Dyslexia: New Assessment Trends and Challenges for the Future

Dyslexia is one of the most common problems in childhood, even affecting adult population, and its prevalence situates between 5% to 17% of school-age children, according to different studies (Katusic, Colligan, Barbaresi, Schaid, and Jacobsen, 2001; Shaywitz and Shaywitz, 2003). This is important since reading disabilities have shown to be an important determining factor in children and adolescent academic performance (Ewing and Parvez, 2012). Dyslexia has been traditionally attributed to different factors, from defects in the visual system to language or phonological coding deficits (Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, and Scanlon, 2004), without reaching an agreement on its specific cause. This may explain the fact that diagnosis of dyslexia sometimes lacks objective criteria, which makes it difficult to make an early detection and intervention. Within this context, in the present chapter, a comprehensive revision of previous literature on this disorder will be conducted, paying special attention to new assessment tendencies and the challenges that the need for objective and reliable measures of reading disabilities supposes for future research and practice. Specifically, a special emphasis will be made in those factors related to visual and perceptual skills (i.e., saccadic movements, fixation, visual fusion), and fluency (i.e., naming speed variables), and how to evaluate them, in concordance with previous theories that support these assessment methods. By means of this analysis, we will intend to make readers familiar with some innovative techniques that are being used nowadays, their main characteristics and potential usefulness for the assessment of reading disabilities in childhood and adolescence; inviting researchers and professionals to consider these techniques in their daily practice. Some implications of the use of these measures will also be outlined.