Are There Lower Repetition Priming Effects in Children with Developmental Dyslexia? Priming Effects in Spanish with the Masked Lexical Decision Task.

The aim of this study was to compare the reaction times and errors of Spanish children with developmental dyslexia to the reaction times and errors of readers without dyslexia on a masked lexical decision task with identity or repetition priming. A priming paradigm was used to study the role of the lexical deficit in dyslexic children, manipulating the frequency and length of the words, with a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA = 150 ms) and degraded stimuli. The sample consisted of 80 participants from 9 to 14 years old, divided equally into a group with a developmental dyslexia diagnosis and a control group without dyslexia. Results show that identity priming is higher in control children (133 ms) than in dyslexic children (55 ms). Thus, the "frequency" and "word length" variables are not the source or origin of this reduction in identity priming reaction times in children with developmental dyslexia compared to control children.

Instrucción en estrategias de comprensión lectora mediante enseñanza recíproca: efectos del agrupamiento de los estudiantes / Instruction of Reading Comprehension Strategies through Reciprocal Teaching: Effects of Grouping Formats

El objetivo de este estudio es comparar el efecto que dos formatos de agrupamiento de los estudiantes tiene sobre la comprensión lectora. La instrucción en comprensión lectora empleó la Enseñanza Recíproca (ER) que es un procedimiento que enseña a los estudiantes estrategias cognitivas para incrementar la comprensión lectora. Participaron 43 alumnos de 4º de E.P.: 18 fueron instruidos mediante ER en el aula ordinaria (GG); 8 mediante ER en pequeño grupo (PG) y 17 recibieron la enseñanza tradicional. Se emplearon dos tipos de medidas: medidas de efectos específicos (idea principal y supervisión y regulación) y medidas de generalización (test estandarizado, significado implícito y recuerdo). Los resultados demuestran que los dos grupos instruidos mediante ER fueron superiores en las medidas de efectos específicos y en las de generalización al grupo de comparación. Además, el grupo instruido en pequeño grupo (PG) fue superior al GG y GC en la mayoría de las medidas de efectos específicos y de generalización (AU)

The aim of this study was to compare the effects of two grouping formats on the reading comprehension. Reading comprehension Instruction used reciprocal teaching (RT) that is an instructional procedure to teach students cognitive strategies that might lead to improved reading comprehension. A sample of 43 students in the fourth year of primary education was selected: 18 children were instructed in regular classroom (GG), 8 were instructed in small group (PG), while the remaining 17 made up the comparison group (GC). Two types of comprehension measures were used: tasks of specific effects (getting the main idea, comprehension-monitoring test) and transfer effect measures (standardized test, word meaning inference, and free recall). Thus, the results show that both RT conditions benefited from the instruction, performing better than the comparison group in measures of specific effects and in the transfer effect measures. Furthermore, students from small group (PG) outperformed students in GG and GC on specific effects and in the transfer effect measures (AU)