The adaptation of an adult group screening test for dyslexia into Finland-Swedish: normative data for university students and the effects of language background on test performance

We present a Finland-Swedish adaptation of the Sweden-Swedish group screening test for dyslexia for adults and young adults DUVAN (Lundberg & Wolff, 2003) together with normative data from 143 Finland-Swedish university students. The test is based on the widely held phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia and consists of a self-report and five subtests tapping phonological working memory, phonological representation, phonological awareness, and orthographic skill. We describe the test adaptation procedure and show that the internal reliability of the new test version is comparable to the original one. Our results indicate that the language background (Swedish, Finnish, early simultaneous Swedish-Finnish bilingualism) should be taken into account when interpreting the results on the Finland-Swedish DUVAN test. We show that the FS-DUVAN differentiates a group of students with dyslexia diagnosis from normals, and that a low performance on the FS-DUVAN correlates with a positive self-report on familial dyslexia and with a history of special education in school. Finally, we analyze the sensitivity and specificity of the FS-DUVAN for dyslexia among university students.