Dr. Wim Tops (University of Groningen) gave the talk "From boosting early reading development to diagnosing adults with dyslexia"

Dr. Wim Tops  talked about the reading/dyslexia projects he is currently involved in. The first is an investigation of the effect of serious gaming on learning to read. In their research group, they use a Dutch version of GraphoGame (www.grapholearn.com) to train grapheme-phoneme correspondences to enhance reading in beginning readers. GraphoGame’s effectiveness has been largely investigated in different languages using pre- and post-treatment reading measures (e.g., reading accuracy; or timed one-minute reading tests). In this research, more sensitive measures than reading accuracy are used, like EEG and in-game assessment. In the presentation, Dr. Wim Tops has shown some tentative results from these studies.

While most studies on dyslexia focus on (young) children learning to read (and spell), the second line of research of Dr. Wim Tops concerns adults with dyslexia, especially higher education students.  By showing these two lines of research, this presentation highlights important new lines of inquiry for developmental dyslexia. It also identifies some methodological and theoretical concerns for neurolinguistic research in reading.