Abstract
The prevalence and long-term consequences of dyslexia make it crucial to look for effective and efficient ways of its therapy. Action video games (AVG) were implied as a possible remedy for difficulties in reading in Italian and English-speaking children. However, the studies examining the effectiveness of AVG application in dyslexia suffered from significant methodological weaknesses such as small sample sizes and lack of a control group with no intervention. In our study, we tested how two forms of training: based on AVG and on phonological non-action video games (PNAVG), affect reading in a group of fifty-four Polish children with dyslexia. Both speed and accuracy of reading increased in AVG as much as in PNAVG group. Moreover, both groups improved in phonological awareness, selective attention and rapid naming. Critically, the reading progress in the two groups did not differ from a dyslexic control group which did not participate in any training. Thus, the observed improvement in reading in AVG and PNAVG can be attributed either to the normal reading development related to schooling or to test practice effect. Overall, we failed to replicate previous studies: Neither AVG nor PNAVG remedy difficulties in reading in school children.
Highlights
Dyslexia is defined as a specific impairment of reading acquisition which occurs despite typical intelligence and sufficient educational resources[1]
Since efficient phonological processing is crucial for reading acquisition[11], several studies aimed to check whether a phonology-based training may result in improved phonological processing and whether this enhancement may be transferred to reading progress
The visual attention hypothesis was supported by two interventional studies[19,20] in which dyslexic children who played video games with high attentional requirements significantly improved their reading skills, in contrast to peers who played non-action video games (NAVG) and who made no progress in reading
Summary
Dyslexia is defined as a specific impairment of reading acquisition which occurs despite typical intelligence and sufficient educational resources[1]. Since efficient phonological processing is crucial for reading acquisition[11], several studies aimed to check whether a phonology-based training may result in improved phonological processing and whether this enhancement may be transferred to reading progress. The authors concluded that trainings based on AVG enhance visual attention and lead to an improvement of both reading speed and accuracy. Both studies involved only small samples of participants Inclusion of PNAVG group enabled us to verify results of several prior studies which showed that phonology-based trainings transfer to reading progress in children with dyslexia and at risk for reading impairment[12,13,14,15,16]
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