Cognitive Behavioral Profiles Of Different Subtypes Of Dyslexia And The Elfficacy Of A Morphological Intervention

Poor word decoding accuracy and poor reading fluency are the two core deficits of reading disorders,so when screening children with dyslexia,researchers classify children as reading disorder when decoding accuracy or reading fluency are lower than the grade level.However,there might be heterogeneity in children with reading disorder screened by these two methods.This study examined whether there are differences between children in the reading fluency deficit group,decoding accuracy deficit group and dual deficit group at the levels of metalingual cognitive ability and general cognitive ability.In this study,136 children with reading disorder were screened from multiple primary schools by using Raven's reasoning test,character naming test,and reading fluency test.Moreover,these children were carefully divided into reading fluency defect group,decoding defect group,and dual defect group.In addition,63 normal children were recruited as a control group.The four groups of children were compared on three metalingual awareness tests including phonological awareness,morphological awareness and orthographic awareness,and three general cognitive ability tests including working memory,rapid automatic naming,and oral understanding.The results show that:(1)Among the 136 children with dyslexia,23 children were defined as reading fluency deficit which accounts for 16.91% of the whole group of reading disorder;59 children were decoding deficit accounted for 39.71% of reading disorder;54 children were dual deficit,which accounts for 43.38%.(2)Children with reading fluency deficit group have higher abilities in phonological awareness,morphological awareness and orthographic awareness than children with decoding deficit.Children in the dual deficit group suffered the most among the three groups with reading disorder.(3)No stable difference in rapid automatic naming,working memory and oral understanding ability have been found between the reading fluency deficit group,decoding deficit group and dual deficit group.This can be further explored in the future.In addition,behavioral intervention is currently the only way to effectively alleviate reading disorder.It is urgent to develop intervention methods for Chinese children with reading disorder.Morphological awareness is considered to be the core competence of Chinese reading development.Therefore,this study conducted a one-month intervention of morphological awareness on 10 children in the dual deficit group and found that:(4)The intervention of morphological awareness significantly improved the morphological awareness,decoding accuracy(character naming)and dictation.This study made a contribution to the framework of subtypes of Chinese dyslexia,reminding researchers to distinguish different types of dyslexia when screening dyslexia,and laying a foundation for providing more targeted intervention methods for different types of dyslexia.At the same time,it has been proved that intervention of morphological awareness can relieve dyslexia,mainly improved the decoding ability of dyslexia children.