Differential Transfer in Poor and Normal Readers

It has been suggested that children who sustain specific reading disability experience difficulty in abstracting and generalizing the invariant components of words containing redundant elements because of basic dysfunction in categorical processing. This hypothesis was assessed by comparing independent samples of poor and normal readers on transfer of training tasks of two different types: a visual-verbal association task which simulated the reading process, and a visual-visual association task unlike reading. It was predicted that poor readers would perform significantly below normal readers on both initial learning and transfer under the visual-verbal association conditions. In contrast, it was expected that the performance of similar groups of poor and normal readers would be comparable under the visual-visual training and transfer conditions. The results supported these predictions, and it was concluded that the generalization problems observed in poor readers in early word learning are, most likely, attributable to transfer difficulties associated with specific disorder in visual-verbal integration, rather than primary or basic disorder in categorization ability.