Work

Letter Position Dyslexia in Fingerspelling: Similar Error Patterns in Reading Written and Fingerspelled Words

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Letter position dyslexia is a deficit in letter position encoding in the orthographic-visual analysis stage. We report here the first cases of deaf signers who show letter position dyslexia in both written and fingerspelled words. Their error pattern was identical in the two modes of presentation, written and fingerspelled: in both modes, they had almost only within-word letter transpositions; their transpositions involved middle letters and almost never exterior letters; they had errors of doubled letters; and their errors occurred almost only in migratable words. They showed no transpositions in reading multi-digit numbers. These results indicate that despite the temporal separation between the fingerspelled letters, the reading of fingerspelling uses the same cognitive processes, and specifically, the same letter-position-encoding mechanism, as the reading of written words.

Source: Behavioral Sciences

DOI: 10.3390/bs16050654

Authors: Naama Friedmann, Neta Haluts, Doron Levy

Institution: Tel Aviv University

Language: English

Topic: Reading and Literacy Development

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,654

Funder: Israel Science Foundation