Abstract
Evidence from opaque languages suggests that visual attention processing abilities in addition to phonological skills may act as cognitive underpinnings of developmental dyslexia. We explored the role of these two cognitive abilities on reading fluency in Brazilian Portuguese, a more transparent orthography than French or English. Sixty-six children with developmental dyslexia and normal Brazilian Portuguese children participated. They were administered three tasks of phonological skills (phoneme identification, phoneme, and syllable blending) and three visual tasks (a letter global report task and two non-verbal tasks of visual closure and visual constancy). Results show that Brazilian Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia are impaired not only in phonological processing but further in visual processing. The phonological and visual processing abilities significantly and independently contribute to reading fluency in the whole population. Last, different cognitively homogeneous subtypes can be identified in the Brazilian Portuguese population of children with developmental dyslexia. Two subsets of children with developmental dyslexia were identified as having a single cognitive disorder, phonological or visual; another group exhibited a double deficit and a few children showed no visual or phonological disorder. Thus the current findings extend previous data from more opaque orthographies as French and English, in showing the importance of investigating visual processing skills in addition to phonological skills in children with developmental dyslexia whatever their language orthography transparency.
Highlights
Developmental dyslexia has been reported in different languages but only a few studies have been done in Portuguese reading children, and most concerned European Portuguese
Different cognitively homogeneous subtypes can be identified in the Brazilian Portuguese population of children with developmental dyslexia, in particular two subsets of children who show either a single phonological disorder or a single visual processing disorder
VISUAL PROCESSING DISORDERS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA One of the main finding of the current study is to show that Brazilian Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a visual processing disorder and more generally that visual processing abilities contribute to reading performance in Brazilian Portuguese children, independently of their phonological skills
Summary
Developmental dyslexia has been reported in different languages but only a few studies have been done in Portuguese reading children, and most concerned European Portuguese. Much evidence suggests that some children with developmental dyslexia show a VA span disorder – namely a difficulty to simultaneously process multiple elements – that contributes to their poor reading performance independently of their phonological skills. The current study will provide support to this hypothesis in showing that the visual attentional skills of Brazilian Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia significantly and independently account for their poor reading performance. Sucena et al (2009) reported that European-Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia exhibited reading disorders on irregular words and pseudo-words, relative to chronological age matched typical readers They performed worse than controls in terms of both accuracy and fluency, as typically reported in deep orthographies. Previous evidence from opaque languages that phonological and VA skills independently contribute to the poor reading outcome of children lead to identify different subtypes of developmental dyslexia characterized by distinct cognitive disorders. Evidence for distinct subtypes of developmental dyslexia in Brazilian Portuguese children will be of great relevance for the diagnosis and remediation of developmental dyslexia in this language
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