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Different studies have demonstrated that people with dyslexia have difficulties in acquiring fluent reading and writing. These problems are also evident when they learn a second language. The aim of our study was to investigate if there is a linguistic transfer effect for writing in children with dyslexia when they face tasks in English (L2), as well as the possible influence of other linguistic skills (spelling, vocabulary and reading) in English (L2) and in Spanish (L1). Participants completed a series of tasks both in Spanish and English: a picture naming task, a word reading task, a word spelling task, and a written composition of which we analysed its quality through different variables provided by the Coh-metrix software. Our results revealed that children with dyslexia show similar or parallel performance in written composition in both languages, which could imply a language transfer effect from L1 and L2. Besides, basic language skills are related to the characteristics of written composition to a greater extent in English than in Spanish, suggesting the impact of these on the quality of written composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work in English has found that the spelling difficulties of children with dyslexia affect the overall quality attributed to their written compositions. The aim of this study was to investigate whether different processes related to transcription, translation and ideas proposing/planning are affected in developmental dyslexia and to what extent potential deficits are associated to poor spelling. Compositions handwritten by Spanish-speaking children with and without dyslexia aged 9–12 years-old (n = 42) were compared on measures of productivity, spelling accuracy, legibility, lexical diversity, punctuation, sentence structure and grammar, organisation, ideas quality, and readability. Children with dyslexia performed worse in spelling, lexical diversity, syntax and grammar and ideas quality. Interestingly, in the group with dyslexia spelling accuracy contributed to lexical diversity, while lexical diversity was the only significant predictor of syntax and grammar, organisation and ideas quality. This pattern of results was absent in typically developing children. This evidence suggests that spelling difficulties reduce the lexical diversity of the texts of children with dyslexia, which may affect the activity of the translator and the proposer, diminishing the perceived quality of their written compositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common to see mirror errors in letters in early stages of reading due to the mirror-generalization process that allows a visual stimulus to be identified independently of its orientation. To avoid such errors, this process must be inhibited. A special case would be children with dyslexia since their difficulties with the alphabetic code may also delay the acquisition of correct letter orientation. We investigated the relationship between reversible errors in reading and dyslexia. Twenty-seven Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia (7–12 years old) and 27 chronological-age-matched controls performed a 'same-different' letter decision task on reversible and non-reversible letters. Results showed that all participants required more time and committed more errors in discriminating reversible letters. In addition, worse execution was observed in the dyslexic group, which seems to indicate that this group is delayed in the acquisition of correct letter orientation. Therefore, our results indicated that overcoming reading errors in mirrors depends to some extent on the reading competence of the children and the ability to inhibit the process of generalization of mirrors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]