Visual Form Perception in Deficient and Normal Readers as a Function of Age and Orthographic-Linguistic Familiarity

The present investigation directly assessed the hypothesis that poor readers sustain no basic disorder in visual-spatial functioning. In order to extend previous results to younger children, the performance of poor and normal readers from both the second and sixth grades was compared. Adopting the format of an earlier investigation, a visual recall task was employed as the dependent variable, and it was predicted that poor readers would perform as well as normals with stimuli taken from Hebrew, an unfamiliar orthography. Accordingly, non-Hebrew poor and normal readers were compared with normal readers learning Hebrew on the production of varying length Hebrew words. As anticipated, children in the non-Hebrew reader groups performed comparably on this task, but the performance of these subjects was inferior to that of children in the Hebrew groups. The data support the contention that visual perceptual disorder is an unlikely source of reading disability.