DYSLEXIA – A COMPREHENSIVE AND INTERNATIONAL APPROACH Edited by Taeko N. Wydell and Liory Fern-Pollak Dyslexia – A Comprehensive and International Approach Edited by Taeko N. Wydell and Liory Fern-Pollak Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2012 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. 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Publishing Process Manager Vana Persen Technical Editor Teodora Smiljanic Cover Designer InTech Design Team First published April, 2012 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechopen.com Dyslexia – A Comprehensive and International Approach, Edited by Taeko N. Wydell and Liory Fern-Pollak p. cm. ISBN 978-953-51-0517-6 Contents Preface IX Chapter 1 Cross-Cultural/Linguistic Differences in the Prevalence of Developmental Dyslexia and the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency 1 Taeko N. Wydell Chapter 2 Typical and Dyslexic Development in Learning to Read Chinese 15 Hua Shu and Hong Li Chapter 3 The Role of Phonological Processing in Dyslexia in the Spanish Language 29 Juan E. Jiménez Chapter 4 Phonological Restriction Knowledge in Dyslexia: Universal or Language-Specific? 47 Norbert Maïonchi-Pino Chapter 5 Antisaccades in Dyslexic Children: Evidence for Immaturity of Oculomotor Cortical Structures 61 Maria Pia Bucci, Naziha Nassibi, Christophe-Loic Gerard, Emmanuel Bui-Quoc and Magali Seassau Chapter 6 Sequential Versus Simultaneous Processing Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia 73 Marie Lallier and Sylviane Valdois Chapter 7 The Contribution of Handwriting and Spelling Remediation to Overcoming Dyslexia 109 Diane Montgomery Chapter 8 Depression in Dyslexic Children Attending Specialized Schools: A Case of Switzerland 147 Tamara Leonova VI Contents Chapter 9 Dyslexia and Self-Esteem: Stories of Resilience 163 Jonathan Glazzard Preface This book covers all aspects of developmental dyslexia from the underlying aetiology to currently available, routinely used diagnostic tests and intervention strategies, and also addresses important social, cultural and quality of life issues of those with developmental dyslexia. The ability to read and write is a remarkable trait of humanity. This trait enables us to convey spoken language through the conversion of symbols composed of lines, dashes, circles and dots, into words, phrases and sentences. This ability seems to have emerged around 3,500 years ago; in terms of evolution, this is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, which dates back some 200,000 years! Unlike spoken language, learning to read and write does not happen through mere exposure during infancy, but requires systematic instruction and applied study, which normally begins in early childhood. While most children are able to reach a skilled level of reading and writing within 5-6 years, some struggle to acquire the skill and may be subsequently diagnosed as having Developmental Dyslexia. This term stands in contrast to Acquired Dyslexia, which is associated with brain damage in individuals who prior to the incident which caused the condition had adequate reading skills. Developmental Dyslexia is characterised primarily by reading difficulty in the absence of any profound sensory, neurological and intellectual disorders or socio-cultural factors. However, it may co-occur with other developmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyscalculia, or dyspraxia, and may therefore manifest as delayed language production, spelling difficulties, and/or difficulties associating sounds and meanings with written words. The precise incidence of Developmental Dyslexia is not known, although it is thought that up to 12% of school children in some countries may face reading difficulties, with higher incidence in boys than girls. Although now widely regarded as a neurobiological disorder with genetic origin, Developmental Dyslexia may be caused by deficits in auditory processing or visual processing skills, or visual attentional skills as well as a deficit in visual or verbal short-term memory, which can affect its manifestation in isolation or in conjunction. Moreover, different languages exert different cognitive demands on the process of X Preface reading. For example, reading in Spanish or Italian, where a close relationship exists between letters and their corresponding sounds, words can be pronounced correctly by assigning to each written consonant the sound of the vowel that follows. In contrast, reading in English often requires prior knowledge of the correct pronunciation, since the phonology of a large proportion of words is not consistent with their spelling (e.g., pint vs. hint, lint, mint, tint; bread, head vs. bead; mead vs. steak; bough vs. cough vs. dough vs. through vs. thorough; colonel; gauge; yacht). In logographic writing-systems such as Chinese and Japanese Kanji, phonemes do not form part of written text since these languages use intricate characters to directly convey meaning. Reading in these languages therefore requires rote memorization and a complete understanding of the combination of strokes included in each character. Dyslexia may therefore manifest itself differently for speakers of different languages. Diagnosis of Developmental Dyslexia is a complex process, which requires intellectual, educational, speech and language, medical, and psychological evaluations, as well as a careful consideration of the properties of the particular language. Treatment is typically provided through educational support, which can help dyslexics to complete everyday reading and writing tasks through compensatory strategies, but cannot ‘cure’ or eliminate the underlying cause. Importantly, beyond the cognitive symptoms and the ensuing difficulty with reading and writing, Dyslexic children may suffer social exclusion, which can lead to behavioural and affective problems. Current research on Developmental Dyslexia therefore comprises various strands; some focusing on the aetiology, some on diagnosis and intervention, and others on psychological and behavioural aspects. All strands aim to provide new insight in order to facilitate early detection, efficient intervention and management of this challenging condition. In nine chapters written by researchers from different parts of the world, this book brings together leading international research from all strands. The first three chapters discuss the manifestation of Dyslexia in very different languages; Japanese, Chinese and Spanish, respectively, thus highlighting the effects of the orthographic properties of different languages on differential manifestation of reading difficulty. The following three chapters explore specific cognitive and biological factors which affect the observed symptoms of Dyslexia among French speakers; namely degraded phonological representations, maturation of the oculomotor system and visual attention span. The eighth chapter provides a comprehensive review of different intervention programs used in UK schools, highlights individual differences in dyslexic children, and the difficulties they face in light of the available diagnostic tools and provision. It further proposes that beyond reading, focus must be shifted towards [...]... phonology, vocabulary and rapid naming (from Wu, 2004) 22 Dyslexia – A Comprehensive and International Approach The significance of morphological awareness was supported in a following study in which children with and without dyslexia were tested on the tasks including paired associative learning (visual-visual and visual-verbal PAL), phonological awareness, morphological awareness, rapid naming, verbal short-term... Kaneko, M., Uno, A. , Kaga, M., Matsuda, H., Inagaki, M., Haruhara, N (1997) Developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia: a case report (in Japanese) NO TO HATTATSU (Brain and Child Development) 29, 24 9–2 53 Kaneko, M., Uno, A. , Kaga, M., Matsuda, H., Inagaki, M., Haruhara, N (1998) Cognitive Neuropsycho-logical and Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Study of a Developmentally Dyslexic Japanese Child Journal of Child... ON-reading) = each character takes ON-reading in a two-character word, but each character has a KUN-reading and/ or another ON-reading; Inc-KUN (Inconsistent KUN) = each character takes KUN-reading in a two-character word, but each character has at least one ONreading; Jukujikun = truly exception words, neither character in a two-character Kanji word takes typical ON or KUN-reading, e.g., 雪崩/nadare/ meaning... Katakana characters are used for the large number of foreign loan words (e.g テレビ/terebi/TV) in contemporary Japanese Both forms of Kana have an almost perfect one-to-one relationship between character and pronunciation That is, one character always represents one particular syllable or mora (syllable like unit) of the Japanese language and its sound value does not change whether the character appears... However his ability to read Japanese was equivalent and often better than that of his Japanese peers, as illustrated in Table 1 Note that the Japanese writing system consists of two qualitatively different scripts: logographic, morphographic Kanji, derived from Chinese characters, and two forms of syllabic Kana, Hiragana and Katakana which are derived from Kanji characters (see Wydell, Patterson, &... of broad skills required to learn to read this orthography 24 Dyslexia – A Comprehensive and International Approach 4 Conclusions In summary, the research confirmed some universal aspects of reading acquisition in alphabetic languages and in Chinese Just like in alphabetic languages, Chinese children with dyslexia have mainly deficits in the accuracy and speed of character or word recognition Mastery... (e.g., Kaneko, Uno, Kaga, Matsuda, Inagaki, & Haruhara, 1997; 1998; Uno, Kaneko, Haruhara, Matsuda, Kato, & Kasahara, 2002) The majority of these children in Japan tend to have both reading and writing difficulties, and often the writing impairment is more severe than the reading impairment4 Significantly, in Japan there are very few reported cases of children with reading impairments only The Japanese... found that the prevalence of dyslexia among American, Japanese and Chinese children is comparable, a great number of studies in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China have congruously reported that between 5% and 10% of school-aged children in Chinese were dyslexic in the past years (Zhang, Zhang, Yin, Zhou, & Chang, 1996; Yin and Weekes, 2003) Research has revealed that, just like in alphabetic languages,... developmental dyslexia both in terms of the extent of the severity and the nature of difficulties/impairments (e.g., Snowling & Griffiths, 2005) 4 Dyslexia – A Comprehensive and International Approach of inflected verbs, adjectives and adverbs Hiragana characters are used mainly for function words and the inflections of verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and for some nouns with uncommon Kanji representations Katakana... phonetic radical (丁, /ding1/), which provides the information about pronunciation of a character The corpus study by Shu, Chen, Anderson, Wu, and Xuan (2003) showed that, in all of the characters taught in elementary schools, about 88% of the compound characters are semantic transparent (e.g the character妈 (mother) is with a female radical “女”) or semi-transparent (e.g the character猎 16 Dyslexia – A Comprehensive . DYSLEXIA – A COMPREHENSIVE AND INTERNATIONAL APPROACH Edited by Taeko N. Wydell and Liory Fern-Pollak Dyslexia – A Comprehensive and International Approach Edited. Hiragana characters are used mainly for function words and the inflections of verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and for some nouns with uncommon Kanji representations. Katakana characters are. suggested. 3. Dyslexia and the hypothesis of granularity and transparency Wydell and Butterworth (1999) reported the case of an adolescent English-Japanese bilingual male, AS, whose reading and writing