Abstract
Dyslexia is a developmental disability affecting the acquisition of reading and writing skills, and its developmental nature makes longitudinal research of great importance. This study therefore investigated the cognitive-linguistic profiles of the typical-functioning dyslexics and high-functioning dyslexics with longitudinal cohorts of Chinese-speaking adolescents diagnosed with childhood dyslexia. These two dyslexic groups of fifty students (with 25 typical-functioning dyslexics) were assessed in Grade 2 (Time 1) and in Grade 8 (Time 2), whereas 25 typically developing controls were assessed at Time 2. Students were administered measures of phonological awareness, morphological skills, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, verbal working memory, and literacy skills. Results showed that, at Time 2, both dyslexic groups performed less well than the control group on most of the measures. Deficits in rapid naming were particularly salient in both dyslexic groups. Comparing the two dyslexic groups, the typical-functioning dyslexics had more multiple deficits than the high-functioning dyslexics. Findings highlight the importance of rapid naming deficits as potential universal causes of dyslexia and the utility of targeting visual-orthographic knowledge and morphological skills in supporting the development of dyslexic adolescents.
Highlights
Dyslexia is a developmental disability affecting the acquisition of reading and writing skills, and its developmental nature makes longitudinal research of great importance
High-functioning dyslexics have been found among those whose language is alphabetic such as English, relatively little is known about the incidence in non-alphabetic languages like Chinese about how Chinese students with childhood dyslexia go on to develop those cognitive-linguistic skills and literacy skills in secondary school grades
The high-functioning dyslexic group performed significantly better than the typicalfunctioning group but worse than the CA on literacy, visual-orthographic knowledge, and morphological skills
Summary
Dyslexia is a developmental disability affecting the acquisition of reading and writing skills, and its developmental nature makes longitudinal research of great importance. This study investigated the cognitive-linguistic profiles of the typical-functioning dyslexics and high-functioning dyslexics with longitudinal cohorts of Chinese-speaking adolescents diagnosed with childhood dyslexia. Many studies on dyslexia in alphabetic languages such as English have shown that the major causes of reading and writing problems lie with deficits in the phonological domain, in the access to phonological representations and phonological processing skills (Snowling, 2000; Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008) These deficits make it difficult for children with dyslexia to read and spell unfamiliar words as they affect the skills of analyzing and manipulating sound structures of words and linking letter sound correspondence. Chinese characters can be formed as one-radical simple characters or multi-radical compound characters (Huang, 2005; Lin, 2006)
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