RESEARCH Verbal and Visual Problems in Reading Disability

Most individuals interested in reading disability favor the view that disordered language processing is the main cause of children's reading problems and that visual problems are seldom, if ever, responsible. Nevertheless, in a preliminary study (Eden, Stein, & Wood, 1993) we showed that visuospatial and oculomotor tests can be used to differentiate children with reading disabilities from nondisabled children. In the present study we investigated a larger sample of children to see if these findings held true. Using 93 children from the Bowman Gray Learning Disability Project (mean age = 11.3 years; 54 boys, 39 girls), we compared the phonological and visuospatial abilities of nondisabled children (children whose reading at fifth grade rated a Woodcock-Johnson reading standardized score between 85 and 115), and children with reading disability (whose reading standardized score was below 85 on the Woodcock-Johnson). In addition to performing poorly on verbal tests, the children with reading disability were significantly worse than nondisabled children at many visual and eye-movement tasks. A high proportion of the variance (68%) in reading ability of both the nondisabled children and those with reading disability could be predicted by combining visual and phonological scores in a multiple regression. These results provide further support for the hypothesis that reading disability may, to some extent, result from dysfunction of the visual and oculomotor systems. A lmost 100 years ago, Hinshel-wood (1895), an ophthalmolo-gist, concluded that outstand-ingly poor reading ability was probably due to impaired visual memory for words and letters. Another pioneer in this field, Orton (1925), also spoke of an impairment of the visual processes. Today, however, the picture is quite different; the visual aspects of dyslexia have fallen out of favor in view of the evidence that reading disability results from a specific language impairment. For example, one of the most severe deficits in children with reading dis-ability is in their ability to analyze com-ponent phonemes of words, some-times referred to as phonemic awarenes