Individual difference predictors of treatment outcome in the remediation of specific reading disability

Perspectives on dyslexia

Dyslexia, or a reading disability, occurs when an individual has significant difficulty with speed and accuracy of word decoding. Comprehension of text and spelling are also affected. The diagnosis of dyslexia involves the use of reading tests, but the continuum of reading performance means that any cutoff point is arbitrary. The IQ score does not play a role in the diagnosis of dyslexia. The cognitive difficulties of dyslexics include problems with speech perception, recognizing and manipulating the basic sounds in a language, language memory, and learning the sounds of letters. Dyslexia is a neurological condition with a genetic basis. There are abnormalities in the brains of dyslexic individuals. There are also differences in the electrophysiological and structural characteristics of the brains of dyslexics. Physicians play a particularly important role in recognizing children who are at risk for dyslexia and helping their parents obtain the proper assessment.

Predictors of response to intervention of word reading fluency in Dutch

The objective of this study was to investigate the contribution of rapid digit naming, phonological memory, letter sound naming, and orthographic knowledge to the prediction of responsiveness to a school-based, individual intervention of word reading fluency problems of 122 Dutch second and third graders whose reading scores were below the 10th percentile in comparison with the normative group. Degree of responsiveness was determined by comparison of a pre- and posttest measure of word reading fluency with a 6-month interval. At posttest, 38% of the children had improved their reading scores above the 10th percentile. Maintenance scores revealed no significant growth on average, confirming that word reading fluency skills of poor readers are hard to remediate. Except rapid digit naming, none of the measures predicted responsiveness after controlling for the autoregressive effect of initial performance on fluency of word reading. A large part of the variance remained unexplained, supporting the advantage of a response-to-intervention approach above traditional psychometric testing to identify severe reading disabilities.

Phonological awareness training and remediation of analytic decoding deficits in a group of severe dyslexics

The goal of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Auditory Discrimination in Depth Program (ADD) in remediating the analytic decoding deficits of a group of severe dyslexics. A group of ten severely dyslexic students ranging in age from 93 to 154 months were treated in a clinic setting for 38 to 124 hours (average of 65 hours). Pre- and post-treatment testing was done with the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test and the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization to assess changes in phonological awareness and analytic decoding skills. Results revealed statistically significant gains in phonological awareness and analytic decoding skills.