Assessing dyslexia in Finnish high-school students: a pilot study

Abstract

A pilot study concerning Finnish dyslexics at senior high school (lukio), for 16–19-year-olds, is reported. The phonological processing deficit was assumed to underlie dyslexia in these late teenage subjects. The regular nature of Finnish orthography was taken into consideration. Four tasks were introduced to a total of 32 students, of whom 15 were dyslexics and 17 were controls. The controls outperformed the dyslexics on three tasks: text recoding, pseudoword recoding and pseudoword spelling. On the text spelling task, both groups performed equally well. In the correlational analysis of all subjects, both recoding tasks showed high correlations with selfestimated school achievement in language-related subjects. The recoding time appeared to be more important than the number of reading errors. These preliminary results suggest that the three tasks, capable of discriminating dyslexics, might be useful in the development of an adult dyslexia test in Finnish.