The diagnosis of developmental dyslexia requires measures of reading ability to be at least two standard deviations (SD) below age mean, encompassing accuracy, speed, and comprehension (ICD-10, WHO, 1992). Reading speed is typically measured in either seconds per syllable (sec/syll) or syllables per second (syll/sec). Although syll/sec seems to be more common in text or sentence reading tests while sec/syll seems to be preferred for word and non-word reading tests, the two scores are often provided interchangeably for the same test. Italian standardized tests offer a clear example: the “official” text-reading test (Cornoldi et al., 1986, 2011) and the widely used Battery for the Diagnosis of Reading and Spelling Disabilities (Sartori et al., 1995, 2007) provide norms measured as either syll/sec or total reading time (i.e., sec/syll multiplied by a constant—the overall number of syllables), depending on the edition or the specific version of the text.
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