The present study was aimed at investigating different aspects of Executive Functions (EF) in children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD). A neuropsychological battery tapping verbal fluency, spoonerism, attention, verbal shifting, short-term and working memory was used to assess 60 children with DD and 65 with typical reading (TR) abilities. Compared to their controls, children with DD showed de...

Remarkably few research articles on the treatment of developmental dyslexia were published during the last 25 years. Some treatment research arose from the temporal processing theory, some from the phonological deficit hypothesis and some more from the balance model of learning to read and dyslexia. Within the framework of that model, this article reviews the aetiology of dyslexia sub-types, th...

The comprehension of fluent speech in one's native language requires that listeners integrate the detailed acoustic-phonetic information available in the sound signal with linguistic knowledge. This interplay is especially apparent in the phoneme restoration effect, a phenomenon in which a missing phoneme is "restored" via the influence of top-down information from the lexicon and through botto...

BACKGROUND Causal theories of dyslexia suggest that it is a heritable disorder, which is the outcome of multiple risk factors. However, whether early screening for dyslexia is viable is not yet known. METHODS The study followed children at high risk of dyslexia from preschool through the early primary years assessing them from age 3 years and 6 months (T1) at approximately annual intervals on...

Recent evidence has suggested cerebellar anomalies in developmental dyslexia. Therefore, we investigated cerebellar morphology in subjects with documented reading disabilities. We obtained T1-weighted magnetic resonance images in the coronal and sagittal planes from 11 males with prior histories of developmental dyslexia, and nine similarly-aged male controls. Proton magnetic resonance spectra ...

We tested the hypothesis that crowding effects are responsible for the reading slowness characteristic of developmental dyslexia. A total of twenty-nine Italian dyslexics and thirty-three age-matched controls participated in various parts of the study. In Experiment 1, we measured contrast thresholds for identifying letters and words as a function of stimulus duration. Thresholds were higher in...

Learning to read builds on the speech processes of the child at many levels (Denckla, 1979; Mann, 1986), and language impairment is one of the most common behavioral correlates of developmental dyslexia (Doehring, Trites, Patel, & Fiedorowicz, 1981; Jorm, 1979; Vellutino, 1978). Current dyslexia research therefore has emphasized the linguistic analysis of language deficits and has brought conve...

Uta Frith has made a major contribution to our understanding of developmental disorders, especially autism and dyslexia. She has studied the cognitive and neurobiological bases of both disorders and demonstrated distinctive impairments in social cognition and central coherence in autism, and in phonological processing in dyslexia. In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a...

Differences in cerebellar structure have been identified in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and developmental dyslexia. However, it is not clear if different cerebellar regions are involved in each disorder, and thus whether cerebellar anatomical differences reflect a generic developmental vulnerability or disorder-specific characteristics. To cl...

Developmental dyslexia, or specific learning difficulties, is the most common neurobehavioral disorder affecting school-aged children, with a prevalence rate of 5-17.5%. Family and twin studies have pointed to a genetic component in the etiology of dyslexia. However, dyslexia is a complex disorder at both the genetic and environmental levels, and its nature so far remains unclear. Dyslexia is t...