Visuospatial Ability and Language Processing in Reading Disabled and Normal Children

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a study that compared the phonological and visuospatial abilities of a group of thoroughly studied, normal and reading disabled children. The subjects were 38 children from the Bowman Gray learning disability project. If a child's reading standardized score at 5th grade was between 85 and 115 (±1 SD from the mean) on the Woodcock Johnson, he or she was classified as a good reader. Those below this range were classified as poor readers. Twenty-one good readers and 17 poor readers were studied. The children in the Bowman Gray Project were followed for 5 years, and 450 variables were recorded on each. The 38 children were chosen to have normal IQ and good or poor reading. These results demonstrate that visual tasks which test children's ability to localize and orientate small targets, particularly on the left hand side, together with those which index binocular stability, were almost as useful in discriminating between good and bad readers as were the phonological tests. Likewise, they correlated as well with reading ability.