title: Which tasks best discriminate between dyslexic university students and controls in a transparent language?
abstract: The need for a battery for testing adult dyslexia, and especially university students, is being increasingly recognized in view of the increased number of adult requests for a dyslexia examination in relation to both assistance and protection from discrimination. The present study examines the discriminative validity of a battery we have developed-the Battery for the Assessment of Reading and Writing in Adulthood-through comparison of the performance of 24 university students with a history of severe developmental dyslexia and 99 controls. All the reading, writing, lexical decision and spelling tasks of the battery, except omissions in a lexical decision task and reading comprehension, showed a good discriminatory power. In addition, use of just two of these tasks (fluency in reading a text and spelling under articulatory suppression) gave 87% sensitivity and 97% specificity. Our results confirm that in transparent languages, measures of phonological automaticity are the best indexes of reading decoding competence, particularly in adults.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova, Italy. annamaria.re@unipd.it
authors.forename: Anna Maria
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Re
authors.forename: Patrizio E
authors.initials: PE
authors.lastname: Tressoldi
authors.forename: Cesare
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cornoldi
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lucangeli
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011932:Reading; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D014495:Universities; D014956:Writing; D055815:Young Adult