title: Spatial and temporal attention in developmental dyslexia.
abstract: Although the dominant view posits that developmental dyslexia (DD) arises from a deficit in phonological processing, emerging evidence suggest that DD could result from a more basic cross-modal letter-to-speech sound integration deficit. Letters have to be precisely selected from irrelevant and cluttering letters by rapid orienting of visual attention before the correct letter-to-speech sound integration applies. In the present study the time-course of spatial attention was investigated measuring target detection reaction times (RTs) in a cuing paradigm, while temporal attention was investigated by assessing impaired identification of the first of two sequentially presented masked visual objects. Spatial and temporal attention were slower in dyslexic children with a deficit in pseudoword reading (N = 14) compared to chronological age (N = 43) and to dyslexics without a deficit in pseudoword reading (N = 18), suggesting a direct link between visual attention efficiency and phonological decoding skills. Individual differences in these visual attention mechanisms were specifically related to pseudoword reading accuracy in dyslexics. The role of spatial and temporal attention in the graphemic parsing process might be related to a basic oscillatory "temporal sampling" dysfunction.
authors.affiliation: Child Psychopathology Unit, Scientific Institute, IRCCS Eugenio Medea Lecco, Italy.
authors.forename: Milena
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ruffino
authors.affiliation: Child Psychopathology Unit, Scientific Institute, IRCCS Eugenio Medea Lecco, Italy ; Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gori
authors.affiliation: Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Boccardi
authors.affiliation: Child Psychopathology Unit, Scientific Institute, IRCCS Eugenio Medea Lecco, Italy.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Molteni
authors.affiliation: Child Psychopathology Unit, Scientific Institute, IRCCS Eugenio Medea Lecco, Italy ; Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Facoetti
keywords: phonological decoding; reading disorder; spatial attention; temporal attention; temporal sampling