Does a specialist typeface affect how fluently children with and without dyslexia process letters, words and passages?

Joseph, H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4325-4628 and Powell, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3607-2407 (2022) Does a specialist typeface affect how fluently children with and without dyslexia process letters, words and passages? Dyslexia, 28 (4). pp. 448-470. ISSN 1099-0909 doi: 10.1002/dys.1727

Abstract/Summary

Children with dyslexia are at risk of poor academic attainment and lower life chances if they do not receive the support they need. Alongside phonics-based interventions which already have a strong evidence base, specialist dyslexia typefaces have been offered as an additional or alternative form of support. The current study examined whether one such typeface, Dyslexie, had a benefit over a standard typeface in identifying letters, reading words, and reading passages. 71 children, aged 8-12 years, 37 of whom had a diagnosis of dyslexia, completed a rapid letter naming task, a word reading efficiency task, and a passage reading task in two typefaces, Dyslexie and Calibri. Spacing between letters and words was kept constant. Results showed no differences in word or passage reading between the two typesfaces, but letter naming did appear to be more fluent when letters were presented in Dyslexie rather than Calibri text for all children. The results suggest that a typeface in which letters are designed to be distinctive from one another may be beneficial for letter identification and that an intervention in which children are taught letters in a specialist typeface is worthy of consideration.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/106411
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education > Language and Literacy in Education
Publisher	Wiley
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