Patterns of Developmental Dyslexia According to a Multi-Trace Memory Model of Reading

The reading performance of two groups of dyslexic children with either a phonological (PH) or a visualattentional (VA) deficit was compared to that of control groups matched on chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA). In both groups and on all the reading measures, the dyslexic children performed worse than the CA-controls but similarly to the RA-controls. Performance of the VA dyslexic participants in exception word reading was lower than that of the PH-dyslexics but the two dyslexic groups exhibited a similarly low performance in pseudo-word reading. These findings constitute arguments against the delay hypothesis and question the current methods used to identify dyslexia subtypes. They are in support of the multi-trace memory model of polysyllabic word reading (Ans, Carbonnel & Valdois, 1998).