Effects of visual hemisphere-specific stimulation versus reading-focused training in dyslexic children

Abstract

Two groups of children with developmental dyslexia were treated over a period of four months. Fourteen children received visual hemisphere-specific stimulation (VHSS) and 11 children were treated with a customary, reading-focused training programme (RT). Reading performance was investigated before and after treatment, as were spelling abilities, phonemic awareness and verbal memory. Improvement in reading accuracy was significantly greater in the VHSS group than in the RT group. Significant improvements were also observed for memory and phonemic skills. The results were compared to existing data on spontaneous reading development. The better results after single-hemisphere stimulation (VHSS) are discussed in terms of the specific characteristics of the treatment, and of the possible contributions of visual-spatial attention, memory functions and phonemic awareness.

Acknowledgments

The research project described in this article was supported by the Ministry of Health and CNR Italy, and by the “Amici della Pediatria” Association of Bergamo Hospital.

Special thanks go to the speech therapists at the Institute “E. Medea” and of Bergamo Hospital for their valuable collaboration in the project. The authors are very grateful to Anke Bouma, Dirk Bakker and Reint Geuze for their thoughtful suggestions, and to Robert Bakker, BC, Canada, who kindly checked the text for English style and spelling.

Notes

Note that the presence (for the VHSS group only) of a significant correlation between improvement in phonemic awareness and in non-word spelling suggests that the significant interaction found for the global phonemic awareness score did not simply depend on regression to the mean for the VHSS group but represented a real change in underlying skills.