Word Fluency Abilities in Japanese Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

We analyzed the word sound finding abilities of Japanese children with developmental dyslexia, with and without developmental language disorder, using word fluency tasks. We evaluated the number of correct words in alliteration fluency tasks with the given sounds /a/ and /ka/ of 151 children in regular classes and 63 children with developmental dyslexia (13 with and 50 without specific language impairment) who were in the first, third and fifth grades of elementary school. Only the children with developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment had lower scores in the alliteration fluency tasks than the children in regular classes, for all grades. These results suggest that scores in word fluency tasks connect with spoken language development and do not decrease in Japanese children with developmental dyslexia without developmental language disorder.