Varieties of Cognitive Profiles in Poor Readers: Evidence for a VAS-Impaired Subtype.

A wide share of secondary school children does not reach the expected competence level in reading. These children could benefit from more efficient intervention responses, providing a better understanding of their cognitive weaknesses/deficits. Our aim was to explore the cognitive heterogeneity of a population of poor readers identified from a large sample of 948 sixth-grade children. We first assessed the contribution of phoneme awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual attention span (VAS) to reading performance in a subset of 281 children including poor and average readers/spellers. We show that all three skills are unique and significant predictors of reading fluency. We then restricted the analysis to participants with normal Raven's score (IQ) and oral language skills to focus on 110 children with more specific reading difficulties. A unique VAS deficit was found in 18% of these poor readers while 20% and 15.5% showed a unique PA or RAN deficit. Children with multiple or no deficit were further identified. The overall findings provide evidence for a variety of cognitive profiles in poor readers. They suggest that, in addition to PA interventions, training programs targeting VAS might be useful for the nontrivial share of poor readers who exhibit a VAS deficit.

Visual attention modulates reading acquisition.

The processing of letters within strings is challenging for beginning readers. Letter identification is affected by visual similarity, loss of information with eccentricity and interference from nearby letters. In contrast, visual attention enhances letter identification. We here explored whether visual attention resources for multi-element processing, as measured through tasks of visual attention span prior to literacy instruction, predicted reading fluency performance one year later. One hundred and twenty-four mainstream children were assessed in kindergarten on their visual attention span abilities, phonological awareness, letter-name knowledge, early literacy knowledge, verbal short-term memory and non-verbal IQ. The participants' reading performance was measured at the end of grade 1 using tasks of irregular word, pseudo-word and text reading. Results from regression analyses showed that kindergarteners' VA span predicted reading fluency for text, irregular words and pseudo-words one year later, after controlling for age, non-verbal IQ, phonological skills, letter name knowledge and early literacy skills. Path analyses carried out to estimate the differential contribution of VA span to the different reading skills revealed a stronger contribution for pseudo-word reading than irregular word or text reading at the end of Grade 1. These results suggest that pre-reading visual attention resources contribute to later reading fluency, whatever the reading subskills and whatever the reading context (words in isolation or in sentences), with higher involvement to pseudo-word reading. We propose a new conceptual model of the role of visual attention in reading acquisition and argue that many aspects of the models are already supported by available findings.