Intervention for a multi-character processing deficit in a Greek-speaking child with surface dyslexia

Abstract

A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F. showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments revealed that R.F. did not appear to have a phonological deficit, but indicated impaired multicharacter processing ability for visually presented letter arrays. On the basis of previous research linking multicharacter processing and reading we developed an intervention aimed at improving R.F.'s ability to report letter arrays of increasing length. Following a 9-week programme, improvement was observed, and investigation of R.F.'s reading revealed gains in single word reading speed and accuracy. The findings support the significance of intervention studies for testing hypotheses regarding causal relationships among cognitive processes and the notion of specific profiles of developmental dyslexia/dysgraphia in both opaque and transparent orthographies.

Keywords:

• Dyslexia
• Dual-route model
• Multicharacter processing deficit
• Reading and spelling.

We are grateful to the participating children and parents for their help and support during data collection. We are also grateful to Aris Terzopoulos for his help in data collection, and to Professor Brenda Rapp and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.

The work reported was supported by the University of London Central Research Fund (2010), a European scholarship (2010–2011), Wingate Scholarships (2011–2012), the Onasis foundation (2011–2013), and the Leventis Foundation (2011–2012).

Notes

1 The first author, a native speaker of Greek, devised all the experimental tasks reported in the paper. Computer-presented tasks were programmed using the DMDX program developed by Forster and Forster (2003).

2 We are grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.