Distinguishing cause from effect – many deficits associated with developmental dyslexia may be a consequence of reduced and suboptimal reading experience

By Falk Huettig, Thomas Lachmann, Alexandra Reis, Karl Magnus Petersson. 2018

86 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The cause of developmental dyslexia is still unknown despite decades of intense research. Many causal explanations have been proposed, based on the range of impairments displayed by affected individuals. Here we draw attention to the fact that many of these impairments are also shown by illiterate individuals who have not received any or very little reading instruction. We suggest that this fact may not be coincidental and that the performance differences of both illiterates and individuals with dyslexia compared to literate controls are, to a substantial extent, secondary consequences of either reduced or suboptimal reading experience or a combination of both. The search for the primary causes of reading impairments will make progress if the consequences of quantitative and qualitative differences in reading experience are better taken into account and not mistaken for the causes of reading disorders. We close by providing four recommendations for future research.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb771c167ccec8b841db1367e6001147a87c9f56

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

  1. Susana Araújo
  2. Luís Faísca

In Education

  1. Susana Araújo
  2. Luís Faísca

In Statistics and Probability

  1. Susana Araújo
  2. Luís Faísca

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