An interaction-dominant perspective on reading fluency and dyslexia

• Published in: Annals of dyslexia Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 100 - 119
• Main Authors: Wijnants, M. L., Hasselman, F., Cox, R. F. A., Bosman, A. M. T., Van Orden, G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer 01-07-2012; Springer US; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Child; Cognitive Ability; Coordination; Correlation; Determinism; Developmental Psychology; Dyslexia; Dyslexia - physiopathology; Education; Entropy; Fractal dimensions; Fractals; Graphemes; Humans; Language and Literature; Language Tests; Linguistics; Measurement; Naming; Neurology; Observation; Performance readers; Phonemes; Phonetics; Phonological Awareness; Psycholinguistics; Quantification; Reaction Time; Reaction Time - physiology; Reading; Reading Fluency; Reading Instruction; Reliability; Resistance (Psychology); Severity (of Disability); Short Term Memory; Social Sciences; Thinking Skills; Time series; White noise; Written Language; Developmental dyslexia; noise; 1; Recurrence quantification analysis; Reading fluency; Self-organization
• ISSN: 0736-9387; 1934-7243; 1934-7243
• DOI: 10.1007/s11881-012-0067-3

The background noise of response times is often overlooked in scientific inquiries of cognitive performances. However, it is becoming widely acknowledged in psychology, medicine, physiology, physics, and beyond that temporal patterns of variability constitute a rich source of information. Here, we introduce two complexity measures (1/f scaling and recurrence quantification analysis) that employ background noise as metrics of reading fluency. These measures gauge the extent of interdependence across, rather than within, cognitive components. In this study, we investigated dyslexic and non-dyslexic word-naming performance in beginning readers and observed that these complexity metrics differentiate reliably between dyslexic and average response times and correlate strongly with the severity of the reading impairment. The direction of change in the introduced metrics suggests that developmental dyslexia resides from dynamical instabilities in the coordination among the many components necessary to read, which could explain why dyslexic readers score below average on so many distinct tasks and modalities.