Report on design of new teaching methods and remediation tools for dyslexia

The aim of this work is to provide a review of the remediation therapies that can be used in the rehabilitation of developmental dyslexia; a special emphasis is put on morphological instruction as a promising strategy for compensating the phonological deficits exhibited by dyslexic children, both monolinguals and bilinguals, and enhancing their literacy skills. We will begin our discussion by presenting an overview of developmental dyslexia, discussing its manifestations and its relationships with other developmental disorders, and in particular with Specific Language Impairment. We will then present the results of the studies that we carried out within the European Project AThEME, which confirm the presence of a morphological deficit in dyslexic children, but also point to an advantage in morphological tasks of bilingual children, both dyslexics and typically developing, over their monolingual peers. On the basis of these results, we propose that morphological training could be a viable and effective strategy for the treatment of reading difficulties in both monolingual and bilingual children. We will back this proposal up by presenting the results of three meta- analyses, for a total of 46 studies reviewed, confirming that morphological treatment can lead to enhancements in reading, spelling and literacy-related skills, including phonological and morphological competence, vocabulary development and reading comprehension.