Current Dyslexia Research and Practice in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Czech and Slovak are closely related languages of the West Slavic subgroup of the Indo-European family. The two languages are broadly mutually intelligible, with similar roots and fusional morphology word structures. Both are highly inflected and hence have a predominance of multisyllabic words that can mark for a rich variety of inflectional and derivational grammatical information (Volín, 2010). Their distribution of word length is virtually identical, with words of three syllables being the most prevalent (40% in Czech, 38% in Slovak), followed by two-syllable words, then words of four syllables, with monosyllabic words ranking only in fourth place (Kessler & Caravolas, 2011). Both languages have a predominantly open (CV, CCV, etc.) syllable structure, and the singleton onset (C) is by far the most prevalent (Kučera & Monroe, 1968). A particular feature of Czech and Slovak phonology is that they allow for complexity in onset structure, with up to four consonants at the start of a syllable. In contrast, at the level of the coda (syllable endings), both languages have limited complexity allowing one or two consonants, but by far most frequent are open syllables (no consonant after the vowel).