The present study investigated whether phonological awareness training is an effective intervention to significantly improve reading in German dyslexic third and fourth graders with a phonological awareness deficit, and whether these children can equally benefit from a phonology-based reading training or a visually-based reading training. German speaking dyslexic elementary school children («=30; M=9.8 years) were matched by forming triplets based on IQ, reading quotient and phonological awareness and then randomly assigned to one out of three interventions («=10): a phonological awareness training, a phonology-based reading training (phonics instruction), and a visually-based reading training (repeated reading of sight words). A total of 20 training sessions (30 minutes each) were distributed over four weeks. Typical readers («=10; M=9.5 years) were assigned to the control group. Phonological awareness training directly improves reading comprehension in German dyslexic children with a phonological awareness deficit. However, these children can equally benefit from a visually-based reading training. In contrast, the phonology-based reading training has a direct selective effect on decoding but not on reading comprehension. Despite divergent short-term patterns, long-term improvement of reading comprehension and decoding is similar across all training groups, irrespective of the training method. Phonological awareness may but does not need to be part of reading remediation in dyslexic children with a phonological deficit when learning to read a consistent orthography. Rather, a visually-based reading strategy might compensate for the phonological deficit in dyslexic children after the initial stage of reading acquisition.
The present study investigates the neurobiological basis of two subtypes of dyslexia with either a double deficit (concerning phonological awareness and rapid naming) or a single rapid naming deficit. We compared such groups of German dyslexic primary school children to each other and with good reading children in a phoneme deletion task performed during fMRI scanning. Children heard German words or pseudowords and repeated the remainder of the stimulus while deleting the initial phoneme (e.g. tear - _ear). In four conditions, the input stimulus (word or pseudoword) could either become another word or pseudoword as output. The word-word condition stuck out against all other conditions involving pseudowords: Dyslexics with a double deficit showed a strong response in left areas 44 and 45 in Boca's region, whereas dyslexics with rapid naming difficulties revealed a contralateral effect in right areas 44 and 45. These findings, which were obtained without presenting written or pictorial stimuli, reveal that a double deficit in dyslexia is not the sum of single deficits, but rather involves the interaction of lexical and phonological processing, making strong demands on the left inferior frontal cortex. In general, the results stress the importance of considering subtypes of dyslexia differentially in order to obtain better insights in the neurocognitive mechanisms of impaired and successful reading.
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