Towards understanding dyslexia in a language with transparent orthography Investigation of perceptual and phonological abilities in Telugu native speakers

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is considered genetic in origin associated with unexpected difficulties in newlinereading writing and comprehension despite normal intelligence and socioeconomic status Its newlinenature and prevalence rate differ across languages These differences gave rise to many newlinedebates about its universality and specificity Additionally prevalence estimate of dyslexia in newlinedifferent countries seems to be related to the shallowness of the orthography Telugu is an newlineAkshara based language with a easy mapping between the grapheme and its constituent newlinephoneme and it falls on the coarse transparent level In Telugu phoneme is not the smallest newlinegrain size nor the reading instructions phoneme based as in English In that case one can ask newlinehow a phoneme deficit could underlie reading difficulties in Telugu Thus we hypothesized that newlinereading difficulties of Telugu native speakers would be perceptual in nature rather than newlinephonological This thesis address the reading difficulties of Telugu native speakers specifically newlineperceptual and phonological deficits Further appropriate intervention methods are devised in newlinethis thesis to address specific deficits We conducted a set of perceptual and phonological tests newlineon dyslexic and normal observed significant group differences on perceptual tests but not on the newlinephonological tests The results are in line with other transparent languages We propose a newlinebilingual reading model for Telugu and other Akshara languages The qualitative analysis of the newlinereading errors indicates that there is impairment of the visual letter detector components that newlinelead to peripheral dyslexia and at the sublexical route causing the vowelletter dyslexia among newlineTelugu native speakers These errors are also related to visual and auditory attention deficits newlineConsequently we designed interventions that could assist in improving visual and auditory skills newlineThe contributions of the thesis could provide the foundation for devising more accurate newlinediagnostic protocols and offer effective interventions for children with reading difficulties