Despite a history of reading or spelling difficulties, some adults attain age-appropriate spelling skills and succeed at university. We compared the spelling of 29 such high-functioning dyslexics with that of 28 typical students, matched on general spelling ability, and controlling for vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence. Participants wrote derived real and pseudo words, whose spelling relat...

Dynamic and static assessments in phonological disorders provide different information about a child’s skills and development. Dynamic assessments evaluate a child’s phonological system when given support, whereas static assessments evaluate skills without support. The Scaffolding Scale of Stimulability (SSS), described in this article, is one example of a dynamic assessment used to evaluate ph...

Phonological dyslexics (Ph-DYS) are characterized by a phonological deficit, while surface dyslexics (S-DYS) are characterized by an orthographic deficit. Four issues were addressed in this study. First, we determined the proportion of Ph-DYS and S-DYS in a population of French dyslexics by applying Castles and Coltheart's (1993) regression method to two previously unused diagnostic measures: p...

Many studies have reported the necessity of phonological awareness to become a skilled reader, citing barriers to phonological information as the cause for reading difficulties experienced by deaf individuals. In contrast, other research suggests that phonological awareness is not necessary for reading acquisition, citing the importance of higher levels of syntactic and semantic knowledge. To d...

Phonological skills, language ability, and literacy scores were compared for four groups: 19 children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNH), 20 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 20 controls matched on chronological age to the SNH group (CA), and 15 controls matched on receptive vocabulary level to a subset of the SLI group (CB). In common with the SLI group, mea...

Phonological awareness is one of several key precursor skills to conventional literacy that develop during the preschool period. Significant amounts of research support the causal and predictive relation between phonological awareness and children’s ease of learning to decode and spell. However, many preschool curricula and early childhood educational and caregiving settings are still lacking i...

The goals of this project were threefold: to determine the nature of the memory deficit in children/adolescents with dyslexia, to utilize clinical memory measures in this endeavor, and to determine the extent to which semantic short-term memory (STM) is related to basic reading performance. Two studies were conducted using different samples, one incorporating the Wide Range Assessment of Memory...

It is well-established that phonological skills are important for literacy acquisition in all scripts. However, the role of visual skills is less well understood. For logographic scripts in which a symbol represents a whole word or a meaningful unit, the importance of visual memory in literacy acquisition might be expected to be high because of the visual complexity of logographic characters, b...

In this study, we concurrently investigated 3 possible causes of dyslexia-a phonological deficit, visual stress, and a reduced visual attention span-in a large population of 164 dyslexic and 118 control French children, aged between 8 and 13 years old. We found that most dyslexic children showed a phonological deficit, either in terms of response accuracy (92.1% of the sample), speed (84.8%), o...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a Ileurobiological disorder (see Habib, 2000; Demonet & Reilhac, 2012 in the present book for reviews ) characterized by difficulties in reading acquisition despite adequate intelligence, conventional education, and motivation (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). It is widely believed that impaired phonologi­ cal processing characterizes individuals with DD (...