Fluency is the quintessence of effective reading. To obtain socio-economic success, fluent reading is of primordial importance and reading is considered a crucial marker of an individual’s life course. Approximately 5% of children are affected by developmental dyslexia, exhibiting inaccurate word recognition, spelling, phonological decoding, and most importantly, severely dysfluent reading, which remains as their most characterizing and persistent deficit. Unable to attain society’s literacy demands, individuals with dyslexia are at severe risk for adverse academic, economic, and psychosocial consequences. Recently, it has been posed that the development of automatic letter-speech sound (LSS) integration is critical in the acquisition of fluent reading skills, and in particular that a failure to develop automatic LSS integration results in an impairment of reading fluency. In support, neurocognitive research has suggested that the development of automatized processing of LSS associations is an essential step in the formation of a functional neural network for reading. Furthermore, both neurocognitive and behavioural studies have suggested a less efficient LSS integration in children with dyslexia than in typical readers. Finally, results from intervention studies have suggested that training LSS might be a promising approach to ameliorate dysfluent reading in children with dyslexia. Nonetheless, there is still a considerable gap of knowledge in our understanding of the mechanisms by which learning LSS associations relate to (dys)fluent reading.

"In alphabetic languages, learning to associate speech-sounds with unfamiliar characters is a critical step in becoming a proficient reader. This dissertation aimed at expanding our knowledge of this learning process and its relation to dyslexia, with an emphasis on bridging the gap between fundamental research and educational and clinical practice. With this goal in mind, we developed a paradigm in which dyslexic and typical readers engaged in a short computer game-based training aimed at learning eight basic letter-speech sound correspondences within an artificial orthography. The training was followed by an assessment of learning gains. Our findings indicated that: 1) basic knowledge of new correspondences was learned equally well by dyslexic and typical readers; 2) typical readers outperformed dyslexic readers on tasks requiring (a) to identify the new correspondences under time pressure, and (b) to use them in reading; 3) the learning gains made a meaningful and partly independent contribution to explaining individual differences in (a) reading and spelling skills, (b) treatment response, and (c) future reading proficiency of kindergarten children; and 4) implicit learning techniques are successful in promoting letter-speech sound integration in children with dyslexia, although a combination of explicit instruction and implicit techniques proved to be a more powerful tool than implicit training alone. The implications for the current theoretical framework and for educational and clinical practice were reviewed extensively. Taken together, our findings provide strong empirical support for the view that a letter-speech sound learning deficit is a key factor in developing dyslexia."--Samenvatting auteur.

The first truly systematic, multi-disciplinary, and cross-linguistic study of the language and writing system factors affecting the emergence of dyslexia.