Abstract
Beyond the established difficulties of individuals with dyslexia in word recognition and spelling, it remains unclear how severe their difficulties in comprehension are. To examine this, we performed a meta-analytic review. A random-effects model analysis of data from 76 studies revealed a large deficit in reading comprehension in individuals with dyslexia compared to their chronological-age (CA) controls (g = 1.43) and a smaller one compared to their reading-level (RL) matched controls (g = 0.64). Individuals with dyslexia also differed significantly from their CA controls in listening comprehension (g = 0.43). Results further showed significant heterogeneity in the effect sizes that was partly explained by orthographic consistency (the deficits were larger in languages with low orthographic consistency) and vocabulary matching (the deficits were larger in studies in which the groups were not matched on vocabulary). These findings suggest, first, that individuals with dyslexia experience significant difficulties in both reading and listening comprehension, but the effect sizes are smaller than those reported in the literature for word reading and spelling. Second, our findings suggest that the deficits in reading comprehension are likely a combination of deficits in both decoding and oral language skills.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors, upon request.
Notes
We use the term “hyperlexia” here as it was used by Gough and Tunmer (1986). Today, researchers use the term developmental language disorders.
We acknowledge though that the type of comprehension task may differ according to the age of the participants. Cloze tasks and picture matching tasks are more frequently used in studies with younger participants and multiple choice or open-ended question tasks are more frequently used in studies with older participants. In addition, even within the same task (e.g., Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension), ítems for younger ages include pictures that give hints to the answer, but ítems for older children do not include pictures.
Notice that Collins et al. (2018) did not use only studies with dyslexic children. Their sample of studies included also struggling readers, children at-risk for reading difficulties, and low achievers in reading.
Notice that similar results are obtained when using random effects models. More specifically, when we reran the analyses using robumeta, in reading comprehension, the overall mean effect for the CA-DYS comparison was 1.4374 (p < 0.0001, 95% CI = [1.2572, 1.6175]) and the overall mean effect for the RL-DYS comparison was 0.6509 (p = 0.0243, 95% CI = [0.0845, 1.2173]). In listening comprehension, the overall mean effect for the CA-DYS comparison was 0.4558 (p = 0.0015, 95% CI = [0.1737, 0.7378]) and the overall mean effect for the RL-DYS comparison was 0.0222 (p = 0.8753, 95% CI = [-0.2548, 0.2991]). The results of this analysis can be found in Supplementary Material.
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This research was partly supported by a grant from the Beijing Education Sciences Planning Foundation (CECA19141) to KG.
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Georgiou, G.K., Martinez, D., Vieira, A.P.A. et al. A meta-analytic review of comprehension deficits in students with dyslexia. Ann. of Dyslexia 72, 204–248 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-021-00244-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-021-00244-y