Funding to support students with dyslexia in post-compulsory education is under pressure and more efficient assessments may offset some of this shortfall. We tested potential tasks for screening dyslexia: recall of adjective-noun, compared to noun-adjective, pairings (syntax) and recall of high versus low frequency letter pairings (bigrams). Students who reported themselves as dyslexic failed to show a normal syntax effect (greater recall of adjective-noun compared to noun-adjective pairings) and no significant difference in recall between the two types of bigrams whereas students who were not dyslexic showed the syntax effect and a bias towards recalling high frequency bigrams. Findings are consistent with recent explanations of dyslexia suggesting that those affected find it difficult to learn and utilise sequential long-term order information (Szmalec et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 37(5) ,1270-1279, 2011). Further, ROC curve analyses revealed both tasks showed acceptable diagnostic properties as they were able to discriminate between the two groups of participants.

在义务后教育中为诵读困难的学生提供支持的资金正面临压力，更有效的评估可能会弥补这一不足。我们测试了筛查阅读障碍的潜在任务：与名词-形容词相比，形容词名词的记忆，配对（语法）以及高频率和低频字母配对（双字母）的记忆。报告为阅读障碍的学生未能表现出正常的句法效果（与名词-形容词配对相比，形容词名词的回忆率更高），两种双字词的回忆率没有显着差异，而没有阅读障碍的学生则表现出句法效果和对召回高频二元音的偏见。实验心理学杂志：学习，记忆与认知，37（5），1270-1279，2011）。此外，ROC曲线分析显示，两项任务均显示出可接受的诊断属性，因为它们能够区分两组参与者。