Transposition errors in visual matching of orthographic stimuli: A study of normal children with implications for orton's theory of developmental dyslexia

Abstract

Transposition (or sequence) errors, such as reading DAM as MAD, have been frequently reported in dyslexic subjects and in (younger) normal readers. Nonetheless, the theoretical status of these errors has remained controversial. We report a visual matching experiment, with Roman and Cyrillic letter-strings, in which one of the foils contains the letters of the stimulus in reversed order. Errors in which this foil is chosen are very common in preschool Italian children (ages 4–6 years), but reduce precipitously after only a few months of learning to read (in a school setting). Normal children, it seems, rapidly learn that concatenations of letters are not commutative in modern orthographies. Furthermore, in the first and second grade school children, there is no significant correlation between the number of errors they make on either of the visual discrimination tasks and their performance in reading aloud.