Verursachung und differenzierte Diagnose der Lese-Rechtschreibschwäche

(1) In the final phase of the project several international publications came out or were submitted. Three of them were characterized in brief below: Wimmer; H. & Mayringer, H. (2001). Is the reading-rate problem of German dyslexic children caused by slow visual processes? In M. Wolf (Ed.), Dyslexia, fluency, and the brain. Timonium, Md.: York Press. Major finding: Naming speed was more strongly related to reading speed than visual processing speed is. Wimmer, H. & Mayringer, H. (in press). The reading rate deficit of German dyslexic children has little to do with surface dyslexia. In: A. Helmquist (Ed.), Reading and the new millennium. Major finding: Although German-speaking dyslexic children read slowly but rather accurate they do not match the type of surface dyslexia. Other than surface dyslexic children they were markedly impaired in pseudoword reading. Mann V., & Wimmer H. (in press). Phoneme Awareness and Pathways into Literacy: A Comparison of German and American Children. Reading and Writing. Major finding: German-speaking children acquired basic phonological awareness skills very easily and quickly after having entered school. In contrast, English-speaking children with reading impairment showed persistent deficits in phonological awareness. (2) A standardized test for the assessment of basic reading skills was developed and normed Children read silently a list of semantically easy sentences that are not related to each other. At the end of each sentence they have to mark whether the proposition is true or not. Processing time is limited to 3 min. Reading ability is measured as number of correctly processed sentences. The test is available in four parallel forms which allows for application in groups as well as repeated testing of the same children. The test is set up in such a way that sentences become more difficult with respect to reading skills from start to end. This enables to use one and the same test from the end of Grade 1 to the end of Grade 4 which in turn makes it possible not only to make references to the peer group but also to determine reading age.