Internalizing problems in individuals with reading, mathematics and unspecified learning difficulties: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine if individuals with reading difficulties (RD), mathematics difficulties (MD), or unspecified learning difficulties (ULD) experience internalizing problems (i.e., anxiety, depression, somatic complaints, and social withdrawal) to the same extent, and if the effect sizes are influenced by moderators (age, internalizing problems type, anxiety type, rater type, selection criteria, and attention control). We reviewed 2,806 studies published in English between January 2000 and April 2023. Our final sample consisted of 96 studies that reported effect sizes or data to calculate them (a total of 120 unique samples, 83,260 participants, age range = 7.3 - 34.8 years). Risk of bias and sensitivity were assessed. A random-effects model analysis revealed a significant and moderate overall effect size (Hedge's g = -.54), indicating that individuals with RD, MD or ULD experience more internalizing problems than their chronological-age (CA) controls. Follow-up analyses showed that neither learning difficulties type nor age of participants were significant moderators, but selection criteria (diagnosis versus screening) and internalizing problems type were. These findings suggest that individuals with RD do not differ from those with MD or ULD in internalizing problems, and all fare poorly compared to CA controls.

Morphological processing influences on dyslexia in Greek-speaking children.

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and noun-adjective inflections). The noun-adjective inflection task assessed children's ability to produce the plural of articles, adjectives, and nouns in the context of a sentence. The verb inflection task required children to change the tense of the verb in a sentence. Furthermore, phonological awareness and oral receptive vocabulary were assessed. Greek-speaking children with dyslexia faced difficulties in both inflectional tasks and in receptive vocabulary. They appeared to have greater difficulty in elicitation of non-past tense from past tense. Binary logistic regression targeted at understanding whether dyslexia can be predicted based on phonological and non-phonological oral language skills revealed that phonological awareness had a significant effect on distinguishing dyslexics from typically developing readers. Overall, our findings lead us to suggest that in an alphabetic language with a shallow orthographic system and rich morphology, children with dyslexia appear to have impaired inflectional morphological awareness and impaired vocabulary in comparison to their peers. Moreover, these results suggest the significance of teaching morphological skills in improving reading skills. However, further research is needed to substantiate these findings.