home . search . contact   index by author chronological index

- abstract below
- a PowerPoint presentation is available on the conference CD.
For details of how to obtain the CD, please contact the BDA.

Visual-Attentional deficits in developmental dyslexia

Marie-line Bosse and Sylviane Valdois

Universite Pierre Mendes, Grenoble, France Marie-Line.Bosse@ac-grenoble.fr

Abstract

The connectionist model of reading of Ans, Carbonnel and Valdois (1998) postulates the existence of two distinct reading procedures (analytic and global) that differ in the kind of visual-attentional (VA) processing they involve. Within this framework, developmental dyslexia is interpreted as resulting from either a phonological disorder or a visual-attentional processing deficit. For normal readers, both visual-attentional and phonological processing are involved. So the model predicts that they both can be predictors of reading (and spelling) performances. Our aim was to confirm that visual-attentional processing can predict reading performance independently to phonological processing, studying performances of a large sample of young readers. 130 participants of grade 3 and 130 of grade 5 were tested on reading, spelling, short term memory, phonological and visual-attentional tasks. A regression analysis showed that both phonological tasks and visual-attentional tasks predicted reading and spelling performance. Phonological processing is the best predictor of performances linked to the analytic procedure (pseudoword reading and spelling, percentages of phonologically plausible errors) but is also a significant predictor of global procedure performance. Visual-attentional processing is the best predictor of word reading and spelling performances, particularly on irregular words. On each grade, comparisons between a group of poor readers and a matched group of normal readers were conducted to precise influence of each processing. Results suggest that, as phonological awareness but independently to it, an efficient visual-attentional processing might be considered as an important factor for reading acquisition.

Disclaimer: all the abstracts presented here have satisfied the academic committee as appropriate for presentation at an international conference. However, the material reflects the views of the authors, not necessarily those of the academic committee or the BDA. No endorsement of any approach, product or service is intended or implied.

home . search . contact . index by author . chronological index