title: Reading performance is enhanced by visual texture discrimination training in Chinese-speaking children with developmental dyslexia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  High order cognitive processing and learning, such as reading, interact with lower-level sensory processing and learning. Previous studies have reported that visual perceptual training enlarges visual span and, consequently, improves reading speed in young and old people with amblyopia. Recently, a visual perceptual training study in Chinese-speaking children with dyslexia found that the visual texture discrimination thresholds of these children in visual perceptual training significantly correlated with their performance in Chinese character recognition, suggesting that deficits in visual perceptual processing/learning might partly underpin the difficulty in reading Chinese.
  
  
  RESULTS
  To further clarify whether visual perceptual training improves the measures of reading performance, eighteen children with dyslexia and eighteen typically developed readers that were age- and IQ-matched completed a series of reading measures before and after visual texture discrimination task (TDT) training. Prior to the TDT training, each group of children was split into two equivalent training and non-training groups in terms of all reading measures, IQ, and TDT. The results revealed that the discrimination threshold SOAs of TDT were significantly higher for the children with dyslexia than for the control children before training. Interestingly, training significantly decreased the discrimination threshold SOAs of TDT for both the typically developed readers and the children with dyslexia. More importantly, the training group with dyslexia exhibited significant enhancement in reading fluency, while the non-training group with dyslexia did not show this improvement. Additional follow-up tests showed that the improvement in reading fluency is a long-lasting effect and could be maintained for up to two months in the training group with dyslexia.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results suggest that basic visual perceptual processing/learning and reading ability in Chinese might at least partially rely on overlapping mechanisms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China; The Joint PekingU-PolyU Center for Child Development and Learning, Peking University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xiangzhi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Ou
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of languages and communication, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Yuzheng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Song
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002681:China; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*