What bilateral damage of the superior parietal lobes tells us about visual attention disorders in developmental dyslexia.

Neuroimaging studies have identified the superior parietal lobules bilaterally as the neural substrates of reduced visual attention (VA) span in developmental dyslexia. It remains however unclear whether the VA span deficit and the deficits in temporal and spatial attention shifting also reported in dyslexic children reflect a unitary spatio-temporal deficit of attention - probably linked to general posterior parietal dysfunction- or the dysfunction of distinct attentional systems that relate to different neural substrates. We explored this issue by testing an adult patient, IG, with a specific damage of the bilateral superior parietal lobules after stroke, on tasks assessing the VA span as well as temporal and spatial attention shifting.

The impact of developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia on movement production during word writing.

This study investigated how deficits in orthographic processing affect movement production during word writing. Children with dyslexia and dysgraphia wrote words and pseudo-words on a digitizer. The words were orthographically regular and irregular of varying frequency.

Impact of orthographic transparency on typical and atypical reading development: evidence in French-Spanish bilingual children.

The present study aimed to quantify cross-linguistic modulations of the contribution of phonemic awareness skills and visual attention span (VA Span) skills (number of visual elements that can be processed simultaneously) to reading speed and accuracy in 18 Spanish-French balanced bilingual children with and without developmental dyslexia. The children were administered two similar reading batteries in French and Spanish. The deficits of the dyslexic children in reading accuracy were mainly visible in their opaque orthography (French) whereas difficulties indexed by reading speed were observed in both their opaque and transparent orthographies.

Dyslexia in a French-Spanish bilingual girl: behavioural and neural modulations following a visual attention span intervention.

We report the case study of a French-Spanish bilingual dyslexic girl, MP, who exhibited a severe visual attention (VA) span deficit but preserved phonological skills. Behavioural investigation showed a severe reduction of reading speed for both single items (words and pseudo-words) and texts in the two languages. However, performance was more affected in French than in Spanish.

Impaired letter-string processing in developmental dyslexia: what visual-to-phonology code mapping disorder?

Poor parallel letter-string processing in developmental dyslexia was taken as evidence of poor visual attention (VA) span, that is, a limitation of visual attentional resources that affects multi-character processing. However, the use of letter stimuli in oral report tasks was challenged on its capacity to highlight a VA span disorder. In particular, report of poor letter/digit-string processing but preserved symbol-string processing was viewed as evidence of poor visual-to-phonology code mapping, in line with the phonological theory of developmental dyslexia.