Dyslexia, technology assists children in reading texts

Reading aloud, assisted by a technology that "captures" the reader's attention on the written word, allows girls and boys with dyslexia to increase their comprehension of a text.

This is what emerges from a study, the result of the collaboration between the Bruno Kessler Foundation and the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Trento, which involved 40 boys and girls aged between 8 and 10 years, half diagnosed with dyslexia and the other half with typical reading skills.

"We have shown that this technology facilitates the comprehension of the text in readers with reading difficulties", explains Massimo Zancanaro, professor at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Trento and head of the research unit I3 of the Bruno Kessler Foundation.

"The improvement - continues Zancanaro - is evident with respect to the reading support technologies based on audio only. These technologies do not act on the child's attention, but which instead tend only to relieve him of the difficulty of reading a text".

"Gary" - this is the name of the instrument used in the studio - is a prototype developed by the Bruno Kessler Foundation.

It provides the reading aloud of the text and at the same time, through an eye tracker device, identifies the reader's gaze on the digital text shown on the video by monitoring whether it is looking at the word that follows, which at that point is highlighted.

"As hypothesized - concludes the research - the use of Gary increases reading comprehension in boys and girls with dyslexia compared to a traditional speech synthesis tool, showing an average improvement of 24% in reading comprehension scores".

The study, published in the journal "Journal of Computer Assisted Learning", combined with the refinement and enhancement of the "Gary" prototype created by Fbk, could be the basis for further studies both in the field of dyslexia but also in the field of language learning. foreign, especially those in which the written word often does not coincide with its pronunciation.

(HANDLE).