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The first session on the multilingual aspects of dyslexia was well-attended. Four papers discussing literacy and dyslexia issues in English, Dutch, Greek, German and Czech speaking children were presented.
Tanya Patel of the University of York reported on a cross-linguistic study of children learning to read in English and in Dutch. These two languages have very different writing systems. English has a more complex sound-letter correspondence structure than Dutch. She discussed the different manifestations of dyslexia in the two different languages.
Nata Goulandris of the University College London shared evidence from a research on learning to spell which identifies knowledge of the alphabet, awareness of grammar, knowledge of the base words and understanding of the writing system as important components of spelling skill. Among Greek children, it is shown that grammatical awareness is needed because the language is highly inflected.
Karin Laderl of the University of Salzburg presented research findings on dyslexia in German. Children and persons with dyslexia do not experience huge inaccuracies while reading words and nonwords in German most probably because of the phonological consistency of the German orthography.
Marketa Caravolas of the University of Liverpool discussed findings of a research done with over 800 Czech children. The spelling performance of the children were studied in term of phonological, morphological and lexical factors. This paper showed that poor spellers in Czech also experienced orthographic and phonological knowledge problems.
The findings presented in these four papers seem to be in agreement that dyslexia manifests differently in different languages as influenced by the knowledge of the child/person about the orthography, grammar, lexicon/semantics and phonological structure as well as the orthographic depth of the language. However, children who experience difficulties in spelling and reading still manifest relatively slower performance rates in various tasks that are traditionally associated with dyslexia.
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