Abstract
Visual processing has been widely studied in regard to its impact on a students’ ability to read. A less researched area is the role of reading in the development of visual processing skills. A cohort-sequential, accelerated-longitudinal design was utilized with 932 kindergarten, first, and second grade students to examine the impact of reading acquisition on the processing of various types of visual discrimination and visual motor test items. Students were assessed four times per year on a variety of reading measures and reading precursors and two popular measures of visual processing over a 3-year period. Explanatory item response models were used to examine the roles of person and item characteristics on changes in visual processing abilities and changes in item difficulties over time. Results showed different developmental patterns for five types of visual processing test items, but most importantly failed to show consistent effects of learning to read on changes in item difficulty. Thus, the present study failed to find support for the hypothesis that learning to read alters performance on measures of visual processing. Rather, visual processing and reading ability improved together over time with no evidence to suggest cross-domain influences from reading to visual processing. Results are discussed in the context of developmental theories of visual processing and brain-based research on the role of visual skills in learning to read.
Highlights
Reading, an everyday task that is essential to success, is a complex developmental activity
The present study evaluated the role of reading in the development of visual processing skills using a large longitudinal data set and advances in psychometric/statistical modeling known as explanatory item response models to examine changes in visual processing associated with learning to read
That is not to say that visual skills are unimportant in reading, but that individual differences in visual processing www.frontiersin.org do not account for individual differences in reading performance
Summary
An everyday task that is essential to success, is a complex developmental activity. The Construction-Integration model of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) and the Landscape Model of van den Broek et al (2005) are two of the most widely cited cognitive models for explaining how readers make sense of text, i.e., for elaborating the cognitive and linguistic processes involved in the linguistic comprehension component of the SVR. These models largely describe the process of skilled reading and are not generally recognized as developmental models of reading. They do not attempt to capture the quantitative and qualitative changes that characterize reading as individuals develop from non-readers, to individuals learning to read, and to individuals reading to learn
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