The Influence Of Visuo-spatial Skill On Reading Ability And Academic Performance Of Chinese

Background:Reading as one of the most important skills in life.Many researchers try to explore the factors that influence reading from verbal and non-verbal aspects in order to give some helps to people who had difficulty in reading.The influences of verbal cognitive factors on reading have been widely recognized by many researchers,but the relationship between non-verbal cognitive factors,especially the visuo-spatial ability and reading is still unclear.Visuo-spatial ability is the ability to process visual information containing a complex cognitive structure.Some researchers believe that dyslexia not only has verbal processing problems,but got lower scores in spatial tasks even with a visuo-spatial deficit.On the contrary,there are some other researchers found the visual brain region over-activation with a reading task,so dyslexia may have visuo-spatial advantage.Most previous studies only used single spatial index and explored by comparation of groups,and few empirical studies use different cognitive factors at the same time to explore the relationship between dyslexia and spatial ability.This study will include visual reasoning,stereoscopic space and visual tracking as three spatial cognitive components to investigate the differences between dyslexia and general,and then explore the relationship between visuo-spatial ability,reading ability and Chinese achievement in general.Methods:495 students in grade 4 of a primary school in ?' an attended this study,including 253 boys and 242 girls.Study 1 explored the characteristic differences between dyslexia/general and gender in three spatial dimensions.Excluded the dyslexia group,Study 2 explored whether three spatial dimensions had different influences on reading ability beyond linguistic factors(i.e.phonological awareness,morphological awareness and rapid naming)in 466 general students.Based on Study 2,Study 3 further explored whether visuo-spatial ability could predict Chinese achievement via reading ability.Results:(1)Dyslexia group had worse performances than developmental group in visual reasoning and visual tracking,but no difference in stereoscopic space.(2)Gender difference only existed in stereoscopic space with boys better than girls.(3)Visual reasoning,stereoscopic space and visual tracking all could significantly predict reading ability even after controlling of linguistic cognitive factors.(4)Visual reasoning,stereoscopic space and visual tracking all could significantly predict Chinese achievement,and visual reasoning could indirectly or via reading ability influence Chinese achievement,but stereoscopic space and visual tracking could only affect the reading ability and then influence Chinese achievement.Conclusions:(1)Children who with lower reading ability performance worse in visuo-spatial tasks,which mildly supports the view of dyslexia-spatial deficit.(2)The higher visuo-spatial ability of male students in grade 4 is only found in the stereoscopic space.(3)Three visuo-spatial factors all have independent effects on reading ability beyond linguistic factors.(4)Three visuo-spatial factors all could predict Chinese achievement via reading ability,but only visual reasoning shows the indirect effect on Chinese achievement.