Postural control and automaticity in dyslexic children: the relationship between visual information and body sway.
Dyslexic children show weaker visuo-motor coupling even in basic balance tasks, hinting at a shared automaticity deficit that worsens when DCD is also present.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hattier et al. (2011) watched how kids with dyslexia stood still. They used a moving room that swayed back and forth. The room moved, not the child.
They measured body sway and how well the kids used visual cues to stay upright. They compared dyslexic children to kids who read normally.
What they found
Kids with dyslexia swayed more. Their bodies did not lock onto the moving room as tightly.
The link between what their eyes saw and how their body moved was weaker and less steady.
How this fits with other research
Danitz et al. (2014) saw the same thing with a hand task. Dyslexic kids tracked a moving target with a handle less accurately. Both studies point to a loose visuo-motor connection.
Cignetti et al. (2018) went further. They showed the problem is worst when dyslexia and DCD occur together. Kids with both diagnoses had a clear lag in feed-forward motor planning.
Schott et al. (2016) found a similar automatization deficit in pure DCD. Adding a simple counting task while walking slowed those kids down more than peers. The same automaticity idea helps explain why dyslexic kids wobble even when they are just standing.
Why it matters
If a child with dyslexia seems clumsy or easily thrown off balance, do not ignore it. Check how they use visual cues during gross motor play. Add short postural challenges to your baseline assessment. Simple fixes like giving a stable visual anchor or extra time to plan movement can cut errors during tabletop and PE tasks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Difficulty with literacy acquisition is only one of the symptoms of developmental dyslexia. Dyslexic children also show poor motor coordination and postural control. Those problems could be associated with automaticity, i.e., difficulty in performing a task without dispending a fair amount of conscious efforts. If this is the case, dyslexic children would show difficulties in using "unperceived" sensory cues to control body sway. Therefore, the aim of the study was to examine postural control performance and the coupling between visual information and body sway in dyslexic children. Ten dyslexic children and 10 non-dyslexic children stood upright inside a moving room that remained stationary or oscillated back and forward at frequencies of 0.2 or 0.5 Hz. Body sway magnitude and the relationship between the room's movement and body sway were examined. The results indicated that dyslexic children oscillated more than non-dyslexic children in both stationary and oscillating conditions. Visual manipulation induced body sway in all children but the coupling between visual information and body sway was weaker and more variable in dyslexic children. Based upon these results, we can suggest that dyslexic children use visual information to postural control with the same underlying processes as non-dyslexic children; however, dyslexic children show poorer performance and more variability while relating visual information and motor action even in a task that does not require an active cognitive and conscious motor involvement, which may be a further evidence of automaticity problem.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.03.011