Abstract
The present study sought to identify cognitive reading-related skills (i.e. visual attention, rapid automatized naming and working memory) that might distinguish dyslexic Arabic children from skilled ones in 4th and 5th grades, and to examine the potential contribution of these factors to word reading and reading comprehension. Two experiments were conducted for this purpose. In Experiment 1, normal readers (N = 108) and dyslexics (23) were given a set of literacy tasks, visual attention, and rapid automatized naming. The results indicated that dyslexic children exhibited lower reading-related skills than controls. Visual attention and phonological processing were able to predict word reading. Experiment 2 was carried out on 36 dyslexic children compared to chronological-age controls. This experiment was designed to assess the relation between phonological awareness and working memory with word recognition and reading comprehension. Results showed significant differences between groups in literacy scores. In addition, inter-correlations indicated a strong relation between word recognition and reading comprehension on one hand and phonological awareness and verbal working memory on the other. Regression analyses showed that rapid naming, visual attention, and verbal working memory were significantly associated with literacy. The findings underscored the importance of cognitive skills in the acquisition of Arabic literacy and emphasized persistent difficulties in dyslexic children from multiple causes.
Highlights
Cross-linguistic studies show that the prevalence of dyslexia differs between transparent (e.g. Arabic script) and opaque (e.g. English) orthographies (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005)
While researches of the most transparent orthographic have focused on word recognition as a restricted outcome to which are related the above-cited factors, we focused on phonological and cognitive factors predicting reading comprehension
We examined the relation between a range of cognitive and phonological skills as predicting factors on reading skills in dyslexic Arabic children at the level of the 4th and 5th grades
Summary
Cross-linguistic studies show that the prevalence of dyslexia differs between transparent (e.g. Arabic script) and opaque (e.g. English) orthographies (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). An important question in deficient literacy processing is to what extent underlying cognitive mechanisms might vary as well. In European, orthographies, phonological processing (Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004) and rapid naming (Vaessen et al, 2010) have been identified as the main linguistic and cognitive predictors among typical as well as dyslexic readers. Vocabulary was the strongest predictor of word reading speed and accuracy (Landerl et al, 2013). Orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness (PA), and morphological awareness contribute to the organization of reading efficiency among Arabic readers (Abu-Rabia, 2007; Taha, 2013). A larger number of cognitive factors should be examined in the Arabic language
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