Cognitive profiles of typical and atypical readers: evidence from the italian orthography

Reading process has been the focus of a great amount of research over the past decades. However, recently Share (2008) claimed that reading research has been dominated by the study of the English language, and that this “Anglocentric research agenda” limited the relevance of the large amount of knowledge on reading in typical and atypical development. In line with this observation, there is evidence that learning to read transparent writing systems, such as Italian, is easier than learning to read opaque systems (Seymour, 2005), and that the precise weight of cognitive processes involved in reading varied systematically as a function of orthography’s transparency (e.g., Ziegler et al., 2010). The series of studies reported in this thesis investigates the reading aloud process in the Italian transparent orthography, considering school-aged children who are typical readers or have Developmental Dyslexia (DD). The first two studies examined the role of verbal and visual-attentional cognitive processes in relation to reading fluency, considering children with typical development (Chapter 2) and with DD (Chapter 3). In particular, Chapter 2 describes a cross-sectional research that analyzes the predictors of reading fluency in primary school, investigating differences in the pattern of predictors for beginners (1st and 2nd grade) and expert readers (3rd to 5th grade). Results showed that concurrent predictors of reading fluency partially change when children become expert readers: whereas in 1st and 2nd grades text reading fluency was predicted by phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, in 3rd to 5th grade also vocabulary, verbal short-term memory and visuo-spatial attention played a significant role in the model. The study presented in Chapter 3 focuses on group differences in the cognitive underpinnings of reading fluency, comparing dyslexic children with chronological-age and reading-age matched controls. Children with DD were significantly impaired in all the measures included in the phonological domain and in the visuo-spatial attention and verbal-visual recall tasks. Furthermore, this study provides an examination of the cognitive deficits that characterized the children with dyslexia involved in the study. Main finding is that a large group of children with DD exhibited multiple deficits, that included both the phonological and the non-verbal domains, whereas a lower number of children had a deficit exclusively in the phonological or exclusively in the visual-attention domains. The last study presented (Chapter 4) is an experimental investigation of the autonomic response to reading tasks in children with DD and typical readers. This study also analyses the relationship between the physiological activation and some socio-emotional variables measured through questionnaires administered to children themselves and to their parents. Children with DD exhibit lower galvanic skin response during the reading aloud task. Then, it was observed a significant correlation of galvanic skin response and heart rate registered during reading tasks with parent’s evaluation of emotional difficulties presented by their children. Theoretical implications for the science of reading, as well as clinical and educational issues, are discussed.