Comparison between Reading Performances of Children with Specific Learning Disabilities and Learning Difficulties by Using Times New Roman and EasyReading Writing Font
Valentina Mengoni, Laura Maria Castagna
Within the last years, several studies have examined the efficacity of so-called «EasyReading» font writing, since their use in the drafting of pieces of texts should increase the speed and improve the accuracy of reading. The aim of this uncontrolled clinical trial is to verify if there is an improvement of the reading performances of children with Specific Learning Disabilities and Learning Difficulties by using the EasyReading writing font. Fonts with specific features have been introduced in order to simplify the recognition of graphemes and to make easier the process of reading. By reducing reading efforts the child can focus on the comprehension of the text. At the present state of scientific knowledge, as reported by Italian Dyslexia Association (AID), the only font that seems to facilitate the reading is EasyReading, but the studies do not allow to confirm a significant advantage of this font. For this reasons, EasyReading was compared to Times New Roman in three reading tasks: one text, four word list and three non-word list; the test has been repeated fifteen days after the first. The 14 students who participated in this test are between 7 and 11 years old — the average age is 9,2 years old — and they were diagnosed learning disabilities and non-specified developmental disorders of school skills by the multidisciplinary team of the Santo Stefano Institute of Civitanova Marche and Filottrano (Italy). Speed, expressed in syllables per seconds, and accuracy, i.e. the number of mistakes, were compared. The above datas show a better reading performance in patients with reading difficulties. The results show a statistically significant improvement (p < 0.05) in speed and correctness of text and word lists reading through the EasyReading font compared to the standard one. The improved performance may therefore facilitate the decoding of the text.
Keywords
Specific Learning Disabilities, Reading, Font.