TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PROCESSING IN READING-DISABLED AND NORMAL-CHILDREN

The ability to process temporal and spatial visual stimuli was studied to investigate the role these functions play in the reading process. Previous studies of this type have often been confounded by memory inv olvement, or did not take into account the evidence which suggests a v isual transient deficit in some dyslexics. Normal (n = 39), reading di sabled (n = 26), and backward reading children (n = 12) were compared on a visual computer game, which consisted of a temporal and an analog ous spatial dot counting task. Reading disabled children performed sig nificantly worse than normal children on the Temporal Dot Task, but we re only mildly impaired on the Spatial Dot Task. Backward readers were not significantly better than the reading disabled group on either ta sk, suggesting that poor visual temporal processing is not specific to dyslexia. In a group of 93 children, a regression model including age , verbal IQ, phonological awareness, and visual temporal processing ab ility, predicted 73% of the variance of reading ability. The results s uggest that dyslexics perform worse in tasks that require fast, sequen tial processing and that this impairment may be partially responsible for their reading difficulties.