On May 27^th 2017 Patrick Snellings will be the opponent in the defense of M.A. Sanna Olkkonen’s doctoral dissertation in Applied Linguistics “Second and foreign language fluency from a cognitive perspective”. On May 29^th 2017 Patrick Snellings will also give a lecture for the researchers within the ForLearning network and Language Campus of the University of Jyväskylä. See below for title and abstract.

Reading fast, how do they do it? A tale of experts, learners, and dyslexic readers

Becoming a proficient reader not only entails reading accurately but also requires sufficient reading speed. Without this speed adult readers do not have full access to the growing information load that is required to function in current society. Reading is an extremely complex skill that surprisingly can be carried out fastand almost automatic by expert readers. However, becoming an expert reader is a long process that requires massive exposure to written words and years of practice. For dyslexic readers, this process takes even more time and effort. In this talk I will discuss how expert readers process written words by integrating visual and auditory information almost automatically. I will discuss how children develop these skills over a number of years and how this development differs in dyslexic readers.  I will also show that dyslexic readers have difficulties in learning new letters and integrating them with speech sounds. Knowledge of these individual differences at the letter level can be used for diagnostic purposes and for predicting treatment response of children with dyslexia.