Text Reading Fluency and Text Reading Comprehension Do Not Rely on the Same Abilities in University Students With and Without Dyslexia

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning condition characterized by severe and persistent difficulties in written word recognition, decoding and spelling that may impair both text reading fluency and text reading comprehension. Despite this, some adults with dyslexia successfully complete their university studies even though graduating from university involves intensive exposure to long and complex texts. This study examined the cognitive skills underlying both text reading comprehension and text reading fluency (TRF) in a sample of 54 university students with dyslexia and 63 university students without dyslexia, based on a set of tests adapted for an adult population, including listening comprehension, word reading, pseudoword reading (i.e., decoding), phonemic awareness, spelling, visual span, reading span, vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, and general knowledge. The contribution of these skills to text reading fluency and text reading comprehension was examined using stepwise multiplicative linear regression analyses. As far as TRF is concerned, a regression model including word reading, pseudoword reading and spelling best fits the data, while a regression model including listening comprehension, general knowledge and vocabulary best fits the data obtained for text reading comprehension. Overall, these results are discussed in the light of the current literature on adults with dyslexia and both text reading fluency and text reading comprehension.

Phoneme Representation and Articulatory Impairment: Insights from Adults with Comorbid Motor Coordination Disorder and Dyslexia

“…Finally, to identify some of the explanatory factors of the PAT scores, we conducted a series of ANCOVAs followed by simple main effects analyses with reading fluency scores, articulatory rate, and pause proportion (speech proportion and pause proportion were perfectly and negatively correlated and speech proportion was therefore discarded from the following analysis) as covariates, and the distinction between skilled readers and readers with dyslexia (including the two groups with dyslexia) as a qualitative factor. In the light of the results reported by Brèthes and collaborators [112], the reading fluency scores should explain the PAT scores of skilled readers only. Given the articulatory contribution to the PAT task, the scores of both groups of readers should be explained by the two articulatory indicators, with larger effects for readers with dyslexia.…”

Can pulsed lighting help adults with dyslexia to read better: Testing LeFloch and Ropars’s hypothesis

“…During the pre-test session, a series of pre-tests was run followed by a series of tests intended to assess the individual reading impairment score. During the experimental session, the in uence of pulsed lighting on two main components of reading performance was estimated: sentence reading speed, estimated using the MNREAD chart (Mans eld et al, 1993), and text reading comprehension, measured with a French standardized test (Brèthes et al, 2022). Details of the experimental protocol are detailed below and summarized in Fig.…”

“…All participants completed a series of French tests, which were administered using a standard procedure (Fig. 1) (Brèthes et al, 2022). The French version of the Adult Reading History Questionnaire (ARHQ) and Anamnesis (Le y & Pennington, 2000) were used to screen for dyslexia.…”

“…The results allowed us to derive a reading e ciency score combining speed and accuracy. Finally, three more standardized reading tests were run (Brèthes et al, 2022): an isolated word reading test (to measure the e ciency of the orthographic procedure), a pseudoword reading test (to assess the e ciency of the decoding procedure) and a reading uency test. As shown in Table 1, readers with dyslexia performed signi cantly worse than controls on every skill, except for verbal IQ.…”

“…Our second outcome measure was text reading comprehension performance, assessed with a new French standardized task which consists in the silent reading of a newspaper article from the French newspaper, Le Monde (~ 500 words). The text is read without time constraints and is followed by a set of questions (Brèthes et al, 2022; https://osf.io/zmf82/). This newly validated test makes it possible to evaluate literal comprehension as well as inferential comprehension skills, namely text-connecting inference skills (which require the participant to integrate text information in order to establish local cohesiveness) and knowledge-based inference skills (which make it possible to establish links between the text content and the reader's personal knowledge).…”