Although being the most evident manifestation of Developmental Dyslexia, reading and spelling deficits are just the tip of the iceberg of the more widespread deficits affecting individuals with this disorder.

The aim of this project, on which I started working already during my PhD in our Lab LaTeC (Language Text and Cognition, University of Verona; together with Denis Delfitto and Chiara Melloni), is that of investigating the nature of the linguistic and cognitive deficits characterizing dyslexia.

Besides the well-known reading deficits, dyslexia  is indeed characterized by linguistic impairments at different levels (phonological, morphological, grammatical and pragmatic). We thus wanted to investigate the exent of these difficulties in Italian dyslexic children and adults. 

The results of the experimental protocols that I developed and administered on hundreds of children diagnosed as dyslexic have revealed that the dyslexia is related to deficits in the domain of working memory, at the phonological level (e.g. repetition of nonwords, rhyme detection and spoonerisms), at the morphological level (e.g. pluralization of nonwords; but also in the inflection and derivation of nonwords, joint work with Chiara Melloni) and in the comprehension and production of morphosyntactic structures particularly costly in terms of processing resources (e.g. interpretation of pronouns; production of clitic pronouns; interpretation of negative sentences). The intepretation of scalar implicatures has also been found impaired.

Thanks to the eyetracking technique we are currently also analyzing the eye movements of dyslexic and unimpaired individuals, to gather a more fine-grained understanding of how reading is processed in both unimpaired and impaired individuals.