The incidence and nature of letter orientation errors in reading disabilitiy

Letter orientation confusions (reversals) in the reading and writing of 10-year-old children with and without reading disability were in-vestigated to determine whether reading disability is associated with letter orientation errors and to identify the nature of the errors. In a variety of tasks measuring letter orientation confusions in reception (reversal detection and recognition) and production (controlled writing, copying), individuals with reading disability made more orientation confusions than average readers. Orientation errors were more frequent for reversible than for nonreversible items in tasks involving long-term memory processes. The results did not appear to be related to group differences in attention or speed of motor responding. Possible sources of orientation confusions, including deficient magnocellular system processing, mislabeling, and overreliance on visual strategies, are discussed. he relation between letter orien-t tation, or reversal, errors and proficiency in reading and writ-ing has generated much interest in the history of reading disability research. Early accounts of these errors focused on hemispheric lateralization (e.g., Or-ton, 1937) and spatial and directional confusion in general as the causes of reading disability (Bender, 1957; Birch, 1962; Frostig & Maslow, 1973). How-ever, claims challenging this spatial-directional explanation have emerged, suggesting that orientation errors may result from the use of holistic, nonana-lytic strategies to encode visual infor-mation rather than from spatial confu-sion (Kershner, 1979). Reversal errors do not appear to constitute an unusual proportion of the errors that children in general make in their reading (Holmes & Peper, 1977; Shake, 1982) and appear to be linguistically rather than perceptually based (Liberman