title: Visual pattern perception: a multidimensional analysis of development of children's reading skills.
abstract: This study was designed to assess the extent to which there are visual pattern processing deficits which are related to differential reading skill of young children. Discrimination problems were constructed using visual patterns with features known to be processed differentially by the central nervous system based upon neurophysiological data. Analysis of variance and multidimensional scaling techniques were used to analyze the discrimination latencies of kindergarten through third grade children (12 per grade) who were classified either as good or poor readers. The results show that there are no pattern-specific effects which discriminate good from poor readers. Rather, good readers process all patterns more efficiently than do poor readers, and efficiency improves with age for all readers studied. This suggests that the locus of the reading deficit occurs at levels in the nervous system beyond where pattern-feature processing occurs.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000503:physiopathology; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011287:Prejudice; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading