The Development of Reading Accuracy and Reading Rate during Treatment of Dyslexia

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to provide a window on the processes by which the accuracy and rate of reading develop during psycholinguistic treatment for dyslexia. In experiment 1, 140 children with dyslexia followed a treatment method that presented them with a learning system that clarifies the basic elements and operations by which one’s writing system encodes the characteristics of the spoken language system. The results revealed that during the first half of treatment most progress was made on reading accuracy, which gradually transformed into a more prominent (or pronounced) improvement in the reading rate during the second half of treatment. Experiment 2 examined the reading of 46 individuals with dyslexia after termination of their treatment. It was shown that following mastering of the reading system the reading rate, as opposed to reading accuracy, continues to improve. These findings are discussed vis‐à‐vis the remediation of reading fluency.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Maurits van der Molen and Jan Hoeks for their helpful comments at various stages of the research.

Notes

1. The false discovery rate (FDR) method controls for the expected proportion of false positive findings among all the rejected hypotheses. FDR is a more powerful quantity to control than the classical familywise error rate (FWER) methods such as the Bonferroni procedure (e.g., Storey, 2002).

2. A phone is a perceptual class of speech sounds with a singular linguistic function. The terms phonic and phone are used to express the perceptual character of speech sounds, phonemes being abstract linguistic entities within a phonetic or phonological theory.

3. Unfortunately, besides the follow‐up score, only the reading scores at the start and the end of treatment were available for this sample. However, a chi‐square test revealed no significant difference in the change in number of errors per second from the start to the end of treatment between the present sample and the sample of experiment 1 (model of independence of sample and distribution of reading score: χ² (1) = .44, p = .51 for 12 months of treatment sample vs. follow‐up sample; χ² (1) = .10, p = .75 for 15 months of treatment sample vs. follow‐up sample).