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Verso la prevenzione della dislessia evolutiva: uno studio clinico, longitudinale e riabilitativo
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Abstract:
Reading is a unique, cognitive human skill crucial to life in modern societies, but, for about 10% of the children, learning to read is extremely difficult. They are affected by a neurodevelopmental disorder called developmental dyslexia. It is widely believed that impaired phonological processing characterizes individuals with developmental dyslexia. These phonological deficits would interfere with one of the most critical skills for successful reading acquisition, the phonological decoding ability. However, reading by phonological decoding also requires rapid selection of sublexical orthographic units through serial attentional orienting. Letters have to be precisely selected from irrelevant and cluttering letters by rapid orienting of visual attention before the correct letter-to-speech sound integration. In the first part of this dissertation, with a 3 year longitudinal study we show that prereading attentional abilities — assessed by serial search performance and spatial cueing facilitation — capture future reading acquisition skills in grades 1 and 2 after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ, speech-sound processing, and nonalphabetic crossmodal mapping. These evidences show that the etiology of dyslexia is multifactorial, and visuo-spatial attention abilities play a fundamental role in the reading acquisition. We know from literature that the simple act of playing action video game could change many aspects of visuo-spatial attention abilities, enhancing attentional capacity and resolution. In the second part of the dissertation, we show that testing two samples of adults video game players and non video game players on their diffused and focused spatial attention abilities — the same functions that are deficient in children with dyslexia — resulted enhanced in people that use video game. Starting from these evidence, and the fact that current treatments are high resource demanding, we tested the hypothesis that action video games could increase attentional and reading abilities. We demonstrate that only 12 hours of playing action video games — not involving any direct phonological or orthographic training — improve the reading abilities of children with dyslexia. We tested reading, phonological, and attentional skills in two matched groups of children with dyslexia before and after playing action or non-action video games for 9 daily sessions of 80 minutes. We found that only the group playing action video games improved their reading abilities, more so than after one year of spontaneous reading development and more or equal to highly-demanding traditional reading treatments. Attentional skills also improved during video game training. Individual differences in visual-spatial and cross-modal, temporal-attention improvements accounted for about 50% of the unique variance in the reading enhancement after controlling for age, IQ, and changes in phonological skills. In the last part of the dissertation, we present a new instrument, a serious game, developed to be used to increase all the cognitive functions that proved their influences on future reading abilities. We show that comparing the serious game scores obtained after a single session evalutation of a sample of preschooler children with and without familial risk for developmental dyslexia, we found differences in the mini games where attentional and phonological performances where tested. These results suggest that the future realization of a treatment based on this serious game could lead to the strengthening of these functions and the decrease in the severity and the incidence of developmental dyslexia in at risk children
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Keyword:
M-PSI/02 Psicobiologia e psicologia fisiologica
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URL: http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/5560/1/Sandro_Franceschini_Tesi.pdf
http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/5560/
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