A controversy has recently developed regarding the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia may be caused, in some cases, by a reduced visual attention span (VAS). To examine this hypothesis, independent of phonological abilities, researchers tested the ability of dyslexic participants to recognize arrays of unfamiliar visual characters. Employing…

Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming…

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non-dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non-dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some…

Visual persistence was investigated in adults with and without dyslexia in order to determine whether dyslexic adults demonstrate problems similar to those found in childhood dyslexia. Results showed that sensitivity of dyslexic adults was impaired when parts of a test stimulus were presented to adjacent retinal areas, suggesting that under…

Using normal adult readers, this study examined the relative involvement of magnocellular and parvocellular processes in reading English phonologically regular pseudowords and irregular words presented in isolation and in contiguity from left to right. The data showed that a low temporal frequency visual measure that implied more parvocellular…

Using published research data, the problem of the seriously retarded reader was examined to determine the role of vision. The most obvious visual factors such as acuity and refractive error did not seem related to the problem. Impairment of visual skills such as fusion and accommodation did seem to contribute to reading difficulty, but such…

The author gives an account of her early teaching experiences, her awareness that many children did not learn to read, her early investigations of readiness, and her conclusions that difficulty in numbers, copying, or tracing were closely related to reading disability. The importance of visual perception, eye motility, early child development, and…