The links between dyslexia and inhibition deficits: do dyslexic children with an inhibition deficit have a specific reading profile?

The present study focused on the nature of the reading disability of children with both dyslexia and inhibition deficit. Van der Schoot et al. (2000; 2004); Nossent et al. (2005); Nossent and Deroux (2006) showed that these children tended more to guess the words they read because these “guessers” found difficulties in suppressing false candidate words that are activated in the lexicon. To test this account, dyslexic children with and without inhibition deficit were presented a sentence reading task. To evoke guessing, each sentence contained a word or a pseudoword which closely resembled either a valid congruent or incongruent word. Our hypothesis was that dyslexic children with inhibition deficit guessed more the word they read from the sentence context and the global word form than dyslexic children without inhibition deficit. The results showed that both dyslexics with and without inhibition deficit tended more to guess the words than control children without dyslexia and inhibition difficulties. We discussed these results with the fact that most of children with reading difficulties use the sentence context to compensate for poor reading skills.