A Special Font for People with Dyslexia: Does it Work and, if so, why?

In 2008 Christian Boer, a Dutch artist, developed a special font ("Dyslexie") to facilitate reading in children and adults with dyslexia. The font has received a lot of media attention worldwide (e.g., TheGuardian.com, Slate.com, TheAtlantic.com, USA Today, and io9.com). Interestingly, there is barely any empirical evidence for the efficacy of Dyslexie. This study aims to examine if Dyslexie is indeed more effective than a commonly used sans serif font (Arial) and, if so, whether this can be explained by its relatively large spacing settings. Participants were 39 low-progress readers who were learning to read in English. They were asked to read four different texts in four different font conditions that were all matched on letter display size (i.e., x-height), but differed in the degree to which they were matched for spacing settings. Results showed that low-progress readers performed better (i.e., read 7% more words per minute) in Dyslexie font than in standardly spaced Arial font. However, when within-word spacing and between-word spacing of Arial font was matched to that of Dyslexie font, the difference in reading speed was no longer significant. We concluded that the efficacy of Dyslexie font is not because of its specially designed letter shapes, but because of its particular spacing settings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Acquisition of Malay word recognition skills: lessons from low-progress early readers.

Malay is a consistent alphabetic orthography with complex syllable structures. The focus of this research was to investigate word recognition performance in order to inform reading interventions for low-progress early readers. Forty-six Grade 1 students were sampled and 11 were identified as low-progress readers. The results indicated that both syllable awareness and phoneme blending were significant predictors of word recognition, suggesting that both syllable and phonemic grain-sizes are important in Malay word recognition. Item analysis revealed a hierarchical pattern of difficulty based on the syllable and the phonic structure of the words. Error analysis identified the sources of errors to be errors due to inefficient syllable segmentation, oversimplification of syllables, insufficient grapheme-phoneme knowledge and inefficient phonemic code assembly. Evidence also suggests that direct instruction in syllable segmentation, phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme correspondence is necessary for low-progress readers to acquire word recognition skills. Finally, a logical sequence to teach grapheme-phoneme decoding in Malay is suggested.

Do more boys than girls have reading problems?

There is controversy within the research literature concerning the relative prevalence of reading problems in boys and girls. The authors report findings from very large and very representative samples of Australian students. Data from the New South Wales Basic Skills Test (BST) for reading, administered annually to third and fifth grade students in New South Wales schools, were analyzed for 1997 to 2006. Poor readers were defined as students who scored in the lowest BST bands, Bands 1 and 2. Average boy/girl ratios for third-grade students were 1.66:1 (Band 1) and 1.44:1 (combined Bands 1 and 2) and for fifth grade students were 2.26:1 (Band 1) and 1.99:1 (combined Bands 1 and 2). The findings of this study confirm earlier research that more boys than girls experience reading problems, but these differences in incidence may be more modest than previous research has suggested.

Refractory effects on auditory-evoked responses in children with reading disorders.

The current study investigated neural refractory effects in children (8-12 years) with reading disorders and a control group. Cortical responses (P1 and N250) to the sound /da / were measured at interstimulus intervals of 538, 1072 and 2152 ms. As expected, owing to slow neural recovery periods, both groups showed longer cortical response latencies at the shortest interstimulus interval of 538 ms. N250 showed a slower neural refractory period at the short interstimulus interval (538 ms) for children with reading disorders than the control group, however. Only control group children showed interhemispheric differences for the N250 peak. No group differences were evident for P1. The results suggest that children with reading disorders have different and slower underlying neural responses than typically developing children.

Effects of identification technique, extraction method, and stimulus type on mismatch negativity in adults and children.

The overall aims of the study were to determine optimal methods and stimuli for eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN), extracting MMN from the deviant and standard waveforms, and identifying the response in children and adults. Several stimulus types were compared (pure tones, chords, and natural speech tokens) to determine which optimally elicit MMN. Deviant-alone and flip-flop MMN extraction methods that control for stimulus effects on MMN were compared for the speech stimuli (/da/ and /ga/). Visual identification, an area criterion, and integral-distribution techniques were used to identify MMN. Eight adults (20 to 28 years) and eight children (8 to 12 years) participated in the study. The deviant-alone method elicited bigger MMN area and duration than the flip-flop method for the speech stimuli. An area criterion of 110 microV x msec identified 90% of visually identified MMN compared to 62% identified using the integral-distribution technique. For both children and adults, speech stimuli and one of the chords most consistently elicited MMN.