COGNITIVE PATTERNS OF CHILDREN WITH DYSLEXIA - A COMPARISON BETWEEN GROUPS WITH HIGH AND AVERAGE NONVERBAL INTELLIGENCE

We tested the hypothesis that children with dyslexia identified by word decoding deficit will be poor in specific cognitive processes that require successive processing and rapid articulation irrespective of their high or average nonverbal IQ. Children with dyslexia and normally achieving children between 9 years and 11 years of age were divided into four groups comprising average-IQ and high-IQ children with dyslexia and normal readers. All children were administered measures of planning, attention-arousal, simultaneous and successive processes, phonemic segmentation, and nonverbal IQ. Results confirmed the hypothesis: The cognitive tasks that differentiated children with dyslexia from nondyslexic children irrespective of IQ were the successive tasks, as well as two tasks of attention that required articulation and/or phonological coding. Tasks that demanded both phonological coding and articulation correctly classified children with dyslexia and nondyslexic children up to 80%. The importance of remedial training appropriate for alleviating the cognitive and word decoding deficits is discussed.