Background: When looking at faces, we tend to attend more to the left visual field (corresponding to the right side of the person's face). This phenomenon is called the left visual field bias (LVF) and is presumed to reflect the brain's right-sided dominance for face processing. Whether alterations in hemispheric dominance are present in dyslexia,…

Perceptual span, the effective visual field in reading covered in a single fixation, varies across orthographies. The perceptual span for reading English covers 3-4-character spaces to the left of fixation and around 14-15-character spaces to the right of the fixation while for Chinese it is one character space to the left and 3-character spaces…

A growing body of evidence suggests that children with dyslexia in alphabetic languages exhibit visual-spatial attention deficits that can obstruct reading acquisition by impairing their phonological decoding skills. However, it remains an open question whether these visual-spatial attention deficits are present in children with dyslexia in…

The automatization of handwriting and typing is sustained by both sensorimotor and linguistic abilities that support the integration of central-linguistic processes with modality-specific peripheral-motor programs. How this integration evolves when handwriting and, especially, typing is not fully automatized has not been well-understood yet. In…

The performance of children and young adults with Down syndrome (DS) on reading subskills and nonword reading was investigated. The performance of the participants with DS (N = 42) was compared to that of typically developing (N = 36) peers matched on fluid intelligence abilities. The study accounted for the different depths in orthography…

A descriptive cross-sectional study was undertaken with Sinhala speaking students from grades 1 and 2 in the Gampaha District of Sri Lanka to determine how akshara graphical features influence emerging reading skills. A battery of locally validated assessments evaluated akshara knowledge (recognition and production), word reading (accurate and…

Holistic processing has been identified as an expertise marker of face and object recognition. By contrast, reduced holistic processing is purportedly an expertise marker in recognising orthographic characters in Chinese. Does holistic processing increase or decrease in expertise development? Is orthographic recognition a domain-specific exception…

The capacities of detecting visual regularities were tested among twenty typical (age 11.1 ± 0.32), and twenty poor (age 11.03 ± 0.28) native-Arab readers. Two stages were implemented, passive exposure to visual regularities and forced decision task. In the first stage, the participants were passively presented with four shapes; each shape was…

Although the link between developmental dyslexia and visual-spatial deficit has been recurrently highlighted, the relationship between visual-spatial abilities and reading performance is still a controversial issue, considering the orthographic variability of the language being learned. This study aimed to examine whether visuo-spatial abilities…

This study examined the relationships between word reading and rapid automatized naming (RAN) for objects and letters in Arabic-speaking children with and without dyslexia to determine potential modulating effects of color on naming by comparing children's performance on color and black-white RAN plates. Participants were 114 Arabic-speaking third…

Structural patterns existing in language can be exploited for implicit prediction of sequences in speech and visual input via a process termed statistical learning (SL). Despite extensive examination of SL in dyslexia, whether SL problems arise from modality-constrained learning processes or from global learning processes is still unknown, nor is…

Fluent reading, which involves visual serial processing of letters/characters (i.e., visual temporal processing, VTP), greatly contributes to our daily life. The present study thus explored the underlying mechanism of reading fluency from the perspective of VTP. A longitudinal method was adopted to examine whether VTP skills in preschool (mean age…

New research suggests that mechanisms involved in fine motor skills play an important role in reading and writing development. Extending past work that focused on fine motor skills measured in adolescence, the present study followed children longitudinally from ages 5 to 7 to examine early literacy and associated sets of fine motor skills,…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Background and aims: Developmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Developmental Dyslexia (DD) are reported to have more visual problems, oral language difficulties, and diminished reading skills in addition to their different diagnostic features. Moreover, these conditions…