Reading difficulties of Hindi-speaking children with developmental dyslexia

Abstract

The current research is an examination of thenature of reading difficulties in dyslexicreaders of Hindi. The reading performance ofchildren with dyslexia was compared with thatof reading-age (RA) and chronological-age (CA)matched controls on word and nonword reading ofitems of different length. The results showedthat the dyslexic children were significantlypoorer than CA controls on reading speedand accuracy and were worse than RA controlson reading accuracy. For all groups, reactiontime and errors increased with increasinglength of stimuli. Analysis of reading errorsfurther indicated that the dyslexic childrenproduced a greater percentage of graphemic thanphonological errors, and that errors involvingvowel substitutions or deletions were much morefrequent than those involving consonant errors.In general, the findings reveal that, despitethe transparency of the Hindi script, dyslexicreaders of Hindi have difficulty in developinghigh-quality, segmentally organizedphonological representations of words anddisplay poor blending skills.