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Children with dyslexia show an inhibition domain-specific deficit in reading

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Abstract

Children with dyslexia face persistent difficulties in acquiring reading skills, often making guessing errors characterized by the replacement of a word by an orthographic neighbour. These reading errors could be related to inhibition problems within the reading task. Previous studies examining inhibition skills in dyslexic children led to unclear results when inhibition in cognitive and non-reading tasks was evaluated. The present study aims to demonstrate whether dyslexic children have a specific reading inhibition deficit or if they have a general inhibition deficit. Eighteen dyslexic children (age range: 106–131 months, in Grade 4) were matched to typically developing children on both chronological age (age range: 109–128 months, in Grade 4), and on reading level (age range: 87–98 months, in Grade 2). All children were asked to perform (i) a cognitive inhibition task based on fruit colours; (ii) a reading inhibition task, consisting of reading sentences in which an expected word was replaced by a orthographic neighbour. Our results demonstrated that dyslexic children performed equally compared to the two control groups in the cognitive inhibition task, whilst they read the sentences less accurately than the two control groups in the reading inhibition task, and they were slower than children of the same age. Therefore, our results clearly demonstrate that dyslexic children have an inhibition deficit specific to the reading task. The study highlights the importance of better understanding the specific reading difficulties of dyslexic children, which in turn opens up interesting perspectives for treatment.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank M. Ficheroulle, S. Petit and C. Vander Stappen for their contribution to the conception (M. Ficheroulle and S. Petit) and data collection and scoring of the tests, and E. Blampain for comments on the manuscript. We are grateful to the children, teacher and principals for their support and participation.

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  1. Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université de Louvain, Place Mercier, 10, bte L3.05.01, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Marie Van Reybroeck & Margot De Rom

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  1. Marie Van Reybroeck
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Correspondence to Marie Van Reybroeck.

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Van Reybroeck, M., De Rom, M. Children with dyslexia show an inhibition domain-specific deficit in reading. Read Writ 33, 907–933 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-09986-z

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