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Reading difficulties in Spanish adults with dyslexia

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Abstract

Recent studies show that dyslexia persists into adulthood, even in highly educated and well-read people. The main characteristic that adults with dyslexia present is a low speed when reading. In Spanish, a shallow orthographic system, no studies about adults with dyslexia are available; and it is possible that the consistency of the orthographic system favours the reading fluency. The aim of this study was to get an insight of the reading characteristics of Spanish adults with dyslexia and also to infer the reading strategies that they are using. For that purpose, a group of 30 dyslexics (M age = 32 years old) and an age-matched group of 30 adults without reading disabilities completed several phonological and reading tasks: phonological awareness tasks, rapid automatic naming, lexical decision, word and pseudoword reading, letter detection and text reading. The results showed that highly educated Spanish dyslexics performed significantly worse than the control group in the majority of the tasks. Specifically, they showed difficulties reading long pseudowords, indicating problems in automating the grapheme–phoneme rules, but they also seem to present difficulties reading words, which indicate problems with the lexical route. It seems that the Spanish dyslexic adults, as in deep orthographies, continue having difficulties in phonological awareness tasks, rapid naming and reading.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by Grant PSI2012-31913, from the Spanish Government. We sincerely thank Cristina Martínez García and Noemí García Cortés for their assistance in testing the participants.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, Pza Feijoo s/n, 33003, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain

    Paz Suárez-Coalla & Fernando Cuetos

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  1. Paz Suárez-Coalla
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Correspondence to Paz Suárez-Coalla.

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Suárez-Coalla, P., Cuetos, F. Reading difficulties in Spanish adults with dyslexia. Ann. of Dyslexia 65, 33–51 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-015-0101-3

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