Impact of orthographic transparency on typical and atypical reading development: evidence in French-Spanish bilingual children.
Visual attention span, not phonics, predicts how fast dyslexic kids read across French and Spanish.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lallier et al. (2014) compared kids who have dyslexia with kids who read on time. All spoke French and Spanish. The team tested how wide each child could see letters at once. This skill is called visual attention span, or VA span.
Kids also read short words and fake words in both languages. French spelling is tricky. Spanish spelling is clear. The study asked: does VA span predict reading speed in both tongues?
What they found
Children with dyslexia showed a smaller VA span. They read words slower and made more errors. The gap was larger in opaque French than in transparent Spanish.
Phoneme skills did not explain reading speed. VA span did. The wider the span, the faster the child read in both languages.
How this fits with other research
Hao et al. (2021) extends this idea to deaf Chinese children. They found visual-orthographic processing, not phonology, drove reading. Together the papers show that visual-cognitive skills matter across very different groups and scripts.
Zakopoulou et al. (2011) seems to disagree. Their Greek preschool data put phonology, memory, and motor skills at the center. The clash is only on the surface. Victoria studied predictors before kids could read. Marie studied real-time reading in fluent bilinguals. Timing changes which skill shines.
Kim et al. (2014) used eye tracking on college students with dyslexia. Longer gaze times matched Marie's slower reading. Both studies show that visual processing bottlenecks persist with age.
Why it matters
If you assess bilingual or multilingual learners, check VA span, not just phonemic awareness. A quick letter-array task can flag reading risk even when speech sounds look fine. For intervention, widen the visual window through timed flash-card arrays or chunking drills. Add extra reading time in opaque English; keep it shorter in transparent Spanish. These tweaks cost nothing and fit into most class schedules.
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Give a five-letter array span task before you drill phonemes; use the score to set reading-time allowances.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study aimed to quantify cross-linguistic modulations of the contribution of phonemic awareness skills and visual attention span (VA Span) skills (number of visual elements that can be processed simultaneously) to reading speed and accuracy in 18 Spanish-French balanced bilingual children with and without developmental dyslexia. The children were administered two similar reading batteries in French and Spanish. The deficits of the dyslexic children in reading accuracy were mainly visible in their opaque orthography (French) whereas difficulties indexed by reading speed were observed in both their opaque and transparent orthographies. Dyslexic children did not exhibit any phonemic awareness problems in French or in Spanish, but showed poor VA Span skills compared to their control peers. VA span skills correlated with reading accuracy and speed measures in both Spanish and French, whereas phonemic awareness correlated with reading accuracy only. Overall, the present results show that the VA Span is tightly related to reading speed regardless of orthographic transparency, and that it accounts for differences in reading performance between good and poor readers across languages. The present findings further suggest that VA Span skills may play a particularly important role in building-up specific word knowledge which is critical for lexical reading strategies.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.01.021