Differences in Detecting Statistical Visual Regularities between Typical and Poor Readers

Abstract

The capacities of detecting visual regularities were tested among twenty typical (age 11.1 ±.32), and twenty poor (age 11.03 ±.28) native-Arab readers. Two stages were implemented, passive exposure to visual regularities and forced decision task. In the first stage, the participants were passively presented with four shapes; each shape was displayed with unique invariant features, which present the regularities of the shape in addition to variant features. In the second stage, the participants were presented with forced decision task and were asked to make an acceptance or rejection of presented 160 shapes according to their own preferences regarding the shapes familiarity. Eighty of the presented shapes were compatible with the visual regularities as was presented in the passive learning stage where the other shapes presented the non-compatible condition. The results indicated that typical readers showed significantly higher levels of true responses in the decision task. In addition, among the typical readers group shorter response times were significantly recorded for the compatible items compared to non-compatible items. Such differences in response times were not observed among the poor readers. The results support the assumption that poor orthographic learning among poor readers could be associated with inefficient statistical learning capacities.