A Randomized Controlled Trial on The Beneficial Effects of Training Letter-Speech Sound Integration on Reading Fluency in Children with Dyslexia

Gorka Fraga González; Gojko Žarić; Jurgen Tijms; Milene Bonte; Leo Blomert; Maurits W van der Molen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0143914

A Randomized Controlled Trial on The Beneficial Effects of Training Letter-Speech Sound Integration on Reading Fluency in Children with Dyslexia

PLoS One. 2015 Dec 2;10(12):e0143914. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143914. eCollection 2015.

Authors

Gorka Fraga González^{1

2}, Gojko Žarić^{3

4}, Jurgen Tijms^{1

2

5}, Milene Bonte^{3

4}, Leo Blomert³, Maurits W van der Molen^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
² Rudolf Berlin Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
³ Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
⁴ Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
⁵ IWAL Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
⁶ Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Abstract

A recent account of dyslexia assumes that a failure to develop automated letter-speech sound integration might be responsible for the observed lack of reading fluency. This study uses a pre-test-training-post-test design to evaluate the effects of a training program based on letter-speech sound associations with a special focus on gains in reading fluency. A sample of 44 children with dyslexia and 23 typical readers, aged 8 to 9, was recruited. Children with dyslexia were randomly allocated to either the training program group (n = 23) or a waiting-list control group (n = 21). The training intensively focused on letter-speech sound mapping and consisted of 34 individual sessions of 45 minutes over a five month period. The children with dyslexia showed substantial reading gains for the main word reading and spelling measures after training, improving at a faster rate than typical readers and waiting-list controls. The results are interpreted within the conceptual framework assuming a multisensory integration deficit as the most proximal cause of dysfluent reading in dyslexia.

Trial registration: ISRCTN register ISRCTN12783279.

Publication types

Randomized Controlled Trial
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Analysis of Variance
Case-Control Studies
Child
Dyslexia / physiopathology*
Dyslexia / therapy*
Female
Humans
Male
Reading*
Sound*
Speech Perception*

Associated data

ISRCTN/ISRCTN12783279

Grants and funding

This project is part of the research program “Fluent reading acquisition neurocognitively decomposed: The case of dyslexia” funded by the Netherlands Initiative Brain and Cognition, a part of the Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant number 056-14-015. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.