Profiles of phonological deficits and comorbidity in Chinese developmental dyslexia

Abstract It has been widely accepted that phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) deficits are three core facets of phonological deficits in developmental dyslexia (DD) of alphabetic orthographies. Yet, whether these three phonological facets also represent key phonological deficits of DD in Chinese, a logographic language, has never been investigated. The current study aimed to examine profiles of phonological deficits and comorbidity in Chinese DD. We tested 128 children with DD aged between 8 and 11 years and 135 age-matched controls on 9 tasks, including 2 PA tasks (phoneme deletion and onset/rime deletion), 3 RAN tasks (digit, object and color), 2 VSTM task (spoonerisms and digit span), an orthographic awareness task (orthographic judgment), and a morphological awareness task (morphological production). With the control of morphological and orthographic awareness, results from latent profile analysis revealed three latent profiles, namely the RAN deficit group, the severe PA deficit group, and the mild VSTM deficit group. Individual analysis using a Venn plot showed that 83.59% of DD exhibited phonological deficits, among whom 58.59% with RAN deficit, 49.22% with PA deficit, and 47.66% with VSTM deficit, and all three groups shared overlap. The results have important implications for the identification and remediation of Chinese DD.