Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of text reading fluency error analysis of Korean 1st and 2nd graders with developmental dyslexia considering semantic knowledge. Methods: Thirty developmental dyslexic children were divided into two groups of 15 children, one group with poor vocabulary and the other not. Both groups had similar word decoding abilities as determined by Korean Language based Reading Assessment (Pae, Kim, Yoon, & Jang, 2015). The children had normal intelligence and difficulties in reading. The task was the text taken from Korean Language based Reading Assessment. Considering semantic knowledge, the performance of text reading fluency and error types, the results of miscue analysis (MA) and Linguistic pattern analysis (LPA) were compared. Results: The group with poor vocabulary exhibited a lower frequency of errors in substitution and correction by miscue analysis. They also showed a lower error frequency in phoneme-grapheme non-correspondent errors by linguistic pattern analysis. Conclusion: According to the automaticity theory, we need to read texts with understanding on a semantic basis. Even with the same level of decoding, there were more errors in text reading fluency due to limited semantic knowledge in the group with poor vocabulary. Paragraphs in textbooks in the 1st and 2nd grades in Korea contain several phoneme-grapheme non-correspondent ‘eojeols’ that combine grammatical morpheme graphemes. Therefore, in addition to reading errors of grapho-phonology in syllable units, reading errors considering triple word-form bases should be examined.

Objectives: This study investigated word decoding abilities of 1st graders with Developmental dyslexia according to the level of decoding difficulty, meaning availability, word and syllable structure.Methods: Twenty Korean 1st graders with developmental dyslexia participated in 40 word-reading tasks individually. All of them had severe decoding difficulties, even with normal listening comprehension (KORLA; Pae et al., 2015) and intelligence (K-CTONI-2; Park, 2014). The group differences by decoding difficulties were compared considering the meaning of words, the number of syllable-final graphemes, and the position of each grapheme in a syllable.Results: Both the severe and less-severe group in Korean word-decoding difficulties revealed the gaps between word reading and nonword reading. Both groups had decoding difficulties when a word had syllable-final graphemes, while the severe group had even lower performances in word readings with 2 syllable-final graphemes. Both groups showed similar performances in reading syllable-initial graphemes while the severe group had lower performances both in reading syllable-medial vowel graphemes and syllable-final consonant graphemes compared to the less-severe group.Conclusion: Korean 1st graders with developmental dyslexia seemed to be in urgent need of decoding support considering word and syllable structure. Triggering the non-lexical route with non-words considering the grain size of syllable-medial vowel graphemes and syllable-final graphemes would facilitate word decoding abilities of severely dyslexic Korean children.

Objectives Reading fluency is an important factor that connects decoding ability and reading comprehension ability. Given that fluent reading is essential for language classes in lower grades of elementary school in Korea, it is necessary to support not only the decoding ability but also student’s reading fluency. This study investigated the differences in reading fluency ability of two groups of children according to text presentation types. Methods Thirteen students with developmental dyslexia(DYS) and 13 typically developing students(TD) read two types of decodable texts, sentence-broken type and general type. Reading accuracy, speed and prosody were measured. Results DYS revealed lower accuracy and prosody scores than TD, while there were no differences in accuracy and prosody according to text presentation type. DYS took longer time to finish reading texts than TD, while only DYS took longer time to read general type text than sentence-broken type text. Conclusions When presenting a text that is decodable to a certain extent to DYS, the text presentation type didn’t seem to matter for reading accuracy, although reading speed was influenced by the presentation type. It seems very important to consider the visuo-spatial presentation format as well as the decodability of the texts to support DYS’s reading fluency meaningfully.