Measures of visual-auditory integration and their relations to reading achievement in early grades

Several tests of visual-auditory integration were designed to represent the various tasks that have been found to correlate with reading achievement in the early grades. The battery of tests was administered to about 100 first, 84 second, and 110 third graders. Several questions were posed: (1) Do the various tests of integration measure the same underlying ability or are there separate abilities that are tapped by the various tests? (2) Are the various tests correlated with reading because they tap a common integrative ability that is related to reading or are there several abilities, each related to reading independently to the others? (3) To what extent are the relationships between the integrative abilities and reading separate from the relationship between reading and IQ? Results indicated that there are separate integrative abilities, and multiple regression analyses showed that several of the integrative measures were correlated with reading independently of the other measures. Further, several of the integrative measures accounted for significant reading variance beyond that accounted for by IQ tests. The results were discussed in the context of the need to differentiate adequately between various patterns of perceptual weakness in the diagnosis and remediation of perceptually based reading difficulties.