Cognitive assessment and progress in language skills in Arabic-speaking subjects with neurodevelopmental dyslexia

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia affects a significant number of children and represents a major challenge for educational systems and healthcare professionals. The evolution of the oral and written language skills of dyslexic children is attracting growing interest, particularly with regard to the pedagogical and therapeutic interventions implemented. This study first aims to evaluate oral and written language skills in children with dyslexia by comparing them to their “typical reader” peers. Second, it seeks to monitor the progression of reading performance by examining word identification processes in dyslexic children across two annual sessions. The study sample consisted of 300 participants (151 girls and 149 boys) with a mean age of 10.47 years. They underwent a cognitive language assessment using the Language Assessment Battery (LABEL) software, which includes a battery of tests exploring linguistic abilities through key functions: oral expression and comprehension, written expression and comprehension, discrimination, lexical access, reading aloud, and dictation writing. The participants, initially divided into good readers showing satisfactory performance across all reading tasks, poor readers exhibiting limited performance, and dyslexic readers whose reading difficulties are of neurodevelopmental origin, were followed over a 2-year period to assess reading speed and accuracy. Performance differences were statistically significant in favor of typical readers across all oral and written tasks. Poor readers generally scored higher than dyslexic children, with the only non-significant differences between the two struggling groups observed in oral expression and visual word discrimination tasks. After the follow-up period, performance improved significantly for both good and poor readers, whereas dyslexic participants showed a decline. Among the latter, impairment of the phonological route persisted, and deficits increased in the lexical (addressing) reading procedure. This study also demonstrated that auditory discrimination and repetition tasks are reliable indicators for deepening the diagnosis of developmental dyslexia. It highlights the need to implement targeted rehabilitation strategies for the benefit of dyslexic children.