A growing body of evidence suggests that children with dyslexia in alphabetic languages exhibit visual-spatial attention deficits that can obstruct reading acquisition by impairing their phonological decoding skills. However, it remains an open question whether these visual-spatial attention deficits are present in children with dyslexia in…

Focusing primarily on learning disabled children, the article briefly reviews the literature related to perceptual skills required in reading acquisition and the validity of current perceptual measures to tap these task-related perceptual abilities, and proposes an informal task-related measure to overcome the drawbacks of more formal measures of…

A major focus in reading difficulty is lack of automaticity in decoding, which overloads the attentional system, leads to the use of small, meaningless visual processing units such as the individual letter, places heavy demands on short-term memory, and interferes with comprehension. Techniques for diagnosis and remediation are noted. (Author/JW)