Universal and Specific Predictors of Chinese Children With Dyslexia – Exploring the Cognitive Deficits and Subtypes

Abstract

While previous studies have shown that the impact of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) on dyslexia depends on orthographic complexity in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether this relationship generalizes to the more complex orthography of Chinese. We investigated the predictive power of PA, RAN, and morphological awareness (MA) in dyslexia diagnosis status in a sample of 241 typically developing and 223 dyslexic Chinese-speaking children. Compared with the control group, children with dyslexia performed notably worse on character reading and all three cognitive measures. A logistic regression analysis showed that PA and RAN were both significant predictors, while MA also played a relatively important role for predicting dyslexia status in Chinese children. In the next step, we used multigroup analyses to test if these three cognitive predictors were of the same importance in predicting reading variance in different reading proficiency groups. And the results showed that the regression coefficient of MP is stronger for the control group than the dyslexia group, while the regression coefficient of PD tends to be stronger for the dyslexic group. Further cluster analysis identified four subtypes of dyslexia in this sample: a global deficit group, a phonological deficit group, a RAN deficit group, and a mild morphological deficit group. Our findings are largely consistent with previous studies of predictors of dyslexia, while uniquely demonstrating the differences in predictive power of these three cognitive variables on reading, as well as the unique contribution of MA in Chinese reading.

Atypical Relationships Between Neurofunctional Features of Print-Sound Integration and Reading Abilities in Chinese Children With Dyslexia

“…Moreover, while both character recognition accuracy and reading comprehension proficiency were associated with MA in typical readers, children with dyslexia showed significant correlations between reading abilities with other cognitive-linguistic skills instead of MA. Specifically, character recognition was correlated with PA, in line with the previous study with a large independent sample (Song et al, 2020 ). Regarding silent reading comprehension, although no correlation was significant, there was a trend with RAN, a phonological processing skill that consists of rapid and accurate phonological representation access, retrieval, and articulatory operations.…”

“…Thus, it is reasonable to predict that semantic processing skill plays an equal or even more critical role in reading development than phonological processing skill, and its impairments will result in reading difficulties. In line with this hypothesis, previous studies of Chinese demonstrated morphological awareness uniquely predicted reading outcomes and dyslexia status (Pan et al, 2016 ; Ruan et al, 2018 ; Song et al, 2020 ). The current results also showed that while the left IFC was strongly involved in the character-sound integration in both groups, it was more associated with articulatory phonological processing in dyslexia and semantic-related morphological processing in typical children.…”

Atypical relationships between neurofunctional features of print-sound integration and reading abilities in Chinese children with dyslexia

“…Thus, it is also reasonable to predict that semantic processing skill plays an equal or even more critical role in reading development than phonological processing skill, and its impairments will result in reading difficulties. In line with this hypothesis, previous studies of Chinese demonstrated morphological awareness uniquely predicted reading outcomes and dyslexia status (Pan et al, 2016;Ruan et al, 2018;Song et al, 2020). The current results also showed that while the left IFC was strongly involved in both groups, it was more associated with articulatory phonological processing in dyslexia and semantic processing in typical children.…”

“…Moreover, while both character recognition accuracy and reading comprehension proficiency were associated with MA in typical readers, children with dyslexia showed significant correlations between reading abilities with other cognitive-linguistic skills instead of MA. Specifically, character recognition was correlated with PA in dyslexia, in line with a previous study in an independent and larger sample (Song, Zhang, Shu, Su, & McBride, 2020). Regarding silent reading comprehension, although no correlation was significant, there was a trend with RAN, a phonological processing skill that consists of rapid and accurate phonological representation access, retrieval, and articulatory operations.…”

Public misconceptions about dyslexia: The role of intuitive psychology

“…Dyslexia, to be clear, compromises not only reading but also speech perception [ 11 ]. Other research has documented difficulties in visual perception [ 12 , 13 ], phonemic awareness [ 7 ], attention and working memory [ 14 ], morphological processing [ 15 ], and text comprehension [ 16 ]. Nonetheless, in orthographies like English, where the mapping from letters to sounds is not fully predictable, phonological decoding from print is, by far, the most common symptom of dyslexia [ 1 , 9 ].…”