This combination of results indicates that primary aspects of hearing and vision separately influence children's ability to read, the researchers contend in the March 14 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . If those findings and the new data hold up, they will support the theory that dyslexia falls at the disadvantageous end of a normal distribution of brain processes that underlie reading, Talcott and his coworkers say. A contrasting theory portrays dyslexia as a distinct neurological disorder. The scientists studied 32 children, all 10 years old, who attended the same elementary-school class. None had any recognized learning disabilities.
Spoken language occurs at a low frequency.
The youngsters also performed a visual task by indicating as quickly as possible when dots moving in clusters across a computer screen reversed direction. On a spelling task, children viewed pairs of words, each containing a real word and a nonsense word that sounded the same but were spelled differently. Such findings suggest that if teachers train youngsters to detect rapidly presented acoustic and visual stimuli, reading instruction will benefit, asserts neuroscientist Paula Tallal of Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., in a comment published with the new study. Tallal is cofounder of a company that produces computer programs designed to improve acoustic perception in beginning readers. All rights reserved.