Characterization of reading processes in students with dyslexia and learning disabilities Caracterização dos processos de leitura em escolares com dislexia e distúrbio de aprendizagem

Purpose: To characterize and to compare the performance of students with dyslexia, learning disabilities, and students with good academic performance in the reading processes. Methods: Participants were 60 students of both genders attending first to fourth grades of public elementary schools, who were divided into three groups: GI – 20 students with interdisciplinary diagnosis of dyslexia; GII – 20 students with interdisciplinary diagnosis of learning disabilities; and GIII – 20 students with good academic performance, paired according to gender, age and schooling to GI and GII. Students were submitted to the application of the Brazilian adaptation of the Assessment of Reading Processes (PROLEC), which is composed by four blocks of processes: identification of letters, lexical, syntactic and semantic processes. Results: Students from GIII showed superior performance in the tasks, compared to the students from GI and GII. Differences were found in tasks of punctuation and clause and text comprehension, in which GII presented lower performance when compared to GI. Regarding the classification of the results, most GI students had normal performance on the identification of letters and great difficulty on the lexical process tasks, which impaired the other processes; GII showed great difficulty in all processes. Conclusion: Students with dyslexia and learning disabilities have lower performance in the reading processes tasks. Students with dyslexia present difficulties in the performance of lexical, syntactic and semantic processes, and students with learning disabilities show difficulties in all processes evaluated.