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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]

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject-verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., "the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away"). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age-matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to investigate the prosody abilities on top of phonological and visual abilities in children with dyslexia in Spanish that can be considered a syllable-timed language. The performances on prosodic tasks (prosodic perception, rise-time perception), phonological tasks (phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal working memory), visual tasks (visual search) of 32 eleven-year-old children with dyslexia were compared with those of 32 typical readers with the same chronological age and 32 reading-matched younger children. It was found that children with dyslexia scored lower than typical readers on phonological and prosodic perception tasks but not on rise perception tasks. It can thus be concluded that children with dyslexia in Spanish show a prosodic impairment that may originate from subtle auditory-processing deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies have suggested that Spanish children with dyslexia have difficulty storing orthographic representations of new words. But given that the syllable plays an important role in word recognition in Spanish, it is possible that the formation of orthographic representations is influenced by the characteristics of the syllables that make up the words. The objective of this study was to determine whether syllabic frequency and syllabic complexity influence orthographic learning in children with dyslexia. We compared the performance of a group of dyslexic children with that of a group of typical readers on a task that involved reading short and long pseudowords six times; we manipulated the frequency and complexity of the syllables from which the pseudowords were constructed. The results showed that dyslexic children do not benefit from syllabic simplicity or frequency when it comes to storing orthographic representations as the length effect in the dyslexic group remained was unchanged after repeated readings, regardless of stimulus characteristics. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two opposing points of view have been presented with regard to the applicability of the dual-route reading models Spanish. Some authors maintain that, given the transparency of the reading system, non-lexical reading is the strategy followed predominantly by Spanish readers and for that reason these models are not appropriate to explain alexias (acquired dyslexias) in Spanish. Other authors, consider that since several cases of phonological, surface and deep alexia have been reported, dual-route reading models are applicable to Spanish in the same way that to the irregular writing systems. In order to contrast these two points of view, an analysis of the two main factors that influence the reading is made: characteristics of the Spanish orthography and characteristics of the Spanish readers. It is conclude that, (1) Due to its transparency, non-lexical reading represents -as in other transparent orthographies- the initial reading strategy in Spanish; (2) the "reading threshold" (i.e., time required to become literate) is lower in Spanish because there are no irregular words to learn; (3) as reading experience increases, speed increases and lexical reading becomes used more; (4) Given the characteristics of the Spanish reading system, it is understandable that frequency of deep dyslexia is so low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies show that dyslexia persists into adulthood, even in highly educated and well-read people. The main characteristic that adults with dyslexia present is a low speed when reading. In Spanish, a shallow orthographic system, no studies about adults with dyslexia are available; and it is possible that the consistency of the orthographic system favours the reading fluency. The aim of this study was to get an insight of the reading characteristics of Spanish adults with dyslexia and also to infer the reading strategies that they are using. For that purpose, a group of 30 dyslexics ( M age = 32 years old) and an age-matched group of 30 adults without reading disabilities completed several phonological and reading tasks: phonological awareness tasks, rapid automatic naming, lexical decision, word and pseudoword reading, letter detection and text reading. The results showed that highly educated Spanish dyslexics performed significantly worse than the control group in the majority of the tasks. Specifically, they showed difficulties reading long pseudowords, indicating problems in automating the grapheme-phoneme rules, but they also seem to present difficulties reading words, which indicate problems with the lexical route. It seems that the Spanish dyslexic adults, as in deep orthographies, continue having difficulties in phonological awareness tasks, rapid naming and reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The expressiveness during reading is essential for a fluent reading. Reading prosody has been scarcely studied in an experimental manner, owing to the difficulties in taking objective and direct measures of this reading skill. However, new technologies development has made it possible to analyse reading prosody in an experimental way. Prosodic patterns may vary, not being the same at the beginning of the reading learning process as in adulthood. They may also be altered in disorders such as dyslexia, but little is known about the prosodic characteristics and reading fluency of people with neurodegenerative diseases that cause language impairment, such as Parkinson's disease (PD). Aims: The aim of this work was to study reading fluency in PD considering the prosodic characteristics of its reading. Methods & Procedures: The participants were 31 Spanish adults with PD and 31 healthy controls, aged 59–88 years. Two experimental texts were designed that included declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences and experimental verbs and nouns. The manipulability level of the nouns and the motor content of the verbs were considered. The reading of the participants was recorded and analysed with Praat software. Outcomes & Results: A longer reading duration and a greater number of pauses, especially in verbs, were found in the PD group, which also showed less pitch variation than the control group in the experimental sentences. The control group showed a big initial rise in declarative and interrogative sentences, as well as a stronger final declination in declarative and exclamatory ones, when compared to the PD group. Conclusions & Implications: The use of experimental methodologies for the analysis of reading fluency allows learning more about the prosodic characteristics of people with different pathologies, such as PD. Scarce pitch variability found in the analysis, together with the great number of pauses and the longer reading duration, leads to poorly expressive reading, which compromises fluency in PD. The exhaustive evaluation of the reading fluency of PD patients will make it possible to design more complete assessment methods that will favour the diagnosis and early detection of this pathology. What this study adds: What is already known on this subject: • The speech of people with Parkinson's disease (PD) is often impaired by the appearance of hypokinetic dysarthria. The language of people with PD is usually affected with the progression of the disease, with lexico‐semantic impairment which mainly affects verbs. Previous literature on reading fluency in PD usually considers reading speed and accuracy, neglecting prosody. Other neurodegenerative diseases with language impairment, such as Alzheimer's disease, commonly cause reading fluency problems. What this paper adds to existing knowledge: • This study provides direct and objective measures of the reading fluency (speed, accuracy and prosody) in patients with PD, by the design of experimental texts. Reading fluency characteristics were found to be altered in these patients, especially in pitch variations and reading duration. The reading of Parkinson's patients showed a more flattened pitch. In addition, a greater number of pauses and longer reading durations were also found in the reading of verbs compared to the control group. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?: • The use of experimentally created texts makes it possible to analyse the influence of different psycholinguistic variables (frequency, length, motor content, manipulability) on reading fluency, and how the processing of these stimuli could be affected in PD. The objective analysis of the reading fluency characteristics in PD allows the design of more specific evaluation and diagnostic tasks. More complete assessment methods may allow the early detection of the disease. In the same way, it may favour a differential diagnosis with other neurodegenerative diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adult oral reading in consistent orthographies, like Spanish, is argued to proceed through sublexical spelling-to-sound conversion. Hence, it was surprising that Davies and Cuetos (2005) observed a Spanish-speaking aphasic patient, MJ, who showed some capacity to read words aloud—producing many semantic errors—alongside an inability to read nonwords. MJ's symptoms are congruent with deep dyslexia. We investigated whether her reading could be improved through therapy addressing those deep dyslexic symptoms (de Partz, 1986). Aims: We expected to see joint improvement in word and nonword reading if therapy aimed at facilitating improvement in nonword reading succeeded, due to the consistency of the orthography. We hypothesised that occurrence of semantic paralexias in reading should decrease as reading skills improved. Alternatively, if therapy had led to the establishment of a lexical-semantic reading strategy not available to the patient before injury, then we anticipated the possibility that semantic errors could actually increase in occurrence as more therapy was received over time. Methods & Procedures: Our study began 18 months after MJ's brain injury, and continued over 2 years. Training was given in completing spelling-sound mappings at the level of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, syllables and words, in phoneme awareness and the combination of phonemes, and in word-picture association. We tested oral reading with the same word and nonword stimuli at four time points through the period of our investigation. We analysed accuracy and error types. Outcomes & Results: By the end of our investigation, MJ presented near-normal word reading and greatly improved, though still impaired, nonword reading. Production of semantic errors disappeared. Thus, adding to some previous case studies (Friedman, 1996), our patient's symptoms evolved from those typical of deep dyslexia to those typical of phonological dyslexia. Conclusions: Our findings show that, even in a language with a transparent orthography, readers can be aided by therapy addressing both lexical and non-lexical reading. The implication is that premorbid reading in a transparent orthography may depend on lexical and non-lexical reading. This conclusion is supported by the superior improvement of word compared to nonword reading, and by the decline in production of semantic paralexias accompanying the improvement in reading performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish-speaking children learn to read words printed in a relatively transparent orthography. Variation in orthographic transparency may shape the architecture of the reading system and also the manifestation of reading difficulties. We tested normally developing children and children diagnosed with reading difficulties. Reading accuracy was high across experimental conditions. However, dyslexic children read more slowly than chronological age (CA)-matched controls, although, importantly, their reading times did not differ from those for ability-matched controls. Reading times were significantly affected by frequency, orthographic neighbourhood size and word length. We also found a number of significant interaction effects. The effect of length was significantly modulated by reading ability, frequency and neighbourhood. Our findings suggest that the reading development of dyslexic children in Spanish is delayed rather than deviant. From an early age, the salient characteristic of reading development is reading speed, and the latter is influenced by specific knowledge about words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers and writers of Spanish use an orthography that is highly transparent. It has been proposed that readers of Spanish can rely on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, alone, to access meaning or phonology from print. In recent years, a number of case studies have yielded evidence inconsistent with this idea. We review these studies with particular focus on those that report evidence for reading based on direct lexical mappings between print, orthographic representations, and meaning or phonology. We report a new case of acquired literacy impairment in Spanish, MJ, who presents a pattern of preserved abilities and deficits symptomatic of deep dyslexia. The patient is unable to read nonwords, but can read a substantial number of words. Her reading is characterized by the production of semantic, visual, and derivational errors. We argue that MJ has a deficit in her lexical selection ability, common to both her reading and her naming problems. We propose that MJ, and the other cases we review, demonstrate that lexical reading is adopted by skilled readers even in a transparent language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8 to 12 years. Children with and without dyslexia (n = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by manipulating lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency, and word length in a copying task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that children with dyslexia produced longer written latencies than chronological age-matched (CA) controls, more errors than CA and reading age-matched (RA) controls, and writing durations similar to CA controls. Latencies were more affected by frequency, consistency, and length in the DD group and the RA group than in CA controls. Children in the DD and RA groups produced longer written latencies in the copying than in the spelling-to-dictation task, while controls in the CA group were not affected by the task. Results indicate that spelling impairments in Spanish children with dyslexia affect the relative involvement of lexical and sublexical information during handwriting. Meanwhile, effects on writing speed seem to be related to deficits in reading ability, and accuracy scores seem to be poorer than expected by children's reading skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has stated that early oral language acquisition difficulties are related to reading and writing difficulties. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with several dimensions of language. In this study we focus on the specific difficulties of children with DLD in spelling. We examine the impact of lexicality and length in written production of Spanish‐speaking children with DLD. A total of 18 children with language difficulties (Mage = 8;4) were compared with age‐matched children (Mage = 8;2). Participants completed a spelling‐to‐dictation task of words and pseudo‐words, where length was manipulated. A digital tablet was used to collect data and obtain measures of accuracy, latencies and total writing durations. Results showed that children with DLD produced more errors, longer latencies and longer writing durations than age‐matched children. Regarding accuracy, analysis of the errors shows that children in the control group produce few errors, most being substitutions, while children with DLD made more errors and of more varied categories. Moreover, they were more affected by length on writing accuracy than the control group. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject: Children with language difficulties are more likely to present reading difficulties. There are fewer studies analysing the impact of oral language difficulties in writing skills. What this paper adds to existing knowledge: The study suggests that children with oral language difficulties also have impairments in spelling, impacting on accuracy, duration and reaction time, possibly related to poor phonological working memory. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?: This study highlights the need to emphasize early oral intervention and language‐related processing skills to help prevent written language difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic representations of words, it is possible that their use of prosody when reading differs from that of typical readers. The goal of this study was to investigate whether the reading prosody of Spanish-speaking dyslexics differs from that of typical Spanish readers. Two experiments were performed. The first experiment involved 36 children (18 with dyslexia), and the second involved 46 adults (23 with dyslexia). Participants were asked to read aloud a text which included declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences. Data on pausing and reading rate (number of pauses, duration of pauses and utterances), pitch changes, intensity changes and syllable lengthening were extracted from the recordings. We found that dyslexic people read more slowly than typical readers and they also made more inappropriate and longer pauses, even as adults with considerable reading experience. We also observed that dyslexics differed from skilled readers in their use of some prosodic features, particularly pitch changes at the end of sentences. This is probably because they have trouble anticipating some structural features of prose, such as sentence ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading fluency is one of the basic processes of learning to read. Children begin to develop fluency when they are able to form orthographic representations of words, which provide direct, smooth, and fast reading. Dyslexic children of transparent orthographic systems are mainly characterized by poor reading fluency (Cuetos & Suárez-Coalla ; Spinelli, De Luca, Di Filippo, Mancini, Martelli, & Zoccolotti, ; Wimmer, ). Therefore, the main problem for these children could be the difficulty in developing orthographic representations of the words they read. The aim of this study was to test the ability of dyslexic Spanish-speaking children (whose native language is Spanish) to develop orthographic representations and determine if the context helps them. For this, two experiments were conducted with a group of 100 children, 7-12 years of age. The groups were comprised of 20 dyslexics, 40 chronological age-matched controls and 40 reading level-matched controls. In the first experiment, eight unfamiliar words (four short and four long) were presented six times within the context of a story. In the second experiment, eight pseudowords were presented on a computer and the children had to read them aloud. In both experiments, the reading and articulation times of experimental and control stimuli were compared, before and after the training. Children without dyslexia showed a decrease of the influence of length of word on reading speed, indicating a lexical reading, while for dyslexic children, the influence of length remained unchanged. These results appeared when the stimuli were presented in the context of a story as well as when presented in isolation. In short, our results describe that dyslexic children of transparent orthographic systems have problems in developing orthographic representations of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]