Dot-to-Dot: Pre-reading Assessment of Literacy Risk via a Visual-Motor Mechanism on Touchscreen Devices

While early identification of children with dyslexia is crucial, it is difficult to assess literacy risks of these children early on before they learn to read. In this study, we expand early work on Dot-to-Dot (DtD), a non-linguistic visual-motor mechanism aimed at facilitating the detection of the potential reading difficulties of children at pre-reading age. To investigate the effectiveness of this approach on touchscreen devices, we conducted a user study with 33 children and examined their task performance logs as well as language test results. Our findings suggest that there is a significant correlation among DtD task and series of language tests. We conclude the work by suggesting different ways in which DtD could be seamlessly embedded into everyday mobile use cases.