Presentation matters: Surface text features and text quality in written narratives of Dutch high school students with and without dyslexia.

Presentation features such as spelling, punctuation and handwriting can influence the evaluation of general text quality. High school students with dyslexia might therefore be at a disadvantage, as at least their spelling performance is typically poor(er). Furthermore, these students might show less sophisticated linguistic features of texts, such as word length and sentence complexity, that might also be related to text quality.

Perceived negative consequences of dyslexia: the influence of person and environmental factors.

Perceived negative consequences of dyslexia entail the degree to which an individual perceives negative outcomes, such as low academic achievement or feelings of anxiety and depression, and attributes these experiences to the disorder. In the current study, we examined how perceived consequences of dyslexia are influenced by person and environmental factors. Perceived consequences were evaluated for the academic domain and the domain of mental health (depression, anxiety).

The Same yet Different: Oral and Silent Reading in Children and Adolescents with Dyslexia.

Dyslexia is characterized by poor word reading. In research, education, and diagnosis, oral reading is commonly assessed, and outcomes are generalized to silent reading, although similarities and differences between oral and silent reading are poorly understood. We therefore compared oral word reading, oral text reading and silent text reading.

Early and late diagnosed dyslexia in secondary school: Performance on literacy skills and cognitive correlates.

Although a diagnosis of dyslexia is often made during elementary school, severe and persistent literacy difficulties of a considerable group of students are only noticed during secondary school. The question arises whether the literacy(-related) deficits of these late identified students with dyslexia differ from those of early diagnosed students. To address this question, 10th Grade Dutch secondary school students with early (n = 35) and late (n = 19) identified dyslexia and their peers with average to good literacy abilities (n = 24) were compared on literacy skills and underlying cognitive skills.

Auditory-motor mapping training as an intervention to facilitate speech output in non-verbal children with autism: a proof of concept study.

Although up to 25% of children with autism are non-verbal, there are very few interventions that can reliably produce significant improvements in speech output. Recently, a novel intervention called Auditory-Motor Mapping Training (AMMT) has been developed, which aims to promote speech production directly by training the association between sounds and articulatory actions using intonation and bimanual motor activities. AMMT capitalizes on the inherent musical strengths of children with autism, and offers activities that they intrinsically enjoy.