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Use of orthographic knowledge by dyslexic and normal readers

Vanessa Martens and Peter F. de Jong

University of Amsterdam vmartens@fmg.uva.nl

Abstract

Slow reading tends to be a universal characteristic of dyslexic children, irrespective of the transparency of their orthography. One reason for this impairment might be a lack of lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge. In a pilot study, we investigated dyslexic and normal readers' use of sublexical knowledge in pseudoword reading by presenting the pseudowords in either normal lower case or in MiXeD case. The latter condition was assumed to prevent the use of sublexical orthographic knowledge. As expected, case mixing did not affect the dyslexics' reading latencies, because their reading strategy does not rely on the use of letter clusters. Normal readers, however, were slowed down by case mixing, as it presumably forced them to shift their reading strategy from processing units larger than single letters at a time to letter-level analysis. In the current larger study, we aimed to replicate and extend these results. Dyslexic children, chronological age controls, and reading age controls read a set of one-syllable words and pseudowords ranging from 3 to 6 letters under normal conditions or in MiXeD case. Results for reading accuracy and reading speed will be discussed.

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