Rapid Automatized Naming and Explicit Phonological Processing in Children With Developmental Dyslexia: A Study With Portuguese-Speaking Children in Brazil

Abstract

Many studies have shown that children with reading difficulties present deficits in rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness skills. The aim of this study was to examine RAN and explicit phonological processing in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with developmental dyslexia and to explore the ability of RAN to discriminate between children with and without dyslexia. Participants were 30 children with a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia established by the Brazilian Dyslexia Association and 30 children with typical development. Children were aged between 7 and 12, and groups were matched for chronological age and sex. They completed a battery of tests that are commonly used in Brazil for diagnosing dyslexia, consisting of the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC-IV) as well as tests of single word and non-word reading, RAN, and the profile of phonological abilities test. Results indicate that the cognitive profile of this group of children, with a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia, showed preserved skills in the four subscales of the WISC-IV (verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed) and on the profile of phonological abilities test. Groups significantly differed on the reading tests (word and non-word) and RAN measures, with medium to large effect sizes for RAN. Classification and regression tree analysis revealed that RAN was a good predictor for dyslexia diagnosis, with an overall classification accuracy rate of 88.33%.

Early screening of reading and writing difficulties in the first grade - a pilot study

“…This indicates that being slower to understand the alphabetic principle in the second grade could have been predicted in the first grade. This finding is coherent with information consistently reported in other studies in that children at risk of dyslexia differ from their peers in terms of phonological skills before finishing the literacy process 21,22 .…”

“…The results provide evidence that agrees with other studies 22,26 in that children with signs of risk of dyslexia differ from children with typical development in terms of less phonological skill and that these differences are already present at the beginning of the literacy process. This reinforces the main idea of the study, that it is not enough to identify children with difficulties.…”

Remote Dyslexia Screening for Bilingual Children

“…More precisely, the reading time scores measured in the self-paced syllable and sentence reading tasks along with performance in Word and Nonword Identification tasks of the Italian screening were significantly associated with the performance in the Italian standardized reading tests. However, not only reading accuracy and reading speed in both languages (L1 and L2) but also other clinical markers proved to be useful for dyslexia risk identification, as suggested by previous studies [19,20,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][36][37][38][39]. Indeed, Phonological Blending and grammaticality judgement tasks were all significantly and positively associated with the performance in the Italian standardized reading tests.…”

“…Typically, dyslexic children show deficits in phonological awareness [31], i.e., the capacity of manipulating and analyzing the sounds that constitute words, regardless of meaning [32]. Da Silva et al [33] confirmed these findings independently of the language and orthographic system a child acquires.…”

Características fonológicas en población escolar con dislexia: Un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales

“…En la investigación ejecutada por Landerl et al, (2018), evaluaron a 1120 niños de diferentes países, señalaron que la denominación del LG es el factor que identifica las deficiencias en la fluidez fonológica. Este hallazgo concuerda con otras investigaciones que demuestran un bajo rendimiento en las tareas de denominación en personas con DS (Cancer & Antonietti, 2018;da Silva et al, 2020;Layes et al, 2020).…”