Abstract
Dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in learning to read and there is some evidence that action video games (AVG), without any direct phonological or orthographic stimulation, improve reading efficiency in Italian children with dyslexia. However, the cognitive mechanism underlying this improvement and the extent to which the benefits of AVG training would generalize to deep English orthography, remain two critical questions. During reading acquisition, children have to integrate written letters with speech sounds, rapidly shifting their attention from visual to auditory modality. In our study, we tested reading skills and phonological working memory, visuo-spatial attention, auditory, visual and audio-visual stimuli localization, and cross-sensory attentional shifting in two matched groups of English-speaking children with dyslexia before and after they played AVG or non-action video games. The speed of words recognition and phonological decoding increased after playing AVG, but not non-action video games. Furthermore, focused visuo-spatial attention and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting also improved only after AVG training. This unconventional reading remediation program also increased phonological short-term memory and phoneme blending skills. Our report shows that an enhancement of visuo-spatial attention and phonological working memory, and an acceleration of visual-to-auditory attentional shifting can directly translate into better reading in English-speaking children with dyslexia.
Highlights
Dyslexia is a specific impairment in the acquisition of reading and spelling abilities, despite normal intelligence and educational resources[1]
We previously demonstrated an improvement in word reading and phonological decoding efficiency after action video games (AVG) training in a sample of Italian children with dyslexia[20]
The reading efficiency improvements after the AVG training were characterized by increased reading speed without any cost in accuracy
Summary
Dyslexia is a specific impairment in the acquisition of reading and spelling abilities, despite normal intelligence and educational resources[1]. Attentional deficits in individuals with dyslexia have been found in spatial and in the temporal processing of sequence of stimuli, using backward masking and attentional blink tasks[15, 23,24,25] During early development, these abilities predict future reading skills both in shallow[13, 14, 26] and in deep orthographies[16], confirming a causal link between early visuo-attentional deficits and future reading difficulties (refs 1, 25, 27). A sluggish domain-general attentional shifting is an alternative explanation to phonological decoding deficits[30,31,32] This could explain the typical deficits in perceptual noise exclusion found in visual[33,34,35,36] and in auditory stimuli[37, 38] both in children with dyslexia and in children with specific language impairment. These cross- and multisensory integration mechanisms - strictly involved in reading acquisition - are able to change the phonological coding in language-specific cortical areas, such as the left planum temporale[43]
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