title: Visual deficits in developmental dyslexia: relationships between non-linguistic visual tasks and their contribution to components of reading.
abstract: Developmental dyslexia is often characterized by a visual deficit, but the nature of this impairment and how it relates to reading ability is disputed (Brain 2003; 126: 841-865). In order to investigate this issue, we compared groups of adults with and without dyslexia on the Ternus, visual-search and symbols tasks. Dyslexic readers yielded more errors on the visual-search and symbols tasks compared with non-dyslexic readers. A positive correlation between visual-search and symbols task performance suggests a common mechanism shared by these tasks. Performance on the visual-search and symbols tasks also correlated with non-word reading and rapid automatized naming measures, and visual search contributed independent variance to non-word reading. The Ternus task did not discriminate reading groups nor contributed significant variance to reading measures. We consider how visual-attention processes might underlie specific component reading measures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. manon.wyn.jones@ed.ac.uk
authors.forename: Manon W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Holly P
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Branigan
authors.forename: M Louise
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Kelly
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D011340:Problem Solving; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult