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 Printable version |
A case study of developmental dyslexia with a selective visual attention span disorder |
Revue de neuropsychologie. Volume 4, Number 1, 24-35, Mars 2012, Article original
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 Résumé
Texte intégral
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Author(s) : Marjorie Bouvier-Chaverot, Elsa Peiffer, Marie-Ange N’Guyen-Morel, Sylviane Valdois |
Summary : Although developmental dyslexia is typically viewed as resulting from a phonological disorder, the multitrace memory model of reading [1] postulates that a visual attention (VA) span disorder independently contributes to the poor reading outcome of dyslexic readers. This component is expected to be mainly involved in the acquisition of specific orthographic knowledge. We report the case of a young dyslexic child, Gustave, who shows a reading pattern close to that of surface dyslexia/dysgraphia. We explored his oral language, phoneme awareness and VA span, and found that he exhibited poor VA span abilities but preserved phoneme awareness skills. In line with his good phonological skills, Gustave exhibits good oral language and good pseudo-word reading accuracy, and mainly produces phonologically motivated errors in both reading and spelling. His poor VA span is associated with poor irregular word reading and spelling. Reading speed is slowed on all types of items (including pseudo-words) as expected if reading relied on a decoding process based on units of limited size. A dissociation is further observed between abnormally slow pseudo-word reading but mainly preserved pseudo-word spelling. Overall, the reported case study illustrates the expected relationship between poor VA span and a reading/spelling pattern of surface dyslexia/dysgraphia. However, no one-to-one mapping can be established between poor VA span abilities and a surface dyslexia pattern since VA span abilities can further affect pseudo-word reading performance, then leading to a mixed dyslexia pattern. |
Keywords : developmental dyslexia, visual attention span, case study |
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