Old and new ways to study characteristics of reading disability: The case of the nonword-reading deficit

Dyslexia Profiles Across Orthographies Differing in Transparency: An Evaluation of Theoretical Predictions Contrasting English and Greek

“…The lack of lexicality effects is inconsistent with a specific nonword deficit (cf. van den Broeck & Geudens, 2012) and consistent with previous comparisons of Greek children with dyslexia to typically developing readers, in which the effect sizes were not greater for pseudowords than for words (Protopapas & Skaloumbakas, 2007Protopapas, Skaloumbakas, & Bali, 2008). It is also consistent with words and pseudowords aligning along common factors of accuracy and fluency rather than forming separable domains of performance (Protopapas, Simos, Sideridis, & Mouzaki, 2012).…”

“…Specifically, scaling considerations regarding comparison groups have led to the conclusion that differences between groups matched in reading level but differing in age depend entirely on the relative growth slopes and standard deviations of the tasks and are not informative about the groups (van den Broeck & Geudens, 2012). Additional considerations arise from accuracy metrics (such as proportion correct), which are subject to ceiling effects.…”

“…Regarding lexicality, although a nonword deficit has long been considered a hallmark of dyslexia (a contention apparently supported in cross-linguistic dyslexia research, e.g., Landerl et al, 1997;Ziegler et al, 2003), it has recently been recognized that scaling and group matching issues may have obscured performance comparisons on familiar words versus pseudowords (van den Broeck & Geudens, 2012). Thus it is important to reevaluate the deficits in phonological awareness and reading tasks using matched stimuli.…”

Effects of orthographic consistency on eye movement behavior: German and English children and adults process the same words differently

“…In the current study, we matched German and English participants in two age groups (children and adults) on basic word reading ability by matching their mean gaze duration for the short high-frequency words of our target word set. Although the reading level match design as often used in dyslexia research (i.e., comparing typically developing children with older dyslexic children with limitations in cognitive processing) has rightly been criticized (e.g., Van den Broeck & Geudens, 2012), our approach applied a reading level match design to typical reading development in cross-linguistic research.…”

Distinguishing cause from effect – many deficits associated with developmental dyslexia may be a consequence of reduced and suboptimal reading experience

“…For example, if affected individuals in Grade 5 are matched to children with the same reading level, for example in Grade 3, but still show differences in phonological tasks or tests probing other functions, one may argue that it cannot be concluded that reading experience is an important factor. Note that reading level control groups are argued to be inappropriate (as they fail to account for many confounding variables such as age, see Van den Broeck & Geudens, 2012, for detailed discussion of this argument). However one may still want to question how we can suggest that it is reading experience that plays a crucial role if participants have equivalent reading skills but show differences on tasks assumed to tap certain readingrelevant core skills.…”