Developmental dyslexia in an orthography of intermediate depth: the case of European Portuguese

Ana Sucena,Philip Seymour,São Luís Castro

doi:10.1007/s11145-008-9156-4

Abstract

Fifteen Portuguese children with dyslexia, aged 9–11 years, were compared with reading and chronological age controls with respect to five indicators related to the phonological deficit hypothesis: the effects of lexicality, regularity, and length, implicit and explicit phonological awareness, and rapid naming. The comparison between groups indicates that Portuguese children with dyslexia have a phonological impairment which is revealed by a developmental deficit in implicit phonological awareness and irregular word reading (where younger reading level controls performed better than dyslexics) and by a developmental delay in decoding ability and explicit phonological awareness (where dyslexics matched reading level controls). These results are discussed in relation to the idea that European Portuguese is written in an orthography of intermediate depth.

Highlights

Portuguese is commonly regarded as a relatively shallow orthography
It might be expected that studies of reading development and dyslexia in Portuguese would yield results similar to those found in other shallow orthographies
The results of this study showed that Portuguese dyslexic children read regular words more accurately than nonwords (10% advantage) and irregular words (46% advantage)

Summary

Introduction

It might be expected that studies of reading development and dyslexia in Portuguese would yield results similar to those found in other shallow orthographies. Translation house each to walk in this one basket elevator to be rabbit church crease minister peg sauce to wet hill grape one the cross-language study of beginning reading by Seymour, Aro and Erskine (2003) suggested that learning to read in Portuguese proceeded less rapidly than in shallow orthographies such as German, Greek, Italian or Finnish. At the end of first grade children in most orthographies (9 out of 13) read words and nonwords with near ceiling results. English children exhibited poor reading results for both words and nonwords (respectively, 34% and 29%). The results for Portuguese children lay between the near ceiling results from shallow orthographies and the poor results for English. Portuguese children read 75% of words and nonwords, a result close to the findings for French and Danish (79% and 71% for words, and 85% for nonwords)

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Conclusion