A Complex View of the Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion (GPC) Procedure: Evidence for Vowel Developmental Dyslexia from a Shallow Orthography Language

EasyChair Preprint no. 6500

Abstract

Introduction

Recent findings suggest that the sublexical route described in the Dual-Route Model is likely to be a multi-layered and feature-based process. This study examined the presence of vowel dyslexia in Italianת a shallow-orthography language.

Methods

The new TILTAN-IT reading battery, aimed at assessing specific types of dyslexia, was administered to 609 Italian-speaking children (2^nd-8^th grade), recruited at their schools. This battery includes lists of Italian words, non-words, and word-pairs, selected as sensitive stimuli for each type of dyslexia. Reading errors were coded according to their types, to identify dyslexia types. Errors of substitution, addition, omission, and migration of vowels were coded separately from the parallel errors in consonants.

Results

28 children were diagnosed with vowel dyslexia. They produced significantly more vowel errors (vowel letter omission/substitution/addition/migration) than the controls, but made none or only 1 consonant errors. We also found the opposite pattern, which has not been reported before: 21 children showed significantly more errors on consonants than their age-peers, but made fewer than 2 vowel errors.
Conclusions

TILTAN-IT allows one to detect different types of dyslexia in Italian. In particular, the results suggest that despite the highly consistent conversion of vowels from orthography to phonology, it is still possible to identify a specific impairment in reading vowel letters in the sublexical route. We were also able to identify children who showed the mirror-image dyslexia, with errors only on consonants in reading nonwords. These results indicate that the sublexical route is more complex than previously thought, with separate conversion mechanisms for vowel letters and for consonant letters.

Keyphrases: Developmental Dyslexia, reading model, Shallow orthography language, Sublexical Route, Vowel dyslexia

@Booklet{EasyChair:6500,
  author = {Daniela Traficante and Claudio Luzzatti and Naama Friedmann},
  title = {A Complex View of the Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion (GPC) Procedure: Evidence for Vowel Developmental Dyslexia from a Shallow Orthography Language},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6500},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}