The Attentional Orienting By Peripheral Cue In Chinese Dyslexia Children

Reading requires accurate visual processing for literal encoding, and the role of attention in visual processing is indisputable. People need to use a good spatial attention to scan quickly and accurately, so there is a tight relationship between the visual-spatial attention defect and dyslexia. The previous researches have shown that dyslexia has the visuospatial attention deficit in phonetic writing, but there is little research pay attention to the Chinese dyslexia. This study explore Chinese dyslexia children’s ability of the visuospatial attention by inspecting the impaired ability to orient spatial attention.Study included three experiments. The first experiment use the Posner cueing task, investigating the subjects’ ability to orient Chinese characters under different conditions of the time interval (SOA). After excluding reading factor, experiment 2 aims to inspect the pure exogenous attention. And experiment 3 investigates the orientation influenced by the endogenous adjustment which caused by the wholeness of words in the process of reading processing. Twenty-seven dyslexia children are chosen through the teachers’ evaluation and reading ability test from 237 fourth-graders in two primary schools in Shanghai, with the 14 age matched normal children as control group. The results showed that:1) Chinese dyslexia who performed the same as normal children, can effectively utilize cue to orient attention in short SOA;2) Chinese dyslexia’s attention shifting is sluggish, as the SOA increases, the speed of attention disengage from the original position is slower than normal children;3) dyslexia’s attention orienting can’t be modulated by different search strategies.