Identifying Developmental Dyslexia in 9 Korean Elementary School Students at Risk for Dyslexia

Objectives: Korean developmental dyslexic upper grade children's text comprehension abilities were investigated considering the mode of texts (reading vs listening) as well as the type of texts (narrative vs expository). Methods: Sixteen 5th to 6th graders with developmental dyslexia (DD) and grade and cognition-matched typically developing children (TD) participated in 4 text comprehension tasks. Each child responded to 32 questions, 8 in each text, tapping comprehension of texts counterbalancing the effect of mode and type of texts. Results: First, children with DD performed lower than TD children in text comprehension, reflecting developmental dyslexic Korean children's performance cross linguistically even with the high orthographic transparency of Hangeul. Second, children with DD performed better in the mode of reading compared to the mode of listening, which was the same as the TD children. Third, the effect of type of text was meaningful to only children with DD, while TD children's performance between narrative and expository text was not different. Conclusion: Korean upper grade children with DD seemed to rely heavily on the mode of reading in comprehending texts similarly to their grade-matched children, while children with DD had greater difficulties in comprehending the expository texts both in reading and listening modes compared to the narrative texts. Each child with DD's developmental level of the type and mode of texts needs to be considered to support his/her text comprehension abilities. Further studies need to be extended to the Korean language considering the type of texts with the DIER model.

Text Comprehension of Korean Developmental Dyslexic Children Considering Mode and Type of Texts

Lee¹,

Jang²,

Soyeong³

2021

Word Decoding Abilities of 1st Graders with Developmental Dyslexia Considering Reading Severity and Word and Syllable Structure

Yu¹,

Soyeong²

2021

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.

Word Reading and Word Writing Development of First Graders with and without Developmental Dyslexia: Considering Meaning Accessibility

Lee,

Jang,

Eom

et al. 2023

Objectives: This study investigated the developmental characteristics of word reading and word writing abilities in developmental dyslexia comparing to typical development. Methods: Two evaluations were conducted individually at the end of each semester for first graders with and without developmental dyslexia, 30 students in each group. After reading and writing 14 two-syllable words considering meaning accessibility, each student’s performance was analyzed and compared by grapheme units. Results: Typically developing students (TD) already demonstrated high performance in meaning word reading and writing as well as non-word reading at the end of the first semester while developmental dyslexic students showed significant improvement at the end of the second semester, but performance remained lower compared to TD students. In non-word writing, both groups showed developmental progress from the end of the first semester to the end of the second semester. However, the developmental gap between the two groups persisted. Conclusion: Despite providing 20-30 intervention sessions, developmental dyslexic students showed consistently lower performance in word reading and writing tasks compared to TD students. The results of this study suggest the urgent need for systematic and individualized intervention support at a higher frequency. The low performance in the non-word task suggests that developmental dyslexic students still have limited ability in phoneme-grapheme mapping through the non-lexical route for phoneme-grapheme correspondent words, highlighting the importance of evaluating tasks that consider meaning. Given that the dyslexic first graders developmental pattern is parallel to the TD students in non-word writing, Korean first graders seem to be actively developing spelling and transcription skills.