Reading strategies in partially sighted children

We know very little about the reading strategies adopted by children with poor vision. Here a group of children with a range of visuo-perceptual problems including defective foveal vision and impaired eye-movements are compared to a group of fully sighted children (matched on age and verbal ability). Three studies using lexical decision tasks with words (regular and irregular) and non-words (legal, illegal and pseudohomophones) as well as with format distorted items, are reported. Regularity effects, as well as effects of intact and disrupted spelling units emerged but the predominant finding was that the partially sighted children though making good use of the 'visual' route in word recognition also relied on phonological mediation. The conclusions drawn were that the phonological emphasis in teaching partially sighted children was a very effective method for compensating for poor vision, and the problems of a visuo-perceptual nature did not seem connected to the development of dyslexia.