Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Repetition of pseudowords and sentences with pseudowords in children with dyslexia and typically developing children in the third and fourth grade of elementary school
Petra Ramljak
ABSTRACT:
Dyslexia as a language-based disorder (Snowling, 2013) manifests in impaired reading fluency and comprehension (APA, 2014). Phonological theory postulates that dyslexia is caused by deficits in phonological processing (Reid, 2016; Swan & Goswami, 1997). The aim of this study is to examine phonological processing in typically developing and dyslexic third and fourth graders using pseudoword repetition and sentence with pseudowords repetition tasks. The study included 136 third and fourth grade children from elementary schools in Zagreb – 68 children with dyslexia and 68 typically developing children. Statistical data processing was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics – version 24. As we hypothesized, significant statistical differences were found between the two groups both in the repetition of pseudowords (Z = -3.605; p < 0.01) and sentences with pseudowords (Z = – 7.213, p < 0.01). The obtained results support the claim that phonological deficits are the basis of dyslexia. They also support the claim that the non-word tasks are reliable clinical markers that can distinguish children from their typically developing peers (Coady & Evans, 2008; Kelić, et al., 2016). This is ongoing work, and future results will provide quantitative and qualitative analysis of the errors of both groups with respect to various linguistic features of pseudowords and sentences with pseudowords, such as length, segmental complexity, and word similarity of pseudowords. All above may contribute to the understanding of language processing in children with dyslexia compared to non-dyslexic children.
keywords: phonological processing, dyslexia; pseudowords, sentences with pseudowords.