Reading Acquisition and Developmental Dyslexia

This chapter discusses the new brain research suggests that children with good phonological skills encode speech more accurately via this oscillatory process. It explains how the dyslexic brain does poorly in perceiving amplitude information, and how neural oscillatory mechanisms are atypical in dyslexia. Reading acquisition by children is predicted across languages by individual differences in phonological skills. Phonological skills reflect in part children’s awareness of the phonological structure of words. The finding that the children with dyslexia were significantly less accurate than younger controls in the DeeDee task suggests that the prosodic difficulty in dyslexia is a profound one. The children with dyslexia found this same-different judgement task significantly more difficult, even when compared to reading-level matched younger controls. Children with developmental dyslexia show reduced awareness of phonology at all levels in the hierarchy. Children with developmental dyslexia, on the other hand, show atypical oscillatory entrainment to speech.