Una nuova prova di competenza ortografica è stata standardizzata su un campione di 318 bambini frequentanti dalla prima alla quinta primaria. La prova è un dettato di brano, che include parole regolari e parole a trascrizione potenzialmente ambigua, consentendo la valutazione dell’ef- ficienza della procedura fonologica e lessicale di scrittura. Inoltre sono forniti i dati normativi per l’analisi dell’errore e la valutazione dell’incidenza di errori fonologici e lessicali. La prova è di agile somministrazione ed ha proprietà psicometriche soddisfacenti, rivelandosi un valido strumento di valutazione delle competenze ortografiche. Esempi di utilizzo del test per lo studio dell’acquisi- zione della scrittura e della disortografia evolutiva sono riportati.

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences.

Increasing evidence supports the contribution of both biological and cultural factors to visuospatial processing. The present study adds to the literature by exploring the interplay of perceptual and linguistic mechanisms in determining visuospatial asymmetries in adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2). In particular, pre-schoolers (3 and 5 year-olds), school-aged children (8 year-old), and adult participants were required to bisect different types of stimuli, that is, lines, words, and figure strings. In accordance with the literature, results yielded a leftward bias for lines and words and a rightward bias for figure strings, in adult participants. More critically, different biases were found for lines, words, and figure strings in children as a function of age, reflecting the impact of both cultural and biological factors on the processing of different visuospatial materials. Specifically, an adult-like pattern of results emerged only in the older group of children (8 year-old), but not in pre-schoolers. Results are discussed in terms of literacy, reading habits exposure, and biological maturation.

Nel corso dei primi anni di scolarizzazione il bambino è impegnato per la maggior parte del tempo in attività di scrittura. È quindi importante poter valutare il grado di apprendimento delle competenze ortografiche e intervenire, in presenza di difficoltà, con un trattamento mirato. Sulla base del modello teorico a due vie, il test DDO-2 permette di valutare le capacità di scrittura lessicale e sub lessicale in bambini della scuola primaria e secondaria di primo grado, attraverso un dettato di 160 stimoli suddivisi in quattro sezioni in base alla categoria di parole proposte. Questa nuova edizione presenta inoltre una versione breve del test (60 stimoli), uno strumento di somministrazione più agile che rispetta i principi di costruzione e attendibilità della versione integrale. Il DDO-2 consente di effettuare lo scoring automatico tramite il software scaricabile dal sito http://risorseonline.erickson.it/, che fornisce una valutazione sia della prestazione complessiva, sia delle prestazioni ai singoli subset di stimoli dettati.

Cognitive dysfunction frequently occurs in aphasic patients and primarily compromises linguistic skills: patients suffering from severe aphasia show heterogeneous performance in basic cognition. Our aim was to characterize the cognitive profiles of patients with severe aphasia and to determine whether they also differ as to residual linguistic abilities. We examined 189 patients with severe aphasia with standard language tests and with the CoBaGA (Cognitive Test Battery for Global Aphasia), a battery of non-verbal tests that assesses a wide range of cognitive domains such as attention, executive functions and intelligence and memory, visual/auditory recognition and visual-spatial abilities. We also examined 20 patients longitudinally to assess their improvement in cognitive skills after speech therapy. Three different sub-groups of patients with different types and severity of cognitive impairment were evidenced. Sub-groups differed as to residual linguistic skills, in particular comprehension and reading-writing abilities. Attention and reasoning/executive function improved after language rehabilitation. This study highlights the importance of an extensive evaluation of cognitive functions in patients with severe aphasia.

The locus of the deficit of children with dyslexia in dealing with strings of letters may be a deficit at a pre-lexical graphemic level or an inability to bind orthographic and phonological information. We evaluate these alternative hypotheses in two experiments by examining the role of stimulus pronounceability in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a forced-choice letter discrimination task (Reicher-Wheeler paradigm). Seventeen fourth grade children with dyslexia and 24 peer control readers participated to two experiments. In the LDT children were presented with high-, low-frequency words, pronounceable pseudowords (such as DASU) and unpronounceable non-words (such as RNGM) of 4-, 5-, or 6- letters. No sign of group by pronounceability interaction was found when over-additivity was taken into account. Children with dyslexia were impaired when they had to process strings, not only of pronounceable stimuli but also of unpronounceable stimuli, a deficit well accounted for by a single global factor. Complementary results were obtained with the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm: both groups of children gained in accuracy in letter discrimination in the context of pronounceable primes (words and pseudowords) compared to unpronounceable primes (non-words). No global factor was detected in this task which requires the discrimination between a target letter and a competitor but does not involve simultaneous letter string processing. Overall, children with dyslexia show a selective difficulty in simultaneously processing a letter string as a whole, independent of its pronounceability; however, when the task involves isolated letter processing, also these children can make use of the ortho-phono-tactic information derived from a previously seen letter string. This pattern of findings is in keeping with the idea that an impairment in pre-lexical graphemic analysis may be a core deficit in developmental dyslexia.

Reading models are largely based on the interpretation of average data from normal or impaired readers, mainly drawn from English-speaking individuals. In the present study we evaluated the possible contribution of orthographic consistency in generating individual differences in reading behavior. We compared the reading performance of young adults speaking English (one of the most irregular orthographies) and Italian (a very regular orthography). In the 1st experiment we presented 22 English and 30 Italian readers with 5-letter words using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm. In a 2nd experiment, we evaluated a new group of 26 English and 32 Italian proficient readers through the RSVP procedure and lists matched in the two languages for both number of phonemes and letters. The results of the two experiments indicate that English participants read at a similar rate but with much greater individual differences than the Italian participants. In a 3rd experiment, we extended these results to a vocal reaction time (vRT) task, examining the effect of word frequency. An ex-Gaussian distribution analysis revealed differences between languages in the size of the exponential parameter (tau) and in the variance (sigma), but not the mean, of the Gaussian component. Notably, English readers were more variable for both tau and sigma than Italian readers. The pattern of performance in English individuals runs counter to models of performance in timed tasks (Faust et al., 1999; Myerson et al., 2003) which envisage a general relationship between mean performance and variability; indeed, this relationship does not hold in the case of the English participants. The present data highlight the importance of developing reading models that not only capture mean level performance, but also variability across individuals, especially in order to account for cross-linguistic differences in reading behavior.

A number of studies have shown that modulating cortical activity by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) affects the performance of both healthy and brain-damaged subjects. In this study, we investigated the potential of tDCS for the recovery of apraxia of speech in 3 patients with stroke-induced aphasia. Over 2 weeks, three aphasic subjects participated in a randomized double-blinded experiment involving intensive language training for their articulatory difficulties in two tDCS conditions. Each subject participated in five consecutive daily sessions of anodic tDCS (20 min, 1 mA) and sham stimulation over the left inferior frontal gyrus (referred to as Broca's area) while they performed a repetition task. By the end of each week, a significant improvement was found in both conditions. However, all three subjects showed greater response accuracy in the anodic than in the sham condition. Moreover, results for transfer of treatment effects, although different across subjects, indicate a generalization of the recovery at the language test. Subjects 2 and 3 showed a significant improvement in oral production tasks, such as word repetition and reading, while Subjects 1 and 2 had an unexpected significant recovery in written naming and word writing under dictation tasks. At three follow-ups (1 week, 1 and 2 months after the end of treatment), response accuracy was still significantly better in the anodic than in sham condition, suggesting a long-term effect on the recovery of their articulatory gestures.

A general problem in studying children with developmental dyslexia is how to separate inefficiency in learning on the one hand from exposure to written texts on the other. To evaluate dyslexic children's learning abilities with graphemic materials, we tested their improvement in a condition that minimized previous experience with words (i.e., "novel words") and with the standard, horizontal spatial letter array (i.e., a non-canonical "zigzag" format). We selected five pairs of children with dyslexia and (younger) typically developing readers matched for reading speed and accuracy in these specific conditions. Reading performance on novel words in the zigzag format was measured in 23 sessions; learning curves were fitted by power functions. Similar to typically developing readers, children with dyslexia improved their reading of novel words presented in the new format; however, their rate of learning was slower than that of typically developing readers. Furthermore, their learning to read in the new format did not generalize to novel untrained items, whereas significant generalization was present in typically developing readers. As the failure to generalize learning of the spatial format could not be attributed to reduced experience, it indicates a genuine disability and points to impaired perceptual learning as a factor in developmental dyslexia.

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus audi- tory lexical decision using the same stimuli. With respect to control readers, children with dyslexia were impaired only on stimuli in the visual modality; they had no deficit on the repetition and auditory lexical decision tasks. By applying the rate-amount model (Faust et al., 1999), we showed that performance of children with dyslexia on visual (but not auditory) tasks was associated with that of control readers by a linear relationship (with a 1.78 slope), suggesting that a global factor accounts for visual (but not auditory) task performance. We conclude that the processing of linguistic stimuli in the visual and auditory modalities is carried out by independent processes and that dyslexic children have a selective deficit in the visual modality

We examined how whole-word lexical information and knowledge of distributional properties of orthography interact in children's spelling. High- versus low-frequency words, which included inconsistently spelled segments occurring more or less frequently in the orthography, were used in two experiments: (a) word spelling; (b) lexical priming of pseudoword spelling. Participants were 1st-, 2nd-, and 4th-grade Italian children. Word spelling showed sensitivity to the distributional properties of orthography in all children: accuracy in spelling uncommon transcription segments emerged progressively as a function of word frequency and schooling. Lexical priming effects emerged as a function of age. When related primes contained an uncommon segment, 2nd- and 4th-graders preferred uncommon segments than common ones in spelling target pseudowords, thus inverting the response trend found in the control condition. A smaller but significant effect was present in 1st- graders, who, unlike 2nd- and 4th-graders, still preferred common segments, only slightly increasing the use of uncommon ones. A larger priming effect emerged for high-frequency primes than low-frequency ones. Results indicate that children learning to spell in a transparent orthography are sensitive to the distributional properties of the orthography. However, whole-word lexical representations are also used, with larger effects in more skilled pupils.

This study examined the ability to master lexical processing and use knowledge of the relative frequency of sound–spelling mappings in both reading and spelling. Twenty-four dyslexic and dysgraphic children and 86 typically developing readers were followed longitudinally in 3rd and 5th grades. Effects of word regularity, word frequency, and probability of sound–spelling mappings were examined in two experimental tasks: (a) spelling to dictation; and (b) orthographic judgment. Dyslexic children showed larger regularity and frequency effects than controls in both tasks. Sensitivity to distributional information of sound–spelling mappings was already detected by third grade, indicating early acquisition even in children with dyslexia. Although with notable differences, knowledge of the relative frequencies of sound–spelling mapping influenced both reading and spelling. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and empirical implications.

Right-brain-damaged patients with left unilateral spatial neglect typically set the mid-point of horizontal lines to the right of the objective center. By contrast, healthy participants exhibit a reversed bias (pseudoneglect). The same effect has been described also when bisecting orthographic strings. In particular, for this latter kind of stimulus, some recent studies have shown that visuo-perceptual characteristics, like stimulus length, may contribute to both the magnitude and the direction bias of the bisection performance (Arduino et al. in Neuropsychologia 48:2140-2146, 2010). Furthermore, word stress was shown to modulate reading performances in both healthy participants, and patients with left spatial neglect and neglect dyslexia (Cubelli and Beschin in Brain Lang 95:319-326, 2005; Rusconi et al. in Neuropsychology 18:135-140, 2004). In Experiment I, 22 right-brain-damaged patients (11 with left visuo-spatial neglect) and 11 matched neurologically unimpaired control participants were asked to set the subjective mid-point of word letter strings, and of lines of comparable length. Most patients exhibited an overall disproportionate rightward bias, sensitive to stimulus length, and similar for words and lines. Importantly, in individual patients, biases differed according to stimulus type (words vs. lines), indicating that at least partly different mechanisms may be involved. In Experiment II, the putative effects on the bisection bias of ortho-phonological information (i.e., word stress endings), arising from the non-neglected right hand side of the stimulus were investigated. The orthographic cue induced a rightward shift of the perceived mid-point in both patients and controls, with short words stressed on the antepenultimate final sequence inducing a smaller rightward deviation with respect to short words stressed on the penultimate final sequence. In conclusion, partly different mechanisms, including both visuo-spatial and lexical factors, may support line and word bisection performance of right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect, and healthy participants.

Frutto del lavoro dei maggiori esperti nel settore, grazie alla sua impostazione teorico-operativa, questa guida presenta non solo le caratteristiche della disortografia, della disgrafia e delle difficoltà di scrittura e le ricadute in ambito scolastico e non, ma anche le strategie per compensare le abilità deficitarie e gli strumenti di intervento didattico e psicoeducativo. Il volume si articola in 4 sezioni che guidano il lettore nelle diverse fasi che caratterizzano il lavoro con gli alunni: - CONOSCERE, OSSERVARE E VALUTARE. - PROGRAMMARE E AGIRE. - RIFLETTERE E COMPRENDERE. - ALLEARSI E CONDIVIDERE. IN OGNI CAPITOLO È INOLTRE POSSIBILE TROVARE: - una linea temporale sequenziale che illustra in quale fase si collocano le proposte presentate nel capitolo - una mappa concettuale che anticipa e organizza i contenuti - numerosi esempi di caso - approfondimenti dalla ricerca scientifica - le interviste «Alcune domande all’esperto...» - i consigli per la didattica in classe - la sintesi dei contenuti presentati nel capitolo. L'offerta del volume si arricchisce di nuove ulteriori risorse disponibili online.

This study was aimed at predicting individual differences in text reading fluency. The basic proposal included two factors, i.e., the ability to decode letter strings (measured by discrete pseudo-word reading) and integration of the various sub-components involved in reading (measured by Rapid Automatized Naming, RAN). Subsequently, a third factor was added to the model, i.e., naming of discrete digits. In order to use homogeneous measures, all contributing variables considered the entire processing of the item, including pronunciation time. The model, which was based on commonality analysis, was applied to data from a group of 43 typically developing readers (11- to 13-year-olds) and a group of 25 chronologically matched dyslexic children. In typically developing readers, both orthographic decoding and integration of reading sub-components contributed significantly to the overall prediction of text reading fluency. The model prediction was higher (from ca. 37 to 52% of the explained variance) when we included the naming of discrete digits variable, which had a suppressive effect on pseudo-word reading. In the dyslexic readers, the variance explained by the two-factor model was high (69%) and did not change when the third factor was added. The lack of a suppression effect was likely due to the prominent individual differences in poor orthographic decoding of the dyslexic children. Analyses on data from both groups of children were replicated by using patches of colors as stimuli (both in the RAN task and in the discrete naming task) obtaining similar results. We conclude that it is possible to predict much of the variance in text-reading fluency using basic processes, such as orthographic decoding and integration of reading sub-components, even without taking into consideration higher-order linguistic factors such as lexical, semantic and contextual abilities. The approach validity of using proximal vs. distal causes to predict reading fluency is discussed.

Italian sixth graders, with and without dyslexia, read pseudowords and low-frequency words that include high-frequency morphemes better than stimuli not including any morpheme. The present study assessed whether morphemes affect (1) younger children, with and without dyslexia; (2) spelling as well as reading; and (3) words with low-frequency morphemes. Two groups of third graders (16 children with dyslexia and dysorthography and 16 age-matched typically developing children) read aloud and spelt to dictation pseudowords and words. Pseudowords included (1) root + suffix in not existing combinations (e.g. lampadista, formed by lampad-, 'lamp', and -ista, '-ist') and (2) orthographic sequences not corresponding to any Italian root or suffix (e.g. livonosto). Words had low frequency and included: (1) root + suffix, both of high frequency (e.g. bestiale, 'beastly'); (2) root + suffix, both of low frequency (e.g. asprigno, 'rather sour'); and (3) simple words (e.g. insulso, 'vapid'). Children with dyslexia and dysorthography were less accurate than typically developing children. Root + suffix pseudowords were read and spelt more accurately than non-morphological pseudowords by both groups. Morphologically complex (root + suffix) words were read and spelt better than simple words. However, task interacted with morphology: reading was not facilitated by low-frequency morphemes. We conclude that children acquiring a transparent orthography exploit morpheme-based reading and spelling to face difficulties in processing long unfamiliar stimuli. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the present study, we showed that a representational disorder for words can dissociate from both representational neglect for objects and neglect dyslexia. This study involved 14 brain-damaged patients with left unilateral spatial neglect and a group of normal subjects. Patients were divided into four groups based on presence of left neglect dyslexia and representational neglect for non-verbal material, as evaluated by the Clock Drawing test. The patients were presented with bisection tasks for words and lines. The word bisection tasks (with words of five and seven letters) comprised the following: (1) representational bisection: the experimenter pronounced a word and then asked the patient to name the letter in the middle position; (2) visual bisection: same as (1) with stimuli presented visually; and (3) motor bisection: the patient was asked to cross out the letter in the middle position. The standard line bisection task was presented using lines of different length. Consistent with the literature, long lines were bisected to the right and short lines, rendered comparable in length to the words of the word bisection test, deviated to the left (crossover effect). Both patients and controls showed the same leftward bias on words in the visual and motor bisection conditions. A significant difference emerged between the groups only in the case of the representational bisection task, whereas the group exhibiting neglect dyslexia associated with representational neglect for objects showed a significant rightward bias, while the other three patient groups and the controls showed a leftward bisection bias. Neither the presence of neglect alone nor the presence of visual neglect dyslexia was sufficient to produce a specific disorder in mental imagery. These results demonstrate a specific representational neglect for words independent of both representational neglect and neglect dyslexia.

Italian children with surface dyslexia and dysgraphia show defective orthographic lexical processing in both reading and spelling. It is unclear whether this parallelism is due to impairment of separate orthographic input and output lexicons or to a unique defective lexicon. The main aim of the present study was to compare the single- vs dual- lexicon accounts in dyslexic/dysgraphic children (and in normal but younger children). In the first study, nine Italian children with surface dyslexia and dysgraphia judged the orthographic correctness (input lexicon) of their phonologically plausible misspellings (output lexicon) and of phonologically plausible spellings experimentally introduced for words they consistently spelt correctly. The children were generally impaired in recognizing phonologically plausible misspellings. Parallel deficits in reading and spelling also emerged: children were more impaired in judging items they consistently misspelt and more accurate in judging items they always spelt correctly. In a second study, younger normal children with reading/spelling ability similar to the dyslexic/dysgraphic children in the first study (but younger) were examined. The results confirmed a close parallelism between the orthographic lexical representations used for reading and spelling. Overall, findings support the hypothesis that a single orthographic lexicon is responsible for reading and spelling performance in both dyslexic/dysgraphic and normal (but younger) children.

We examined the spelling acquisition in children up to late primary school of a consistent orthography (Italian) and an inconsistent orthography (English). The effects of frequency, lexicality, length, and regularity in modulating spelling performance of the two groups were examined. English and Italian children were matched for both chronological age and number of years of schooling. Two-hundred and seven Italian children and 79 English children took part in the study. We found greater accuracy in spelling in Italian than English children: Italian children were very accurate after only 2 years of schooling, while in English children the spelling performance was still poor after 5 years of schooling. Cross-linguistic differences in spelling accuracy proved to be more persistent than the corresponding ones in reading accuracy. Orthographic consistency produced not only quantitative, but also qualitative differences, with larger frequency and regularity effects in English than in Italian children.

Language delay is considered a frequent antecedent of literacy problems and both may be linked to phonological impairment. However, while several studies have examined the relationship between language delay and reading impairment, relatively few have focused on spelling. In this study, spelling performance of 28 children with developmental dyslexia (DD), 14 children with a history of language delay (LD), and 14 children without (NoLD) and 28 control participants were examined. Spelling was investigated by a writing to dictation task that included orthographically regular stimuli (word and non-words), as well as words with unpredictable transcription. Results indicated that all dyslexic participants underperformed compared to controls on both regular and unpredictable transcription stimuli, but LD performance was generally the worst. Moreover, spelling impairment assumed different characteristics in LD and NoLD children. LD children were more sensitive to acoustic-to-phonological variables, showing relevant failure especially on stimuli containing geminate consonants but also on polysyllabic stimuli and those containing non-continuant consonants. Error analysis confirmed these results, with LD children producing a higher rate of phonological errors respect to NoLD children and controls. Results were coherent with the hypothesis that among dyslexic children, those with previous language delay have more severe spelling deficit, suffering from defective orthographic lexical acquisition together with long-lasting phonological difficulties.

In opaque orthographies knowledge of morphological information helps in achieving reading and spelling accuracy. In transparent orthographies with regular print-to-sound correspondences, such as Italian, the mappings of orthography onto phonology and phonology onto orthography are in principle sufficient to read and spell most words. The present study aimed to investigate the role of morphology in the reading and spelling accuracy of Italian children as a function of school experience to determine whether morphological facilitation was present in children learning a transparent orthography. The reading and spelling performances of 15 third-grade and 15 fifth-grade typically developing children were analyzed. Children read aloud and spelled both low-frequency words and pseudowords. Low-frequency words were manipulated for the presence of morphological structure (morphemic words vs non-derived words). Morphemic words could also vary for the frequency (high vs low) of roots and suffixes. Pseudo-words were made up of either a real root and a real derivational suffix in a combination that does not exist in the Italian language or had no morphological constituents. Results showed that, in Italian, morphological information is a useful resource for both reading and spelling. Typically developing children benefitted from the presence of morphological structure when they read and spelled pseudowords; however, in processing low-frequency words, morphology facilitated reading but not spelling. These findings are discussed in terms of morpho-lexical access and successful cooperation between lexical and sublexical processes in reading and spelling.

A number of studies have shown that modulating cortical activity by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) affects performances of both healthy and brain-damaged subjects. In this study, we investigated the potential of tDCS to enhance associative verbal learning in 10 healthy individuals and to improve word retrieval deficits in three patients with stroke-induced aphasia. In healthy individuals, tDCS (20 min, 1 mA) was applied over Wernicke's area (position CP5 of the International 10-20 EEG System) while they learned 20 new "words" (legal nonwords arbitrarily assigned to 20 different pictures). The healthy subjects participated in a randomized counterbalanced double-blind procedure in which they were subjected to one session of anodic tDCS over left Wernicke's area, one sham session over this location and one session of anodic tDCS stimulating the right occipito-parietal area. Each experimental session was performed during a different week (over three consecutive weeks) with 6 days of intersession interval. Over 2 weeks, three aphasic subjects participated in a randomized double-blind experiment involving intensive language training for their anomic difficulties in two tDCS conditions. Each subject participated in five consecutive daily sessions of anodic tDCS (20 min, 1 mA) and sham stimulation over Wernicke's area while they performed a picture-naming task. By the end of each week, anodic tDCS had significantly improved their accuracy on the picture-naming task. Both normal subjects and aphasic patients also had shorter naming latencies during anodic tDCS than during sham condition. At two follow-ups (1 and 3 weeks after the end of treatment), performed only in two aphasic subjects, response accuracy and reaction times were still significantly better in the anodic than in the sham condition, suggesting a long-term effect on recovery of their anomic disturbances.