Dyslexia Families Empowering Eachother

07/25/2026

Dyscalculia Documentary! please help if you can as this is being organised by several brilliant members of our Adult Advisory Board!
Email: [email protected]

07/24/2026

Having dyslexia can be exhausting!
So much of our day-to-day lives relies on our ability to read.
Being a dyslexic student is all-consuming.
The fatigue caused by reading, writing, spelling and studying is such a mammoth effort for us that we often feel tired.
Trying to keep up with our peers in class, keeping on top of our studies and constantly feeling like we’re falling short, means we are often burnt-out and stressed by the end of the day.
We constantly feel swamped.
So please don’t ever mistake our fatigue and tiredness for being bored, lazy or defiant, in fact the opposite is usually true, we are working harder, longer and exerting more focus and energy than you can possibly imagine!

07/23/2026

07/19/2026

Great episode.

07/17/2026

If a child has oral language challenges such as those from developmental language disorder (DLD), they are at higher risk for future literacy acquisition challenges.

Like for dyslexia, early identification and evidence-based intervention are key to mitigate the impacts of DLD.

A new July 2026 Pearson blog overviews developmental language disorder. The link to the Pearson DLD blog is in a comment below.

-- excerpt --

"DLD refers to a persistent difficulty in the acquisition and use of spoken language — not associated with a known biomedical condition such as intellectual disability, hearing loss or brain injury — that results in functional impact on learning and everyday communication.

A DLD diagnosis can be made even when an individual has other risk factors like certain socioeconomic statuses, bilingualism or attention difficulties."

07/14/2026

Great read / especially for my immersion families.

Open study -- Sprouts of literacy: The longitudinal prediction of early morphological awareness skills in French -- from Swiss and French researchers, investigation into the benefits of teaching morphology, and students using morphology, in the earliest grades.

French morphology instruction and knowledge matters even in G1, especially to be able to retain and accurately recall French word spelling. From the study's conclusion:

"Morphological awareness assessed at time 1 predicts general reading and spelling skills a year later in French-speaking children followed from Grades 1 to 2 and from Grades 2 to 3.

Morphological awareness skills can thus be considered a cornerstone of literacy acquisition. In languages like French, given the number of morphologically derived words that children encounter during their schooling, morphological awareness should not be overlooked and should be widely taught and practiced, promoting literacy development."

Link to the open study is in a comment below.

-- excerpts --

"... the aim of the current study is to test the early contribution of derivational morphological awareness on literacy skills (reading fluency and word spelling) and, more specifically, to assess whether this effect is present on morphologically derived words (in reading and spelling) but also on more general measures of reading and spelling. To do this, we recruited two groups of children that we longitudinally followed: a first sample followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and a second sample followed from Grade 2 to Grade 3."

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"Morphological decoding—defined as the use of morphemic units to read or spell complex words—is particularly relevant in the early stages of literacy acquisition, as it allows learners to process larger orthographic units beyond grapheme–phoneme correspondences. This mechanism is therefore central to the present study."

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"... in a longitudinal study conducted from the beginning to the end of 2nd grade, Desrochers et al. (2018) compared the contribution of morphological awareness to various measures of literacy in English (opaque orthography), French (consistent orthography in reading and inconsistent in spelling), and Greek (transparent orthography).

The results showed that morphological awareness was a unique predictor, after controlling for phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, of (1) reading comprehension in the three languages, (2) reading fluency in French and English, and (3) reading accuracy in English.

Moreover, in languages with a rather consistent orthographic system for reading (such as French or Italian), it seems that morphological awareness has a role to play in young or struggling readers, particularly in terms of reading fluency. In sum, while knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondences is sufficient for reading accuracy in consistent orthographic systems, morphology plays a role in accelerating reading fluency."

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"Although reading and spelling are closely related, they differ in key cognitive demands, as spelling requires active production, including working memory and letter retrieval, whereas reading mainly involves recognition."

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"... Casalis et al. (2011), in a study with French-speaking children in Grades 3 and 4, showed that morphological awareness predicted not only the spelling of derived words but also general standardized measures of spelling. As for the longitudinal studies that have been conducted, they provide evidence of the predictive relationship of morphological awareness for later spelling skills (Deacon et al., 2009; Desrochers et al., 2018; Manolitsis et al., 2019)"

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"Our main results show a unique contribution of morphological awareness to standardized text reading fluency, on word spelling, together with an effect on morphologically derived words during spelling only."

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"While the importance of phonological skills in literacy acquisition is already well established, our study further supports this finding and suggests phonological awareness plays an equally important role at this age in both cohorts in reading but becomes more important in word spelling in the G2–G3 sample..."

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"These results seem to be in line with those found in languages with a transparent orthographic system, where morphological awareness is a predictor of reading fluency (Burani et al., 2008; Desrochers et al., 2018; Giazitzidou & Padeliadu, 2022; Marcolini et al., 2011). French-speaking children therefore use their morphological awareness, in addition to other components such as phonological skills, for reading texts, after only one to two years of formal literacy learning."

--

For spelling, our results show a dual contribution of morphological awareness: one to standardized word spelling, and another to morphologically derived words in spelling.

The longitudinal contribution of morphological awareness to word spelling skills, assessed by a standardized test, had already been shown by several authors (Deacon et al., 2009; Manolitsis et al., 2019), but only in one study with French-speaking children (Desrochers et al., 2018). One explanation for this finding could be that children use their knowledge of morphology to spell the words in the word spelling task that are for the most part (9 out of 10 words) base words, thus allowing for the formation of other words of the same family (even if they are monomorphemic words). For example, the word *ville [city] has many morphological derivatives: village and *villageois [villager]. If children use their knowledge of derived words, they will be able to write a related word of the same family.

To our knowledge, no study has reported the contribution of morphological awareness to morphologically derived words in spelling among children, moreover, in the earliest stage of spelling acquisition.

Our statistical model showed that this relation, between morphological awareness assessed in the first year and morphological decoding in spelling assessed in the following year, is significant in both samples.

This effect was one of the most expected, especially since it was consistent with the Morphological Pathways Framework (Levesque et al., 2021) that hypothesizes that morphological awareness plays a role in the spelling of multimorphemic words. In other words, children use their knowledge of morphemes to spell these words.

Since the French writing system is particularly inconsistent in spelling (Ziegler et al., 1996), children need to use their morphological awareness in addition to phonological information to spell more accurately, because morphemes are islands of regularity among the majority of irregularities"

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"The contribution of morphological awareness to general reading fluency and word spelling shows the same pattern of effect size across groups: a stronger effect in the younger group (G1–G2) compared to the second group (G2–G3) based on the non-overlap of confidence intervals. This pattern is contrary to our hypothesis."

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"One of the most important limitations of our study lies in the measures we used to build our model. Indeed, morphologically derived words are a latent variable for reading and spelling, while the “general” measures of spelling and reading are only represented by manifest variables. It would have been interesting to compare latent variables on the same level.

Also, we were not able to directly compare reading and spelling performance because we measured reading using a text reading task (to measure fluency), whereas we tested spelling via the dictation of single words."

07/14/2026

Interesting open research study from Toronto (ON) and Haskins (CT) pertaining to refugee, displaced, and re-situated children and youth from the Syrian conflict. Educational background and fMRIs were performed and analyzed.

Please note that the study authors' identification of a need for individualized reading interventions for the studied neurotypical Ontario Syrian refugee cohort has always applied to Ontario children with dyslexia who did, do, and will require timely effective intervention to mitigate the harmful socioemotional, family, academic, economic, and employment impacts.

Towards the end of the selected excerpts, some of the Ontario Syrian refugee children data is considered via the lens of the global developmental dyslexia knowledge base; the known neural challenges (eg. orthographic processing/recognize, retain, and accurate recall of letters/words).

The link to the open research study is in a comment below.

-- excerpts --

"Our study extends the SVR [Simple View of Reading] by demonstrating that the contribution of decoding and language comprehension to reading comprehension depends on educational experience, and that multiple neural pathways can support reading comprehension after educational disruption.

Practically, these results highlight the need for individualized reading interventions and the urgency of minimizing educational disruption for displaced children and youth."

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"Despite being in the Canadian educational system for two or three years, many Syrian refugee children demonstrate significant impairment (>1 SD below mean) in decoding, language comprehension, and reading comprehension. More recent work suggests that the literacy gap persists well beyond the initial years of resettlement and is significantly related to children and youth’s socioemotional well-being."

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"Our sample includes refugee children who have experienced prolonged periods of disrupted education during key developmental windows, providing a unique opportunity to examine how inconsistent access to literacy instruction influences the functional specialization of the neural networks that support reading."

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"A total of 100 Syrian refugee children and youth from 44 families living in Southern Ontario participated in the study. The participants were between the ages of 8 and 18 years at the time of data collection (M = 13.78, SD = 2.55).

They had resettled in Canada between 2013 and 2023 and had lived in Canada for a mean length of 6.19 years (SD = 3.12). Due to their migration journeys, many of the children experienced prolonged periods of displacement (M = 5.48 years, SD = 3.00).

At the time of testing, all children were enrolled in Canadian English-language schools.

Children and youth with diagnosed learning, language, or neurodevelopmental disabilities were excluded from the study."

--

"As expected, reading comprehension was significantly correlated with vocabulary and decoding. Reading comprehension was also significantly, positively correlated with years in Canada and negatively correlated with DoD [duration of displacement]. Interestingly, age was significantly negatively correlated with vocabulary. This result suggests that older refugee children show a larger gap in this skill in comparison to younger children."

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"Consistent with the SVR model, our findings highlight the critical role of language comprehension (operationalized through vocabulary knowledge) in the development of reading comprehension among Syrian refugee children and youth. In our sample, vocabulary emerged as a significant predictor of reading comprehension, underscoring the importance of oral language skills in supporting literacy, even when formal schooling is disrupted.

A particularly novel finding of this study is that the contribution of decoding to reading comprehension differed depending on children and youth’s experiences of educational disruption. For children who experienced relatively short gaps in formal schooling, decoding was a significant predictor of reading comprehension, which is consistent with prior research showing that fluent and accurate word recognition frees up cognitive resources needed to construct meaning from text. In contrast, among those whose schooling had been substantially disrupted, decoding no longer significantly predicted reading comprehension. This pattern suggests that prolonged disruptions in formal schooling may reduce opportunities for the direct and systematic literacy instruction needed to develop decoding skills, which are typically embedded within formal schooling during the early elementary years. For these learners, decoding may remain effortful and insufficiently automatized. As a result, decoding contributed little unique variance to comprehension, while these children and youth relied more heavily on their oral language skills to support reading."

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"Our findings extend the SVR framework by demonstrating that the contribution of decoding to reading comprehension is conditional on children’s educational experiences, not just their age or grade. Past work shows that decoding plays a greater role for young readers and that its influence diminishes as decoding becomes more automatic, with the role of oral language becoming more significant over time and in adult readers.

However, prior research has largely focused on children who have received consistent schooling, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of age and reading experience.

Our results show that this developmental shift is disrupted when children experience interruptions in formal literacy instruction. In these circumstances, decoding may remain effortful beyond the typical developmental window, leaving oral language skills to act as a compensatory mechanism to support reading comprehension."

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"Delayed literacy acquisition has been associated with greater activation in right hemisphere regions during literacy tasks. Similarly, research in bilingual populations shows that variability in literacy experience may influence how neural systems supporting reading are recruited, often resulting in more distributed or bilateral patterns of activation.

Together, these findings suggest that when literacy acquisition occurs later or is disrupted, learners may rely more on additional neural regions beyond the typical left-lateralized reading network associated with skilled reading.

This pattern of right-lateralized activation has also been documented as a compensatory mechanism among individuals with decoding challenges, including those with dyslexia [14]. For example, Hoeft et al., [77] found that greater right prefrontal activation during a reading task predicted future reading gains over a 2.5-year period in 25 children with dyslexia, suggesting that this compensatory process can be adaptive and support reading development over time. "

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"... the only significant moderation effect observed was between vocabulary and activation in the left SMG, a region that is associated with mapping orthography to phonology during reading (Price, 2012). Simple slopes analyses showed that for children and youth with higher left SMG activation, vocabulary was a significant predictor of reading comprehension; however, this association was not significant when left SMG activation was lower.

This finding suggests that when left SMG activation is higher during a decoding task, vocabulary knowledge can be more effectively leveraged to support reading comprehension.

Greater SMG engagement may support more efficient decoding, allowing children to recognize printed words more easily and then link those words to their meanings. In this way, higher SMG activation appears to support conditions under which oral language skills can be harnessed to support reading comprehension.

Conversely, when SMG activation is lower, difficulties in orthographic processing may interfere with children’s ability to recognize words, limiting the extent to which oral language skills can help with understanding text."

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"Notably, children in the highest performing cluster showed greater activation in the right IFG and lower activation in the left IFG compared to peers with lower reading scores. This pattern is consistent with the compensatory role of the right IFG discussed earlier, suggesting that right hemisphere engagement may help bolster reading comprehension when left-lateralized decoding processes are underdeveloped due to lack of formal instruction.

This result suggests that successful comprehension might rely on recruitment of additional neural pathways to overcome challenges caused by educational disruption. Activation in the right SMG also significantly predicted group membership. Children in the highest performing groups showed lower right SMG activation compared to peers with lower reading scores.

Although exploratory, this pattern may reflect more efficient decoding processes. Since decoding is less effortful for this group, fewer compensatory resources are required to manage phonological demands of the task and greater left-lateralization is observed.

Our findings also highlight the role of formal instruction in the development of literacy skills. In our models, duration of educational disruption significantly predicted cluster membership: those in the highest performing reading groups experienced shorter periods of educational disruption compared to those in the lowest performing groups."