Abstract
The present study explored the direct and indirect contribution of semantic abilities to the levels of phonological and orthographic abilities in children with dyslexia. The semantic abilities of fifty‐five 9‐year‐old Dutch children diagnosed with dyslexia were associated with their phonological abilities (phonological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal working memory) and their word decoding and pseudoword decoding efficiency scores. It was found that children's semantic abilities predicted both word decoding efficiency and pseudoword decoding efficiency indirectly via phonological awareness and rapid naming. These results can be explained in terms of a lexical restructuring account of early reading development; strong semantic abilities provide children with dyslexia with a boost to strengthen their phonological skills and naming skills, which indirectly facilitate their reading development.
Highlights
Learning to read is important to become functional literate in today's society
The main goal of the present study was to investigate the direct and indirect effect of semantic knowledge on pseudoword and word decoding within a group of Dutch children with dyslexia
Significant indirect effects of semantic knowledge were found on both pseudoword decoding efficiency and word decoding efficiency
Summary
Learning to read is important to become functional literate in today's society. The process of reading involves activation of orthographic, phonological, and semantic features of words (see Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). By learning the letters and recoding orthographic representations into phonological representations, children become proficient in reading (see Ehri, 2005). Research has shown that phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN; Swanson, Trainin, Necoechea, & Hammill, 2003), and working memory (Jongejan, Verhoeven, & Siegel, 2007) can be seen as important predictors of early word decoding. Research indicated that phonological awareness, rapid naming, and working memory are generally low in children with dyslexia (Tilanus, Segers, & Verhoeven, 2013). The possible beneficial role of semantics in the development of word decoding in children with dyslexia has so far only received scant attention in the literature. In the present study, we explored the direct and indirect contribution of semantic abilities to the levels of phonological and orthographic abilities in Dutch children with dyslexia
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