Dyslexia and Handwriting
Recent research was published on dyslexia and handwriting to increase understanding of handwriting skills in children with dyslexia. Developmental dyslexia is a reading disorder but it is also thought to include deficits in motor skills that may well affect handwriting performance.
Methodology of the Study on Dyslexia and Handwriting
In order to analyze the legibility and fluency of handwritten letters along with motor skills, the researchers compared the performaces of 15 children with dyslexia (mean age 11.4 years old) with two groups of typically developing children (one matched for age and the other matched for orthographic level). Each participant was evaluated with two handwriting measures – production of the letters of the alphabet and writing their first and last name.
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Results
Following data analysis on dyslexia and handwriting the researchers determined that:
- a delay in motor skills was present in the children with dyslexia
- letter legibility, letter production duration, and the number of short pauses (i.e., lasting between 20 and 199 ms) were delayed during letter production in the children with dyslexia
- there was a strong negative correlations between motor skills and the number of short pauses.
The researchers concluded that the persistence of a high number of short pauses linked to less efficient motor skills in children with dyslexia is an important outcome that possibly confirms the presence of handwriting difficulties in these children, leading to less fluent and less legible letter production.
Children with dyslexia should be provided with handwriting training to support their control of handwriting gestures in writing situations in addition to interventions centered on spelling.
Reference: Alamargot, D., Morin, M. F., & Simard-Dupuis, E. (2020). Handwriting Delay in Dyslexia: Children at the End of Primary School Still Make Numerous Short Pauses When Producing Letters. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 53(3), 163-175.
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Additional Research on this Topic
Human Movement Science published research demonstrating that deficits in the specific motor activity of handwriting are associated with developmental dyslexia. The subjects were evaluated for linguistic and writing performance and included children with developmental dyslexia, with and without handwriting problems (dysgraphia) and children with typical development. Using a digitized tablet, the quantitative kinematic variables of handwriting were collected.
The results indicated the following:
1. all children with developmental dyslexia wrote more slowly than those with typical development.
2. all children with developmental dyslexia varied more in the time taken to write the individual letters of a word and failed to comply with the principles of isochrony (velocity for tracing increases as a function of its size) and homothety (trajectory keeps its shape characteristics no matter what its size).
3. correlations were found among reading, language measures and writing measures suggesting that the two abilities may be linked.
Reference: Elena Pagliarini, Teresa Guasti,Carlo Toneatto,Elisa Granocchio,Federica Riva,Daniela Sarti,Bruna Molteni,Natale Stucchi. Dyslexic children fail to comply with the rhythmic constraints of handwriting. Human Movement Science. Volume 42, August 2015, Pages 161–182. doi:10.1016/j.humov.2015.04.012
