, support received and general parenting perspectives. Interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Three main themes were identified: Navigating the diagnosis; Various levels of support; Battling Misconceptions and Lack of Knowledge. Findings suggested that single parents had a mixed experience, both after receiving the diagnosis and in terms of the support they received from family and schools. Differences in the quality of statutory support were highlighted, implicating the need for improved dyslexia support in schools. Unique challenges of parenting an IWD as a single parent were also identified, highlighting important implications. Future research should explore differences in single fathers' experiences and the impact of dyslexia comorbidities on single parents.
•The dyslexia diagnosis had both positive and negative impacts on parents’ lives.•Dyslexia support for parents differed greatly between private and mainstream school.•The general public and educational staff carry misconceptions about dyslexia.•Single parents faced unique challenges to parenting a child with dyslexia.•There is a need for greater statutory and financial support for single parents parenting a child with dyslexia.
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