Centre for Child Evaluation and Teaching, Kuwait City, Kuwait.
Dyslexia. 2011 May;17(2):123-42. doi: 10.1002/dys.430.
Two cohorts of mainstream children (grades 2-5) and one cohort of children with learning disabilities (LD; grades 3-5), all Arabic speaking children in Kuwait, were given measures of reading comprehension fluency and orthographic discrimination to assess the relationship between the two. Additional measures of phonological processing (decoding and awareness), speed of processing (rapid naming) and memory (visual as well as phonological/verbal tasks) were included either because these have been found to be predictive of Arabic literacy or to provide an assessment of alternative interpretations of any influence of the orthographic task. The findings indicated that the orthographic measure predicted variability in the comprehension fluency over-and-above that predicted by the other measures in the study. This was significant in the older mainstream children (grades 4 and 5) when controlling for phonological processing, but was not in the younger grades (2 and 3) where experience text that incorporating short vowel markers is dominant. The LD group showed little evidence of an influence of phonological processing but did of orthographic processing. The findings are discussed in terms of the skills required to process Arabic literacy and potential causes of literacy learning difficulties among Arabic children.
两组主流儿童（2-5 年级）和一组学习障碍儿童（LD；3-5 年级），都是科威特讲阿拉伯语的儿童，他们接受了阅读理解流畅性和正字法辨别能力的测试，以评估两者之间的关系。还包括了语音处理（解码和意识）、处理速度（快速命名）和记忆（视觉以及语音/词汇任务）的额外测试，这些测试要么是因为它们被发现可以预测阿拉伯语读写能力，要么是为了评估正字法任务的任何影响的替代解释提供评估。研究结果表明，在考虑了其他研究中的测试外，正字法测试可以预测阅读理解流畅性的变化。这在控制语音处理的情况下，对于年龄较大的主流儿童（4 年级和 5 年级）来说是显著的，但在低年级（2 年级和 3 年级），加入短元音标记的经验文本占主导地位，这种情况并不明显。LD 组在语音处理方面几乎没有表现出影响，但在正字法处理方面则表现出影响。研究结果从处理阿拉伯语读写能力所需的技能以及阿拉伯语儿童读写困难的潜在原因方面进行了讨论。
