XX CONGRESSO NAZIONALE DELLA SEZIONE DI PSICOLOGIA CLINICA E DINAMICA

The role of the Executive Functions (EFs) in dyslexia is still unclear. In the recent literature several studies find dyslexia to be associated with an EFs impairment (Beneventi at al. 2010; Willcutt et al., 2005), whereas other authors don’t find any association between dyslexia and difficulties in EFs tasks (Marzocchi et al., 2008). Moreover, the main studies evaluating EFs both in typically developing children and dyslexics have mainly focused on planning and problem solving, and working memory (e.g., Best et al., 2009; Reiter et al., 2005) ) while only few studies have focused on set-shifting. The set-shifting seems to have a central role in the linguistic elaboration, because it permits to rapidly switch between tasks or mental sets (Best et al., 2009). The aim of this study is to investigate the set-shifting abilities in two groups of children, with and without dyslexia, using an Alternate Fluency (AF) task already used and standardized by Costa and colleagues (2014) for adult population. This study involved 22 adolescents, aged 11 to 14, with a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia (DD) and 124 typically developing (TD) peers. Three tasks were administered to two groups: Phonemic Fluency (PF), Semantic Fluency (SF) and Alternate Fluency (AF). The results show a significant difference between the two groups in all the three tasks. Specifically, we found a lower performance in the adolescents with dyslexia with respect to controls (PF, p = .003; SF, p < .001; AF, p = .005). Moreover both the two groups showed more difficulties in the PF task rather then in the SF and AF tasks. In conclusion, this study supports the hypothesis of difficulties in the executive component represented by set-shifting in adolescents with dyslexia. These data underline the importance of considering this EF in the clinical evaluation and in the description of the cognitive profile of these adolescents.