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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]

Expressive reading is considered one of the subprocesses involved in reading fluency, and good readers show greater changes in tone and fewer unnecessary pauses than bad ones. Given the high frequency of reading difficulties in specific language impairment (SLI), there may be certain differences in the use of prosody among children with SLI. The purpose of this study was to research whether prosody in the reading of children with Spanish SLI differs from that in the reading of typical readers. To do so, 44 children (SLI and control) read aloud a text which contained declarative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences. Different prosodic parameters referring to length, tone and intensity were measured. The results showed that the children with SLI read slower, commit more errors and make more inappropriate pauses. Furthermore, fewer pitch variations were found in the interrogative sentence and in the final features of the sentence. These results confirm the relationship between decoding and prosody; therefore, interventions with these children should bear in mind the practice of expressive reading while learning reading fluency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do skilled readers of opaque and transparent orthographies make differential use of lexical and sublexical processes when converting words from print to sound? Two experiments are reported, which address that question, using effects of letter length on naming latencies as an index of the involvement of sublexical letter–sound conversion. Adult native speakers of English (Experiment 1) and Spanish (Experiment 2) read aloud four- and seven-letter high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords in their native language. The stimuli were interleaved and presented 10 times in a first testing session and 10 more times in a second session 28 days later. Effects of lexicality were observed in both languages, indicating the deployment of lexical representations in word naming. Naming latencies to both words and nonwords reduced across repetitions on Day 1, with those savings being retained to Day 28. Length effects were, however, greater for Spanish than English word naming. Reaction times to long and short nonwords converged with repeated presentations in both languages, but less in Spanish than in English. The results support the hypothesis that reading in opaque orthographies favours the rapid creation and use of lexical representations, while reading in transparent orthographies makes more use of a combination of lexical and sublexical processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading impairment is an important feature in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The Spanish orthography entails completely regular spelling to sound correspondences, so reading disorders may be different to English. In the current study, reading, phonological and semantic abilities of 35 patients with the three variants of PPA, and 13 healthy volunteers were assessed. Brain metabolism was concomitantly obtained from each participant using 18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography imaging. Two main patterns of impairment were identified: difficulties in nonwords reading with preservation of exception words in agrammatic and logopenic aphasia, and the inverse pattern in semantic dementia. Left frontal and left parietotemporal regions were associated to nonwords reading, while the anterior temporal lobe was related to reading of exception words. These results support the usefulness of examining reading abilities in the differential diagnosis of PPA variants, and suggest potential types of words that could be used in Spanish to assess these patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthographic representations of words are indispensable for reading fluency. The ways in which these representations are developed and their resistance to decay are hotly debated topics. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of semantic and phonological representations on the formation of orthographic representations in a transparent orthography. In order to achieve this objective, an experiment with three conditions was carried out. In the first condition, a group of university students were asked to repeatedly read 10 new words after semantic and phonological training, in the second condition another group of participants read the new words after phonological training, and in the third condition participants read without previous training. Finally, a follow-up session was performed to test the resistance to decay of the orthographic representations. The results showed that participants who had received semantic training formed the representations faster than participants in the other conditions, as indicated by the decrease in length effect. These results indicate the important role of previous knowledge when people face new written words. A month later these orthographic representations still remained in the lexicon of the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Twenty Spanish patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 20 matched controls were given a battery of 17 tasks involving object recognition and the spoken and written perception and production of words and non-words. The AD patients were significantly impaired on nine of the tasks. Prominent among these were tasks that involve semantic processing, though non-word reading was also impaired. Performance on a category fluency task best discriminated AD patients from controls. It is proposed that impairment to semantic processing underlies most of the observed deficits on lexical processing tasks in patients with early AD, but that non-word reading may be sensitive to additional, mild impairments to phonological representations caused by extension of the degenerative process from anterior to posterior temporal regions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Correct stress assignment is a requirement for fluent reading in alphabetic languages. This study focuses on two nonlexical mechanisms at the core of stress assignment. In particular, the use of a default stress pattern (e.g., penultimate stress) and the Spanish stress mark. In Experiment 1, participants read aloud words and pseudowords with different stress types (on the antepenultimate or the penultimate syllable), and with or without a stress mark. Results showed longer reaction times (RTs) for words and pseudowords with antepenultimate stress. However, as words with antepenultimate stress always have a stress mark, it could be argued that stress type differences could be due to the presence of the stress mark. In Experiment 2, using a priming procedure participants read aloud words and pseudowords in pure versus mixed stress blocks. Again, words and pseudowords with antepenultimate stress were read slower (longer RTs), suggesting that previous differences were due to stress mark rather than stress type. These results indicate that processing stress marks is cognitively demanding when reading in Spanish. [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]

Background: Prosodic reading is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. It is already known that English children develop their reading prosody from the earliest grades of primary school, showing the greatest improvement between first and second grade, but there are no Spanish studies of the development of reading prosody in the first years of school. Reading prosody may develop earlier in Spanish children as Spanish is a transparent language, which makes it possible to achieve high accuracy in the first year of learning to read. Method: We performed a longitudinal study, monitoring children from first to third grade. The children were asked to read aloud a text including declarative sentences containing high‐frequency and low‐frequency words and interrogative sentences; we analysed the usual prosodic variables (i.e., pauses, duration of different segments and pitch variations). Results: The results showed that younger readers made more and longer pauses and read less accurately. Moreover, the frequency words affected accuracy in all three grades, but only modified reading time in the first and second grades. We found no differences between the grades with respect to declarative sentences, but reading in all grades was influenced by word frequency, with a flatter final intonation. In the case of interrogative sentences, we found that first graders had a flatter melodic contour, whereas second graders tended to exaggerate the final change in intonation. Conclusions: Our results confirmed that reading fluency increases dramatically between first and second grade. Although Spanish has a transparent orthographic system, Spanish children seem to develop reading prosody similarly to children using opaque languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Studies of the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension have traditionally focused on primary schools and narrative texts. However, reading fluency continues to develop during secondary school, when the texts used most are expository texts. Method: The aim of our study was to investigate reading fluency and reading comprehension in secondary-school students, comparing two texts (i.e. narrative and expository) containing various types of sentences (i.e. declarative, adversative and enumerative sentences). Results: We found differences in reading fluency between narrative and expository texts, the expository text being read with a more marked prosody (pauses and melodic contour) suggesting that readers rely on this for their understanding. In addition, we also found a relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension, with a greater relationship of prosodic variables with the expository text than with the narrative one. Conclusions: Our results confirm that reading fluency continues to develop during secondary school. The expository text, due to its increased difficulty, seemingly needs to lean on and exaggerate the prosody more when reading in order to understand it. [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]

Despite the similar transparency of their orthographies, reading in Italian has been found to be affected by frequency but not age of acquisition (AoA) [Barca, L., Burani, C., & Arduino, L. S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns.Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments and Computers,34, 424–434] while reading in Spanish is affected by AoA but not frequency [Cuetos, F., & Barbón, A. (2006). Word naming in Spanish.European Journal of Cognitive Psychology,18, 415–436]. We examined this cross-linguistic difference, firstly, through a reanalysis of the Italian and Spanish reading latencies. After eliminating several between-experiment differences, we replicated the AoA effect in Spanish but not in Italian and the frequency effect in Italian but not in Spanish. The cross-linguistic comparison could not equate stimulus imageability; therefore, secondly, we compared the Italian reading latencies with new Spanish reading latencies for imageability-matched words. We found frequency effects but neither an AoA effect nor a language by AoA interaction. We argue that the previously reported cross-linguistic difference in the AoA effect resulted from a between-study difference in stimulus imageability. More imageable words induced more semantic involvement in reading, yielding an AoA effect in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La posibilidad de predecir el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura ha sido objeto de numerosas investigaciones. Las habilidades de procesamiento fonológico y velocidad de denominación aparecen entre los mejores predictores en la mayor parte de los estudios. Sin embargo, muchos de los resultados se han obtenido en lenguas diferentes del castellano y con estudios que evalúan esas capacidades cuando los niños ya saben leer, por tanto la relación de la lectura y escritura con otras habilidades podría ser fruto del aprendizaje. El objetivo de este estudio fue determinar qué variables permiten predecir la adquisición de la lectura mecánica, así como de la escritura, en castellano. Se aplicaron tareas de conciencia fonémica, repetición de pseudopalabras, amplitud de memoria, fluidez verbal y denominación rápida y automatizada, a un grupo de 50 niños prelectores. Dieciocho meses después, cuando ya sabían leer y escribir, se les evaluó en lectura y escritura. Con los datos obtenidos, se realizaron análisis de correlación de Pearson, análisis factorial y análisis de regresión lineal. La conciencia fonológica fue la variable que mejor predijo la exactitud lectora y la escritura, mientras que la denominación rápida de dibujos predijo la velocidad lectora. Estos datos indican que es posible pronosticar la adquisición de la lectura y escritura antes de su enseñanza. Así mismo, nos sugieren que es posible intervenir tempranamente, especialmente en aquellos niños que presenten riesgo de dificultades de aprendizaje.The prediction of reading and writing acquisition has been the subject of numerous research studies, given the importance of the issue. Phonological processing skills and rapid automatic naming are among the best predictors in most research studies. However, many of the results have been obtained in languages other than Spanish, and from studies that assess these skills in children who are already readers. Therefore, the relationship between reading and writing and other skills could be the result of learning these skills. The aim of this study was to identify variables that predict the acquisition of mechanical reading and writing in Spanish. A group of 50 pre-reading children participated in different tasks (phonemic awareness, pseudoword repetition, memory span, verbal fluency and Rapid Automatic Naming), and eighteen months later, when they could read and write, literacy skills were evaluated. Pearson correlations, factor analysis, and linear regression analysis were carried out on the data. Phonological awareness was the variable that best predicted reading accuracy and writing, while rapid automatized naming of pictures predicted reading speed. These data indicate that it is possible to predict the acquisition of reading and writing skills before they are taught. Furthermore, these results suggest that early intervention is possible, especially in those children who are at risk of learning difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Las estrategias que emplean los aprendices lectores dependen en buena medida de la consistencia de los sistemas ortográficos pues, mientras en las ortografías transparentes los aprendices se basan más en estrategias subléxicas, en las opacas tienen que recurrir a un uso flexible de estrategias de tipo subléxico y léxico. No obstante, algunas investigaciones recientes en ortografías transparentes han destacado el uso de estrategias léxicas ya en las primeras fases del aprendizaje. El objetivo de este artículo fue determinar si los aprendices españoles emplean diferentes estrategias en las primeras etapas o mantienen únicamente una lectura subléxica basada en las reglas de conversión grafema-fonema. Para ello se aplicó un diseño basado en bloques a una muestra de 37 alumnos de 7 y 9 años de edad en una tarea de lectura de palabras. Los análisis de modelos lineales de efectos mixtos mostraron un efecto de cambio de estrategia ya a los 7 años. Se confirma así que desde las primeras etapas los aprendices de ortografías transparentes también emplean la vía léxica y recurren a la flexibilidad en el uso de estrategias. Se discuten las consecuencias de los resultados en la concepción del aprendizaje de las ortografías transparentes.Strategies used by reading learners depend largely on the consistency of orthographic systems. Thus, whereas learners of languages with transparent orthographies rely mainly on sublexical strategies, learners of deep orthographic systems have to resort to the use of flexible lexical and sublexical strategies in order to achieve a good command of word recognition. Nevertheless, some recent research on transparent orthography have pointed out that lexical strategies are used from the early stages of learning. The aim of this study was to determine whether learners of Spanish –a transparent language– alternate between different lexical and sublexical strategies, or stick to sublexical reading based on grapheme-phoneme conversion rules only. A block-based reading experiment was conducted with 37 students aged 7 and 9 years. Mixed-effects analyses showed an effect of strategy change even at age 7. We thus confirm that from the first stages, learners of transparent orthographies also employ the lexical route and resort to a flexible use of strategies. The implications of these results in the conception of learning transparent orthographic systems are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report a study of the factors that affect reading in Spanish, a language with a transparent orthography. Our focus was on the influence of lexical semantic knowledge in phonological coding. This effect would be predicted to be minimal in Spanish, according to some accounts of semantic effects in reading. We asked 25 healthy adults to name 2,764 mono- and multisyllabic words. As is typical for psycholinguistics, variables capturing critical word attributes were highly intercorrelated. Therefore, we used principal components analysis (PCA) to derive orthogonalized predictors from raw variables. The PCA distinguished components relating to (1) word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and familiarity; (2) word AoA, imageability, and familiarity; (3) word length and orthographic neighborhood size; and (4) bigram type and token frequency. Linear mixed-effects analyses indicated significant effects on reading due to each PCA component. Our observations confirm that oral reading in Spanish proceeds through spelling-sound mappings involving lexical and sublexical units. Importantly, our observations distinguish between the effect of lexical frequency (the impact of the component relating to frequency, AoA, and familiarity) and the effect of semantic knowledge (the impact of the component relating to AoA, imageability, and familiarity). Semantic knowledge influences word naming even when all the words being read have regular spelling-sound mappings. [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]

We present a single case of a right-handed female patient, RH, who was categorized as suffering from conduction aphasia. She presented no articulatory problems during spontaneous speech but made a significant number of phonological paraphasias in naming and repetition tasks. The number of errors increased for long words and pseudowords. This pattern of results points to damage in the “Phonological Output Buffer” (POB) as the basis of this disorder. However, this patient did not make mistakes when reading words and pseudowords aloud, even when we introduced a delay between the presentation of the word and its production to test the working memory resources of the phonological buffer. Furthermore, the patient’s ability to name objects, repeat words, and write to dictation improved with her degree of familiarity with the items. The damage could be situated at the point where phonemes are selected and ordered to produce words. We posit that the deficits observed in this patient, and the differences encountered between her performance and that of others described in the literature, in particular in reading tasks, can be explained by considering POB damage to be gradual in nature. According to this explanation, the performance of patients with damage to the POB will depend on the amount of information provided by the stimulus (word/nonword), the language particularities (regular/irregular), and the nature of the task demands (repetition, writing, naming, or reading). [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]

The acquisition of new vocabulary is usually mediated by previous experience with language. In the visual domain, the representation of orthographically unfamiliar words at the phonological or conceptual levels may facilitate their orthographic learning. The neural correlates of this advantage were investigated by recording EEG activity during reading novel and familiar words across three different experiments (n = 22 each), manipulating the availability of previous knowledge on the novel written words. A different pattern of event-related potential (ERP) responses was found depending on the previous training, resembling cross-level top-down interactive effects during vocabulary acquisition. Thus, whereas previous phonological experience caused a modulation at the post-lexical stages of the visual recognition of novel written words (~520 ms), additional semantic training influenced their processing at a lexico-semantic stage (~320 ms). Moreover, early lexical differences (~180 ms) elicited in the absence of previous training did not emerge after both phonological and semantic training, reflecting similar orthographic processing and word-form access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]