The effect of a dyslexia-specific Cyrillic font, LexiaD, on reading speed: further exploration in adolescents with and without dyslexia

Abstract

The current study aims to test the assumption that a specially designed Cyrillic font, LexiaD, can assist adolescents with persistent reading problems and facilitate their reading experience. LexiaD was compared with the widely used Arial font. Two groups of adolescents with dyslexia (N = 34) and without dyslexia (N = 28) silently read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus (Laurinavichyute et al., 2019), some of which were presented in LexiaD, and others in Arial, while their eye movements were recorded. LexiaD did not show the desired effect for adolescents at the beginning of the experiment: Arial outperformed it in reading speed in both participant groups. By the end of the experiment, LexiaD outperformed Arial, and although the speed of the higher-level cognitive processing (e.g., lexical access) in both fonts did not differ significantly, the feature extraction was found to be better in LexiaD than in Arial. Thus, we found some positive effect of LexiaD when participants with and without dyslexia got accustomed to it. A follow-up study with an explicit exposure session is needed to confirm this conclusion.