Abstract
Reading is vital to every aspect of modern life, exacerbated by reliance of the internet, email, and social media on the written medium. Developmental dyslexia (DD) characterizes a disorder in which the core deficit involves reading. Traditionally, DD is thought to be associated with a phonological impairment. However, recent evidence has begun to suggest that the reading impairment in some individuals is provoked by a visual processing deficit. In this paper, we present WISC‐IV data from more than 300 Italian children with a diagnosis of DD to investigate the manifestation of phonological and visual subtypes. Our results indicate the existence of two clusters of children with DD. In one cluster, the deficit was more pronounced in the phonological component, while both clusters were impaired in visual processing. These data indicate that DD may be an umbrella term that encompasses different profiles. From a theoretical perspective, our results demonstrate that dyslexia cannot be explained in terms of an isolated phonological deficit alone; visual impairment plays a crucial role. Moreover, general rather than specific accounts of DD are discussed.
Highlights
In order to lead a normal life in most societies, it is vital to have an appropriate level of reading skills
We examined the scores obtained in the 10 core subtests of the WISC-IV—block design (BD), similarities (SI), digit span (DS), picture concepts (PCn), coding (CD), vocabulary (VC), letter–number sequencing (LN), matrix reasoning (MR), comprehension (CO), and symbol search (SS)
The aim of this study was to evaluate the presence of different clusters of children with Developmental dyslexia (DD)
Summary
In order to lead a normal life in most societies, it is vital to have an appropriate level of reading skills. Most dyslexic individuals are classified under the lexically based subtype with the majority of studies reporting language-related deficits in phonological processing. The dual-route reading framework (DRC; Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) has been highly influential in explaining the lexically based subtype (Figure 1a). In this model, reading can be achieved via two routes: (a) lexically through access to stored representations in the orthographic and phonological lexicons and (b) sub-lexically through a phonological grapheme-to-phoneme conversion procedure. The lexical route permits reading of familiar words, whereas the sub-lexical route processes unfamiliar words and phonologically plausible non-words (e.g., plur) through a spelling-to-sound conversion mechanism. In keeping with the DRC framework, the majority of interventions are targeted at these components through speech and language therapy, which often leads to improvement in reading ability
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