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Updated: Jun 18, 2026
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Assessing Dyslexia at Six Year of Age
Published on: May 1, 2020
Sentence comprehension in young adults with developmental dyslexia
Rebecca Wiseheart1, Lori J P Altmann, Heeyoung Park
1University of Florida, Gainesville, 32611-7420, USA. wisehart@ufl.edu
Annals of Dyslexia
|November 14, 2009
Summary
Adults with dyslexia struggle with complex sentence comprehension, particularly passive sentences. Working memory and word reading ability explain these syntactic challenges.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Dyslexia is a learning disorder affecting reading.
- Individuals with dyslexia often have working memory (WM) deficits.
- Syntactic complexity in sentences can tax WM resources.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of syntactic complexity on written sentence comprehension in adults with dyslexia.
- To determine if working memory and word reading ability mediate syntactic comprehension differences.
- To explore the relationship between dyslexia, WM, and syntactic processing.
Main Methods:
- Assessed written sentence comprehension in adults with dyslexia and matched controls.
- Used tasks involving passive sentences and sentences with relative clauses.
- Measured working memory capacity and word reading ability.
Main Results:
- Adults with dyslexia showed significantly lower accuracy on passive sentences compared to controls.
- Accuracy was also lower for sentences with relative clauses in the dyslexic group.
- Working memory and word reading ability accounted for the observed group differences in syntactic comprehension.
Conclusions:
- Syntactic processing deficits are present in adults with dyslexia, even in compensated individuals.
- These deficits are significantly influenced by working memory capacity and word reading skills.
- Findings highlight the interconnectedness of reading, memory, and language processing in dyslexia.
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