Designing an Accurate Reading Skills Test: Why Parallel Texts are Important in Dyslexia Diagnosis
Researchers from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have developed a tool for accurately assessing reading skills in adults with reading impairments. It can be used, for instance, before and after sessions with a language therapist. The tool includes two texts that differ in content but are equal in complexity: participants were observed to read them at the same speed, make a similar number of errors, and understand the content to the same degree. Such parallel texts will enable more accurate diagnosis of dyslexia and better monitoring of the effectiveness of interventions aimed at addressing it. The paper has been published in Educational Studies.
Reading is a fundamental skill essential for learning, working, and navigating the world. However, even adults may struggle to read at a typical pace, with letters seeming to jump around and word meanings slipping away—leading to frustration and fatigue. Such symptoms are often overlooked, but they may signal dyslexia—a specific reading disorder that begins in childhood and can persist into adulthood without proper intervention, despite normal intelligence, good education, and no vision or hearing impairments.
Accurately diagnosing dyslexia in adults remains a challenge in Russia—one specialist may identify the disorder, another may disagree, and yet another may detect additional issues in the same patient. This inconsistency stems not from a lack of professional expertise but from differences in diagnostic approaches and tools—and more broadly, from the absence of standardised assessment tools for reading skills in Russian-speaking adults.
As a result, without a reliable diagnosis, it is difficult to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of interventions—typically measured by administering a reading test before and after the treatment. However, using the same text before and after an intervention risks the patient memorising it, while using a different text with unknown properties makes it unclear whether any change in reading performance reflects the intervention or merely variation in text complexity.
To address this problem, researchers from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain developed and tested two texts that differ in content but show no significant differences in key linguistic features, such as word length and frequency, sentence syntactic structure, readability according to the Flesch Reading Ease score, and other factors. The researchers hypothesised that these texts would be equally complex for adult native Russian speakers. The final versions were tested on a sample of 111 students.
Yana Kokoreva
'We composed the texts manually, without using neural networks—carefully monitoring sentence syntax, word length, and frequency, while striving to create coherent and meaningful stories. This would not have been possible without the tools provided by our colleagues: we relied on the StimulStat lexical database and the Textometr text complexity analyser, which enabled us to precisely control the psycholinguistic parameters of the texts,' comments co-author Yana Kokoreva, Research Assistant at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain.
The results confirm that both texts can be read with no statistically significant differences in speed, accuracy, or comprehension. This means they can be used to assess reading skills before and after dyslexia interventions, allowing for informed conclusions about their effectiveness. Building on the original paper-based test, the team at HSE’s Centre for Language and Brain has developed a digital version, now available for download.
Svetlana Dorofeeva
'The test can now be used both to diagnose dyslexia in adults and to assess progress following remedial sessions. Our study confirmed that these linguistically validated parallel texts are indeed equally challenging for readers. This means the methodology can be scaled up, allowing new texts to be created for repeated testing of adult readers based on established parameters. The same principles can be applied to develop reading tests for children, provided the parameters are adapted to their age,' says co-author Svetlana Dorofeeva, Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Brain.
The study was conducted with support from HSE University's Basic Research Programme within the framework of the Centres of Excellence project.
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