Reading difficulties in Albanian.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Albanian exhibits a shallow orthography with consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
• Understanding reading strategies in children with disabilities is crucial for targeted interventions.
• Previous research on reading acquisition in transparent orthographies is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate reading strategies in Albanian children with and without reading disabilities.
• To compare word and pseudoword reading performance based on lexicality, frequency, and length.
• To analyze error patterns and developmental trajectories in reading acquisition.

Main Methods:

• A comparative study involving 114 reading-disabled and 150 typically developing children (aged 6-11) in Kosovo.
• Participants read 120 stimuli varying in lexicality, frequency, and length.
• Analysis of reading accuracy, reading times, and error types (phonological, visual, lexicalization).

Main Results:

• Both groups were influenced by lexicality and length, with effects modulated by school year.
• Reading-disabled children were less accurate and slower across all grades.
• Phonological errors were most common, with visual errors and lexicalizations increasing with grade, particularly in the control group.

Conclusions:

• Typically developing Albanian children employ both lexical and sublexical reading routes early on, despite the language's regularity.
• Children with reading difficulties initially rely more on sublexical reading, with the lexical route developing more gradually.
• Both reading routes become functional in children with reading difficulties, albeit with a delayed acquisition of the lexical pathway.