Electro-oculographic recordings reveal reading deficiencies in learning disabled children

This study was undertaken in order to learn the functional differences in reading tasks between two groups of children: those identified as learning disabled and a group of control children. During the earliest stages of learning to read, children adopt a logographic strategy, in which letter order is ignored and phonologic factors are secondary. The children later move into an alphabetic and then to an orthographic reading stage. Reading strategies can be studied by electro-oculographic (EOG) recordings during text reading. This investigation uses EOG to study text reading time, and number of saccadic and regressive movements, to test if learning disabled children show altered strategies on text reading. Nineteen learning disabled and thirteen control subjects were included in the study. Learning disabled children showed longer text reading time, and greater number of saccadic and regressive eye movements. Electro-oculographic recording is not a test customarily performed on learning disabled children. However, our results concerning the dynamic discriminative reading have shown that it can be a useful tool for the examination of learning disabled children.