On the manifestation of different types of dyslexia in different orthographies

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Dyslexia is a general term for various deficits in reading. There are more than 20 different dyslexia types, each stemming from a deficit at a different component of the reading process or in the connections between these components. The different loci of impairment yield different error types. There is yet another source of difference, on which I will focus in my talk: the same type of dyslexia can manifest itself differently in different languages and orthographies.

I will discuss the manifestation of several types of dyslexia in orthographies with different characteristics and the interactions between dyslexia, orthography, and language. Several types of dyslexia will be presented, including letter position dyslexia, surface dyslexia, deep dyslexia, and vowel letter dyslexia.

The talk will show how properties of morphology, of representation of vowels in the orthography, of the diglossic nature of a language, and letter forms, modulate the manifestation of dyslexia in the different orthographies. It will also show how testing dyslexia in various languages can inform open theoretical questions regarding dyslexia and reading.

About the speaker, Dr. Naama  Friedman, Ph.D. Tel Aviv University

Dr. Naama Friedmann received her Ph.D. from the Cognitive Psychology department at Tel Aviv University and completed her postdoctoral training in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently professor in the School of Education and Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. She is the head of the Lieselotte Adler Lab for Research in Child Development and The Cukier-Goldstein-Goren Center for Mind, Cognition, and Language. She also holds Branco Weiss Chair for Research in Child Development and Education. Her research interests include but are not limited to dyslexia, dysgraphia, syntactic impairment, lexical deficit, and phonological working memory problems both in children and adults.