This study investigated the triple-deficit hypothesis in Arabic, a Semitic transparent orthography, among 258 native Arabic children from Grade 3, divided into a typical readers group (n = 204) and a dyslexia group (n = 54). Children were tested on word- and pseudoword-reading accuracy, word-reading fluency, phonological awareness (PA), naming speed (NS), orthographic processing (OP), and nonverbal reasoning ability. The results indicated that all children with dyslexia had either double or triple deficits, and none of them had a single deficit. Children with triple deficits showed lower performance than children with single and no deficits on all the reading measures. They have also lower performance to children with double deficits on word-reading accuracy but comparable scores in word- and pseudoword-reading fluency. In addition, OP was confirmed as an additional independent predictor of word-level reading skills besides PA and NS, while controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. The classification findings showed that the presence of a triple deficit maximizes the risk of reading failure. These findings support the additive nature of combined deficits in PA, NS, and OP. Moreover, they establish the benefit of including OP as a third deficit, in addition to PA and NS, underlying dyslexia in Arabic.

A long-standing hypothesis is that rapid automatized naming (RAN) measures access to phonological representations stored in long-term memory, but this has been difficult to test experimentally because phonological representations are mental constructs not easily operationalized. Here, we provide a method to test this theory using rime neighborhood density as an index of phonological representational strength. Thirty adults completed four picture-naming tasks orthogonalized for item composition (repeating vs. nonrepeating) and presentation format (discrete vs. serial). Each task was presented in two dichotomous conditions of rime neighborhood density (dense and sparse). There was no effect of rime neighborhood density on naming speed in the discrete nonrepeated (confrontation naming) task. However, rime neighborhood density significantly facilitated naming speed for serial repeated (i.e., RAN), discrete repeated, and serial nonrepeated tasks (ps<.03). The effect was weakest for confrontation naming (d=0.14) and strongest for both discrete and serial RAN tasks (ds=1.01), suggesting that repeating items, not serial presentation, makes RAN uniquely sensitive to manipulations of rime neighborhood density and, by proxy, phonological representations.

This study identified the cognitive processes that underlie the individual differences in early mathematical performance in elementary school children. Taking into account the Baddeley framework multicomponent model, the inhibitory processes, working memory, phonological awareness, and naming speed are considered to be related to early math learning. To examine this relationship, we compared the performance of a total of 424 typically developing middle-class children, aged between 4 and 7 years in a battery of cognitive and early numeric tests: The Utrecht Early Numeracy Test, the Rapid Automatized Naming Test, Spanish version of the Stroop task, the Numeracy Interference Test, Digit Span test, and Phonological Knowledge Test. The mean age of the participants was 72.21 months (sd = 14.8), and 48.6% were male and 51.4% were female. The results demonstrated that children performing worst on central executive, phonological processing, and inhibitory processes showed lower results in early mathematical tasks measured by The Utrecht Early Numeracy Test. Results supported the notion that the executive system is an important predictor of children's mathematical performance.