Visual and auditory perception in preschool children at risk for dyslexia.
Preschoolers headed for dyslexia already struggle to decide ‘what came first’ in simple sounds and lights.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ortiz et al. (2014) tested young learners who had family risk for dyslexia but could not yet read. They gave simple games: hear two beeps and say which came first, or see two flashes and point to the first one. A control group of typical preschoolers played the same games.
The team also checked if kids could tell sounds or lights apart when they did not need to know order. They wanted to see if timing problems show up before reading starts.
What they found
At-risk kids got the order wrong twice as often on both beep and flash games. Their single-sound or single-light scores were the same as controls. The trouble was only with quick timing, not with hearing or seeing the items.
How this fits with other research
Cicchetti et al. (2014) found older dyslexic kids could not learn hidden patterns in a string of letters. Rosario’s preschoolers show the same group falls behind on the simpler job of spotting which beep came first. Together they map a line: early timing gaps grow into rule-learning gaps.
Razuk et al. (2014) looked at balance. Dyslexic school-age kids wobbled more when wall stripes were removed. Both studies point to a system that needs richer, slower cues—whether in the ear, eye, or feet.
van Roon et al. (2010) saw kids with learning disorders fail to track a moving dot that sped up. Rosario’s timing task and Dominique’s motion task both ask the brain to put events in the right order. The pattern fits: weak timing in preschool shows up again as weak motion prediction in grade school.
Why it matters
You can spot timing trouble at age 4, before any reading failure. Add brief order games—‘Which sound came first?’—to your early learner assessments. If the child hesitates, give extra wait time during instruction and use clear, separated prompts. Targeting timing early may head off later reading and tracking problems.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Recently, there has been renewed interest in perceptive problems of dyslexics. A polemic research issue in this area has been the nature of the perception deficit. Another issue is the causal role of this deficit in dyslexia. Most studies have been carried out in adult and child literates; consequently, the observed deficits may be the result rather than the cause of dyslexia. This study addresses these issues by examining visual and auditory perception in children at risk for dyslexia. We compared children from preschool with and without risk for dyslexia in auditory and visual temporal order judgment tasks and same-different discrimination tasks. Identical visual and auditory, linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli were presented in both tasks. The results revealed that the visual as well as the auditory perception of children at risk for dyslexia is impaired. The comparison between groups in auditory and visual perception shows that the achievement of children at risk was lower than children without risk for dyslexia in the temporal tasks. There were no differences between groups in auditory discrimination tasks. The difficulties of children at risk in visual and auditory perceptive processing affected both linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli. Our conclusions are that children at risk for dyslexia show auditory and visual perceptive deficits for linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli. The auditory impairment may be explained by temporal processing problems and these problems are more serious for processing language than for processing other auditory stimuli. These visual and auditory perceptive deficits are not the consequence of failing to learn to read, thus, these findings support the theory of temporal processing deficit.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.07.007