Verhoeven, L.
Recent neurocognitive research has identified major dysfunctions in the reading network. However, it is still unclear how these dysfunctions impact reading fluency development. Significant progress has been made with treatment of dyslexia but the effects mainly address reading accuracy, not fluency. Learning to read in a transparent orthography like Dutch is relatively easy for most children. Dutch children have been found to be highly accurate in their decoding from first grade on, and the further development of this skill is largely a matter of increasing speed (i.e., automatization of word decoding). The basic task confronting children to become fluent readers of Dutch is thus to progress from slow, sequential, grapheme-to-phoneme word decoding to fast, parallel, phonology-based orthographic word decoding. For children with dyslexia, accurate decoding turns out to be quite a challenge, particularly when it comes to longer or unfamiliar Dutch words. Even more problems present themselves when the reading process must be speeded up as attested by the incremental backlogs that manifest themselves in the decoding efficiency of children with developmental dyslexia throughout the elementary school years. An important question is how reading fluency can be enhanced. In this presentation, the development and remediation of reading accuracy and fluency in Dutch children will therefore be the focus. It is concluded that reading problems in a transparent alphabetic orthography are primarily a matter of speed and that early computer-supported intervention may help children with dyslexia to speed up their reading. However, it will also be shown that for some children showing a phonological deficit a sustained intervention is needed