Up to 17% of German school children suffer from reading and writing disabilities. Unlike developmental dyslexia, only few studies have addressed dysgraphia. Presenting a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art in developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia, this paper aims to determine how far existing knowledge about the causes of developmental dyslexia also apply to developmental dys...

The developmental dyslexia studies in alphabetic languages usually from the perspectives of cognition, neurobiology and genetics. Since the Chinese language is characterized as a logographic writing system with deep orthography, which is different from alphabetic languages, whether the findings in alphabetic languages are coincident in Chinese remains a question. By comparing theories in the ca...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have reported reduced activation in parietotemporal and occipitotemporal areas in adults and children with developmental dyslexia compared to controls during reading and reading related tasks. These patterns of regionally reduced activation have been linked to behavioral impairments of reading-related processes (e.g., phonological skills and rapid a...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are distinct developmental disorders. Method: Study 1 investigated the overlap between SLI identified in kindergarten and dyslexia identified in 2nd, 4th, or 8th grades in a representative sample of 527 children. Study 2 examined phonological processing in a subsample of participants, inc...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine whether specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are distinct developmental disorders. METHOD Study 1 investigated the overlap between SLI identified in kindergarten and dyslexia identified in 2nd, 4th, or 8th grades in a representative sample of 527 children. Study 2 examined phonological processing in a subsample of participants, inc...

We investigated the performance of children with developmental dyslexia on a visual line bisection task. Dyslexic children did not show the overestimation of the left visual field (pseudoneglect) characteristic of normal adult vision. These results suggest that children with developmental dyslexia present selective deficits in visual attention, probably involving neural structures located in th...

This paper provides a selective review of data on phonology, audition, vision, and learning abilities in developmental dyslexia, with a specific focus on patterns of normal alongside poor performance. Indeed we highlight the difficulties of interpreting poor performance, and we criticize theories of dyslexia that are exclusively suited to explaining poor performance, at the risk of overgenerali...