© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 207 Observations on the temporal correlates of reading failure

Abstract. The definitions of developmental dyslexia and temporal processing are discussed and several construals of what a temporal processing deficit might entail are illustrated. Then, using a framework developed by Farmer & Klein (1995), the proposal that a temporal processing deficit (in vision, audition, or both) might be the root cause of some proportion of cases of developmental dyslexia is introduced and various research strategies for testing this proposal are identified. The symposium papers which address this general question using a range of these strategies are then critically reviewed. It is noted that whereas reading is a recent artifact not yet subject to any direct selection pressure, its normal performance requires the use of, and connections between, the highly evolved modules for visual pattern recognition and language. Within vision and language redundant coding, which permits performance in the face of injuries and degraded input, also makes it difficult to detect subtle deficits (whether temporal, or not) unless precise tests are used. Yet such deficits may degrade performance on tasks (such as reading) which require the non-copious connections between vision and language. The efficacy of this pathway, I suggest, is measured by performance on the rapid automatized naming (RAN) test