Brief articleSpecific phonological impairments in dyslexia revealed by eyetracking
Section snippets
Participants
School-age children were recruited from schools in the London, Ontario area. Recruitment and testing procedures were approved by the University of Western Ontario office of Research Ethics. Eight dyslexic children in the third and fourth grades were tested (age M=8;9, range 8;1–9;5); one additional child was unable to complete the eyetracking task and was excluded from analyses. Children in the dyslexic group scored below the 25th percentile (M=15.63, SD=7.58) on the Word Identification subtask
Reading and IQ measures
As expected, dyslexic children scored lower than controls on word reading ability (WRMT-R Word Identification), t(15)=14.30, P<.001, nonword reading (percentile rank: controls, M=55.11, SD=17.82; dyslexics, M=10.00, SD=7.43; t(15)=6.95, P<.001) and phoneme deletion (grade level: controls, M=3.93, SD=.95; dyslexics, M=2.44, SD=.44; t(15)=4.23, P<.001). However, the dyslexic and control groups did not differ on the WISC-III measures (Block Design: t(15)=−.19, ns; Vocabulary t(15)=1.44, ns).
Eyetracking
Mean
Discussion
We compared phonological processing abilities of children with dyslexia to those of normally developing same-aged controls. Previous studies have tended to rely on phonological awareness tests to assess phonology in dyslexia, which can be undermined by attendant factors related to children's difficulty understanding instructions as well as attention and memory limitations. Results of the eyetracking task indicated that under normal circumstances, auditory word identification in dyslexic
Conclusion
Phonological awareness tests have long been an important source of information about the underlying nature of phonological deficits in dyslexia (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983). Indeed, considerable debate has focused on whether the locus of this problem is in their representation of individual segments (Fowler, 1991; Muter et al., 1998; Nation & Hulme, 1997) or at the level of rhymes (Bryant, 1997; Goswami, 1999; Kirtley et al., 1989). The present results suggest some caution in
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research to MFJ and the Ontario Graduate Scholarships for Science and Technology to ASD.
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