Enhancing Dyslexia Diagnosis with Multisensory Pseudoword Mask Assessment

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects reading, spelling, and phonological processing, with growing evidence suggesting deficits in both visual and auditory domains. Traditional diagnostic methods primarily focus on phonological deficits, which may overlook the role of multimodal integration in dyslexia. This study examines whether integrating visual and auditory stimuli improves task performance in dyslexic individuals, providing insights into cognitive processing mechanisms. Participants completed a pseudoword identification task under three conditions: visual-only, auditory-only, and combined visual-auditory. In non-dyslexic participants, response times were faster in the auditory condition, and accuracy was highest in the combined condition. Dyslexic participants demonstrated slower response times and lower accuracy in unimodal conditions, but their performance improved in the combined condition. An ANOVA revealed a significant effect of stimulus type on response times (F (2, 2499) = 303.41, p < .001), and a logistic mixed-effects model confirmed stimulus type significantly influenced accuracy. These findings support the role of multimodal integration in mitigating dyslexia-related deficits and highlight the need for computational and mathematical models that account for multisensory processing in dyslexia. This work contributes to the broader understanding of cognitive mechanisms underlying reading disorders and informs potential interventions.