Visual and auditory processing and component reading skills in developmental dyslexia

Previous research suggests that children with developmental dyslexia have low-level visual and auditory deficits. The present study further examines these proposed deficits and how they relate to component reading skills. Children with dyslexia and control children were administered measures of visual and auditory processing and a battery of reading tasks, including nonword and irregular-word reading, as measures of phonological and orthographic skills. Significant group differences were found on all visual and auditory tasks. However, at an individual level only a minority of dyslexics had visual and auditory deficits. In both dyslexics and controls, visual processing was not related to component reading skills, while weak associations were found between auditory processing and phonological decoding skills. The results of the present study suggest that dyslexia is not characterized by core deficits in visual and auditory processing. The results are discussed in terms of a general nonsensory problem with task completion.