Perceived negative consequences of dyslexia entail the degree to which an individual perceives negative outcomes, such as low academic achievement or feelings of anxiety and depression, and attributes these experiences to the disorder. In the current study, we examined how perceived consequences of dyslexia are influenced by person and…

Purpose: This study aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally. Method: The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their…

Two explanations for resolving dyslexia were investigated, one assuming resolving underlying deficits and another assuming compensatory mechanisms based on cognitive strengths. Thirty-six Dutch gifted secondary-school students with either persistent (n = 18) or resolving (n = 18) dyslexia participated. Groups, matched on IQ, were assessed on…

Recent research suggests that visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) may tap a crossmodal associative learning mechanism that plays a distinct role in reading development. However, evidence from children with dyslexia indicates that deficits in visual-verbal PAL are strongly linked to the verbal demands of the task. The primary aim of this…

A few studies suggest that gifted children with dyslexia have better literacy skills than averagely intelligent children with dyslexia. This finding aligns with the hypothesis that giftedness-related factors provide compensation for poor reading. The present study investigated whether, as in the native language (NL), the level of foreign language…

Cognitive processes underlying a behavioural outcome (like reading ability) and the impact of familial risk (e.g., for dyslexia) have been studied in isolation. We present a novel design, linking the two avenues. How do familial influences impact on children's cognitive skills, which subsequently underlie reading development? Participants from the…

This study investigated risk and protective factors associated with dyslexia and literacy development, both at the group and individual level, to gain more insight in underlying cognitive profiles and possibilities for compensation in high-IQ children. A sample of 73 Dutch primary school children included a dyslexic group, a gifted-dyslexic group,…

Do children who go on to develop dyslexia show normal verbal and nonverbal development before reading onset? According to the aptitude-achievement discrepancy model, dyslexia is defined as a discrepancy between intelligence and reading achievement. One of the underlying assumptions is that the general cognitive development of children who fail to…

This study examined the influence of the number of orthographically similar candidates, neighborhood size, on the word and pseudoword naming performance of normal, dyslexic, and beginning readers. Participants were 23 Dutch dyslexic fourth-graders matched to 23 fourth-grade chronological age controls and 17 second-grade reading age controls.…

The study concerns reading development and its precursors in a transparent orthography. Dutch children differing in family risk for dyslexia were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. In fifth grade, at-risk dyslexic (n = 22), at-risk non-dyslexic (n = 45), and control children (n = 12) were distinguished. In kindergarten, the at-risk…

Background: The present study concerns literacy and its underlying cognitive skills in Dutch children who differ in familial risk (FR) for dyslexia. Previous studies with FR-children were inconclusive regarding the performance of FR-children without dyslexia as compared to the controls. Moreover, van Bergen et al. (2011) recently showed that…

We tested the hypothesis that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge of novel words that are presented in an indistinct context, that is a context with many orthographically similar words, would be more difficult for dyslexic than for normal readers. Participants were 19 Dutch dyslexic children (mean age 10;9 years), 20 age-matched and 20…

In this study the effect of repeated reading on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge was examined. Acquisition of orthographic knowledge was assessed by the effect of word length on reading speed. We predicted that the effect of length in a set of words and pseudowords would decrease after the repeated reading of these (pseudo)words. The…

The current study examined the use of sublexical clusters in normal and dyslexic readers. We focused primarily on onset consonantal clusters, but the use of rimes and digraphs was also considered. A segmentation paradigm, the separation of two adjacent letters in a word by a nonletter symbol, was used. We hypothesized that the effect of this…

In the present study, the effect of word length on lexical decision in dyslexic and normal reading children was investigated. Dyslexics of 10-years old, chronological age controls, and reading age controls read words and pseudowords consisting of 3 to 6 letters in a lexical decision task. Length effects were much stronger in dyslexics and reading…