Developmental Dyslexia across Languages and Writing Systems

This volume presents the first truly systematic, multi-disciplinary, and cross-linguistic study of the language and writing system factors affecting the emergence of dyslexia. Bringing together a team of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, it takes a dual focus on the language-specific properties of dyslexia and on its core components across languages and orthographies, to challenge theories on the nature, identification and prevalence of dyslexia, and to reveal new insights. Part I highlights the nature, identification and prevalence of dyslexia across multiple languages including English, French, Dutch, Czech and Slovakian, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese, while Part II takes a cross-linguistic stance on topics such as the nature of dyslexia, the universals that determine relevant precursor measures, competing hypotheses of brain-based deficits, modelling outcomes, etiologies, and intergenerational gene-environment interactions.

Ludo Verhoeven is Professor in Communication, Language and Literacy in the Behaviour Science Institute at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and at the University of Curaçao. Charles Perfetti is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Kenneth Pugh is Professor in Psychology at the University of Connecticut and Associate Professor in Linguistics and Medicine at Yale University, Connecticut and he is President and Director of Research, and Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories.