Abstract
Developmental dyslexia is a complex reading disorder involving genetic and environmental factors. After more than a century of research, its etiology remains debated. Two hypotheses are often put forward by scholars to account for the causes of dyslexia. The most common one, the linguistic hypothesis, postulates that dyslexia is due to poor phonological awareness. The alternative hypothesis considers that dyslexia is caused by visual-attentional deficits and abnormal eye movement patterns. This article reviews a series of selected event-related brain potential (ERP) and eye movement studies on the reading ability of dyslexic individuals to provide an informed state of knowledge on the etiology of dyslexia. Our purpose is to show that the two abovementioned hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and that dyslexia should rather be considered as a multifactorial deficit.
Highlights
Reading is a complex skill that entails oculomotor and cognitive processes such as eye movements, visual perception and various language processes in charge of letter, lexical, syntactic, and semantic analyses [1]
Dyslexia is found in different languages independently of language orthographic transparency [6]
The goal of this article was to review current research focusing on both event-related brain potentials (ERP) as well as eye movement recordings in the dyslexic population to propose future directions in which these two methods could be tested by recording simultaneously ERP activities and eye movements in dyslexic individuals
Summary
Reading is a complex skill that entails oculomotor and cognitive processes such as eye movements (convergence, saccades and fixations), visual perception and various language processes in charge of letter, lexical, syntactic, and semantic analyses [1]. The most prevalent theory of developmental dyslexia nowadays is the phonological deficit theory [9], which posits that dyslexic readers present poor phonological awareness, poor verbal short-term memory and slow lexical retrieval [4] It is disputable whether the phonologic representations of dyslexic individuals are unspecified or whether it is the access to these representations that is impaired, maybe due to the difficulty in separating the two hypotheses (quality of representations vs access to the representations) [10,11,12]. Some studies have reported a reduced visual attention span in dyslexics that may result in a limitation in the number of letters processed in parallel This disorder, known as visuo-attentional deficit, can lead to abnormal eye movements during reading in dyslexic individuals [13,14,15]. We review the results on eye movement studies conducted in these two populations
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