Immediate Visual Recall in Poor and Normal Readers as a Function of Orthographic-Linguistic Familiarity

Abstract

The current investigation directly assessed the hypothesis that the visualperceptual skills of poor readers are comparable to those of normal readers. Previous research suggested that spatial and other perceptual difficulties, as observed in poor readers, occur as a function of more basic problems in acquiring visual-verbal equivalents. The prediction was made that both poor and normal readers would encounter similar difficulties if these groups were presented with an unfamiliar orthography, as compared with normal readers who were becoming acquainted with the graphic and linguistic components of that orthography. Employing a visual recall task, the performance of non-Hebrew poor and normal readers were compared with one another as well as with those of normal readers learning Hebrew. Response variables consisted of total number correct, as well as omission, orientation, sequencing and substitution errors for different length Hebrew words. It was expected that the performance of the non-Hebrew groups would be comparable on all measures but that both groups would be inferior to the Hebrew group. The prediction was supported for total number correct, as well as for omission and orientation errors, but there were no reliable differences among the groups on the sequencing and substitution measures. Of additional interest was the finding that the non-Hebrew groups had particular difficulty in correctly orienting Hebrew letters that could be construed as disoriented Roman letters as well as the observation that the directional scanning tendencies of the non-Hebrew groups were identical. The results provide additional evidence for the suggestion that visual-spatial deficit is an unlikely cause of reading disability and indirectly support the notion that the disorder is attributable to dysfunction in visual-verbal integration.