Recent findings suggest that people with dyslexia experience difficulties with the learning of serial order information during the transition from short-to long-term memory (Szmalec et al. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition" 37(5): 1270-1279, 2011). At the same time, models of short-term memory…

The present study examines implicit sequence learning in adult dyslexics with a focus on comparing sequence transitions with different statistical complexities. Learning of a 12-item deterministic sequence was assessed in 12 dyslexic and 12 non-dyslexic university students. Both groups showed equivalent standard reaction time increments when the…

Dyslexia is hard to diagnose in a second language. Poor performance on a test of reading may be caused by poor language proficiency in the second language or by limited schooling rather than by poor reading ability per se. This confound was supported in a study of 88 adult second language learners and 65 native language speakers. The incidence of…

It is not clear from research whether, or to what extent, reading comprehension is impaired in adults who have learning disabilities (LD). The influence of perceptual organization (PO) and phonological awareness (PA) on reading comprehension was investigated. PO and PA are cognitive functions that have been examined in previous research for their…

This study investigated the reading and reading-related skills of 15 French-speaking adults with dyslexia, whose performance was compared with that of chronological-age controls (CA) and reading-level controls (RL). Experiment 1 assessed the efficiency of their phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term…

Outcomes of two training programs aimed at improving reading speed for 39 German-speaking poor readers in grades 2 and 4 were evaluated. During a 6-week training period, a specific target for children in a "computer group" was to improve reading of word-initial consonant clusters by practice in associating an orthographic unit with a corresponding…

We examined whether university students who report a significant history of reading difficulties (RD; n=24) differed from university students with no history of reading difficulties (NRD; n=31) in how sentence context affects word recognition. Experiment 1 found no differences in how congruent sentence primes or syntactic manipulations of the…

The double-deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that reading deficits are more severe in individuals with weaknesses in phonological awareness and rapid naming than in individuals with deficits in only one of these reading composite skills. In this study, the hypothesis was tested in an adult sample as a model of reading achievement. Participants…

We report on an experiment designed to evaluate processing of derived forms in high-functioning dyslexics, defined as university students with a history of reading difficulties who have age-appropriate reading comprehension skills. We compared high-functioning dyslexics with a group of normal adult readers in their performance on a lexical…

Data from 123 male adults were analyzed to estimate environmental (home, school, and literacy environments) influences on components of literacy skills. Results suggest a substantial social-cultural bias in the delineation of literacy skills and in definitions of reading disabilities. Only phonological ability appeared relatively unaffected by…

This paper reports on the development of a battery of phonological processing tasks to screen adults with dyslexia. Tasks examined reversed spoonerism, phonological choice, working memory, and vocabulary with confusable alternatives. All tasks showed high discrimination between adults with dyslexia and a control group. Tasks also correlated with…

It is argued the proposed definition of dyslexia is restricted to developmental dyslexia in which a student struggles to learn to read and does not apply to acquired dyslexia in which a previously normal reader loses reading functions. The need for classification schemes for defining specific learning disabilities is emphasized. (Contains…

This article reviews recent evidence supporting a biological basis for developmental dyslexia. It concludes that the combined evidence demonstrating macroscopic morphologic, microscopic neuronal, and microstructural white matter abnormalities in dyslexia is consistent with a localization of the principle pathophysicological process to perisylvian…

A lexical decision study with two groups of tertiary students (n=43) differing in their Chinese language ability found that even for adult readers differing in their Chinese language ability, lexicality, frequency of characters, and the consistency of semantic radicals affect accurate and rapid character identification. Teaching suggestions are…

This article is based on a lecture presented at the 48th Annual Conference of the International Dyslexia Association. It provides a selective biography of Samuel T. Orton, discusses his educational ideas and how they came to be, and considers how current educational research validates much of Orton's early thinking. (Author/CR)