Are poor readers semantically challenged? An event-related brain potential assessment

This study explores visual event-related potentials components in a group of poor readers (PRs) and control children who carried out figure and word categorization tasks. In both tasks, every child had to categorize between animal and non-animal stimuli in an odd-ball GO-GO paradigm. During the word categorization task, PRs presented longer reaction times, a poorer performance, longer and larger P2 amplitudes, and smaller amplitudes and longer P300 latencies than controls. There were no differences in the N400 component between groups. These results suggest that semantic processing underachievement in PRs may not be a semantic deficit per se, but the late reflection of an early word codification problem, deficient use of attentional resources and lack of target identification during reading.