Selective attentional dyslexia

Abstract

A case study is presented of a university professor (SJ) who was classified as a developmental dyslexic when he was a teenager. His reading comprehension was found to be markedly inferior to his listening comprehension; in addition, his reading rate was quite slow. Standardised tests were administered to SJ to provide estimates of his reading ability (and overall intelligence) and a test battery was administered to examine his word retrieval and word recognition skills. While these tests revealed that SJ has some type of word retrieval problem, subsequent testing revealed that a major contributor to his reading problem was a selective attentional deficit in which letters from words in parafoveal vision interfere with his processing of the currently fixated word. When parafoveal vision was restricted, by using the McConkie and Rayner (1975) moving window paradigm in which letters outside of a small, centrally fixated window region were replaced with Xs, SJ's reading performance was actually better than when the entire line of text was present. Implications of these findings for developmental dyslexia were discussed.