Development of phonological and orthographic processing in teenagers with and without reading disabilities

The aim of this study was to analyze the development of phonological and orthographic processing in reading in teenagers with and without DEAL using a cross-sectional design. To analyze the performance of the teenagers the Sicole-R-ESO Multimedia Battery (www.ocideidi.net ) was used, measuring different cognitive processes associated to reading disabilities. The battery has a highly modular format , so that the assessment tasks are grouped into five modules. To carry out this study phonological processing module that assesses phonological awareness was administered. This module consists of four subtasks: blending, isolation, segmentation, and deletion. Orthographic processing module which consists of two subtasks, homophone and pseudohomophone comprehension subtask were also administered. A sample of teenagers with dyslexia was selected from a population of 945 secundary school students (12-16 years old ) from different public and private schools in the Canary Islands. Significant differences were found between dyslexics and normally achieving readers across grades in both, phonological and orthographic processing involved in reading acquisition. This result indicates that when diagnosing DEAL, we must assess the student’s cognitive profile , establishing precisely where the difficulty lies , not just focus on curricular competition or a general diagnosis of reading level. In this sense, the Sicole-R-ESO Multimedia Battery carries out an exhaustive record the performance of all cognitive processes involved in reading, to locate precisely where the difficulty is, allowing to obtain significant information to understand the problem and provide possible solutions to articulate answers, adapted to the individual needs of students