Cognitive profiling and preliminary subtyping in Chinese developmental dyslexia

The present study examined the cognitive profile and subtypes of developmental dyslexia in a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. One hundred and forty-seven Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia were tested on a number of literacy and cognitive tasks. The results showed that rapid naming deficit and orthographic deficit were the two most dominant types of cognitive deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia, and that rapid naming and orthographic processing had significant unique contributions to literacy performance. Seven subtypes of dyslexia – global deficit, orthographic deficit, phonological memory deficit, mild difficulty, and three other subtypes with rapid-naming-related deficits – were identified using scores of the cognitive tasks as classification measures in cluster analyses. These subtypes were validated with a behaviour checklist and three literacy measures. The authors suggested that orthographic and rapid naming deficits in Chinese dyslexic children might pose an interrelated problem in developing orthographic knowledge and representation. Therefore, orthographic-related difficulties may be the crux of the problem in Chinese developmental dyslexia.