2022 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 347-361
A questionnaire survey was conducted with elementary school teachers to (1) comprehensively examine the characteristic cognitive deficits in the writing of children with dyslexia in Japanese, (2) develop the Writing Disorders Scale for Dyslexic Children (WDS-DC) to measure these cognitive deficits and examine its reliability and validity, (3) determine what subtypes of writing disorders exist in Japanese dyslexia, and (4) examine how each subtype relates to reading and writing abilities. The factor analysis results of writing characteristics indicate that Japanese dyslexic children have four major cognitive impairments in writing: mental lexical impairment, visual impairment, phonological impairment, and dysgraphic motor impairment. The WDS-DC was found to have high reliability and validity in measuring these impairments. Furthermore, a cluster analysis of the subtypes of developmental dysgraphia suggested a severe multiple disability group, a moderate multiple disability group, and a visual processing disorder group. The groups with severe multiple disabilities and moderate multiple disabilities had lower literacy for all letter types than the visual processing disorder group, the border group, and the no-disability group.
