Dyslexic children fail to comply with the rhythmic constraints of handwriting Elena Pagliarini a,⇑ , Maria Teresa Guasti a , Carlo Toneatto a , Elisa Granocchio b , Federica Riva b , Daniela Sarti b , Bruna Molteni b , Natale Stucchi a a Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126 Milan, Italy b Developmental Neurology Unit, Fondazione I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta, Via Giovanni Celoria, 11, 20133 Milan, Italy article info PsycINFO classification: 3253 2720 3270 2330 3380 Keywords: Handwriting Developmental Dyslexia Dysgraphia Rhythm Digitizing tablet abstract In this study, we sought to demonstrate that deficits in a specific motor activity, handwriting, are associated to Developmental Dyslexia. The linguistic and writing performance of children with Developmental Dyslexia, with and without handwriting problems (dysgraphia), were compared to that of children with Typical Development. The quantitative kinematic variables of handwriting were collected by means of a digitizing tablet. The results showed that all children with Developmental Dyslexia wrote more slowly than those with Typical Development. Contrary to typically devel- oping children, they also varied more in the time taken to write the individual letters of a word and failed to comply with the princi- ples of isochrony and homothety. Moreover, a series of correlations was found among reading, language measures and writing mea- sures suggesting that the two abilities may be linked. We propose that the link between handwriting and reading/language deficits is mediated by rhythm, as both reading (which is grounded on lan- guage) and handwriting are ruled by principles of rhythmic organization. Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2015.04.012 0167-9457/Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0264483865. E-mail addresses: e.pagliarini@campus.unimib.it (E. Pagliarini), mariateresa.guasti@unimib.it (M.T. Guasti), carlo.toneatto@ unimib.it (C. Toneatto), elisa.granocchio@istituto-besta.it (E. Granocchio), federica.riva@istituto-besta.it (F. Riva), daniela. sarti@istituto-besta.it (D. Sarti), bruna.molteni@istituto-besta.it (B. Molteni), natale.stucchi@unimib.it (N. Stucchi). Human Movement Science 42 (2015) 161–182 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Human Movement Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/humov