Dyslexia Research

Question 1

McDougall et al.

Answer 1

McDougall et al. divided 90 children with dyslexia into three different ability groups: poor, moderate, and good. They found that poor readers had significantly lower memory spans for words and slow reading rate. Good readers can articulate words being represented phologically in short-term memory. Poor readers sound out words more slowly, leading to fewer words being held in short-term memory

Question 2

Alloway et al.

Answer 2

Alloway et al. suggested children with dyslexia have difficulty in processing and remembering speech sounds because of poor working memory. They cannot hold all of the speech sounds for long enough in working memory to be able to bind them together to form a word. They simply do not have the working memory capacity to store syllables for long enough to form an affluent word

Question 3

Smith-Spark et al.

Answer 3

Smith-Spark et al. found that adults with dyslexia had unimpaired spatial working memory, but impaired verbal working memory compared to a control group of non-dyslexic participants. THey suggest that their results indicate a deficit with the phonological loop

Question 4

What percentage of children does dyslexia affect?

Answer 4

Dyslexia affects between 3 and 6 percent of children (though some estimate as many as 10 percent)

Question 5

Is dyslexia more prevalent in boys or girls?

Answer 5

Dyslexia is more prevalent in boys than girls

Question 6

By what is dyslexia characterised?

Answer 6

Dyslexia is characterised by a particular difficulty with phonology, which is critical for learning to read. Children with dyslexia have a poor verbal short-term memory - evidence for this comes from the phonological similarity effect (difficulty in remembering similar-sounding words) and the word length effect (difficulty in remembering sequences of long words compared to short words). Children with dyslexia may therefore have an impaired short-term memory for dealing with speech sounds