Orthographic Neighborhood-Size Effects on the Reading Aloud of Italian Children With and Without Dyslexia

This study examines the effects of orthographic neighborhood size (N-size) in relationship with word frequency on the reading aloud of children with and without dyslexia whose language has a consistent orthography. Participants included 22 Italian fourth-grade children with dyslexia and 44 age-matched typically developing readers. Children with dyslexia read low-frequency words with high N-size faster than words that had no neighbors; by contrast, typically developing readers showed no N-size effects, irrespective of word frequency. The facilitating effect of N-size on low-frequency word reading in children with dyslexia indicates that they benefit from lexical activation spreading from dense neighborhoods.