InterRater Reliability of a Dyslexia Screening Test A standardized dyslexia screening test can help in identifying the vast number of undiagnosed dyslexics in Indian schools; needless to say, such a test should produce consistent and reproducible results. This study investigated reliability and consistency among raters of a MalayalamEnglish dyslexia screening in India. Paperbased tests were administered to groups of students, and four raters evaluated the answer sheets of 208 secondgrade students (ages 6xe2x80x937). Interrater agreement, intraclass agreement, and internal consistency were calculated. Our findings include good agreement among ratersu0027 appraisals for most error types and tasks. Internal consistency for a few tasks was low, possibly because these tasks evaluated more than one skill. A few error types need to be redefined and a few tasks need to be more skillspecific to enable unambiguous and fruitful interpretation by different raters in the future.

The emergence of dyslexia in the developing brain Abstract   Developmental dyslexia, a severe deficit in literacy learning, is a neurodevelopmental learning disorder. Yet, it is not clear whether existing neurobiological accounts of dyslexia capture potential predispositions of the deficit or consequences of reduced reading experience. Here, we longitudinally followed 32 children from preliterate to school age using functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging techniques. Based on standardised and agenormed reading and spelling tests administered at school age, children were classified as 16 dyslexic participants and 16 controls. This longitudinal design allowed us to disentangle possible neurobiological predispositions for developing dyslexia from effects of individual differences in literacy experience. In our sample, the disorder can be predicted already before literacy learning from auditory cortex gyrification and aberrant downstream connectivity within the speech processing system. These results provide evidence for the notion that dyslexia may originate from an atypical maturation of the speech network that precedes literacy instruction.