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The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently discriminate letters and words. Therefore, it is supposed that this unlearning process takes place in a gradual way and that reading expertise modulates mirror-letter discrimination. However, to date no supporting evidence for this has been obtained. We present data from an eye-movement study that investigated the degree of sensitivity to mirror-letters in a group of beginning readers and a group of expert readers. Participants had to decide which of the two strings presented on a screen corresponded to an auditorily presented word. Visual displays always included the correct target word and one distractor word. Results showed that those distractors that were the same as the target word except for the mirror lateralization of two internal letters attracted participants' attention more than distractors created by replacement of 2 internal letters. Interestingly, the time course of the effects was found to be different for the 2 groups, with beginning readers showing a greater tolerance (decreased sensitivity) to mirror-letters than expert readers. Implications of these findings are discussed within the framework of preceding evidence showing how reading expertise modulates letter identification. (Contains 1 table, 4 figures, and 4 notes.)

Introduction: The aim of this study was to examine the role of multiletter units, such as the morpheme and whole word, in accessing the lexicon, in Spanish children with dyslexia. Method: A sample of 60 participants were selected and organised i n three different groups: 1) an experimental group of 18 reading-disabled children, (2) a control group of 27 normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled group, and (3) a control group of 15 younger children at the same reading level as the reading disabled group. Homophones and morphological root comprehension tasks were used. Results: The results were analysed using measures of accuracy and latency for the morphological comprehension task and accuracy for the homophone task. These showed that there was a lexical processing deficit in children with reading disabilities compared to younger children with the same reading level. Nevertheless, when we analysed the latency of the morphological comprehension task, results showed that this latency decreased during presentation, independently of the groups, although the performance of normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled children was significantly better than the two other groups. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Introduction: The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether children who have reading disabilities in an alphabetically transparent orthography show a syntactic processing deficit. This research focuses on exploring syntactic processing and the use of morphological markers by subjects with reading disabilities. We analyze these groups' execution of various tasks from the syntactic module of the SICOLE multimedia battery (Jimenez, et al., 2002), grouping them into three sets: gender and number agreement, grammatical structure and function words. Method: A sample of 97 subjects was selected (52 boys and 45 girls). The design involves three groups according to reading level: one experimental group formed by 29 reading-disabled (RD) subjects in fourth grade; one control group of 41 good readers of equivalent age; and one control group of 27 subjects from second grade with equivalent reading level to the RD group. Results: The RD children obtain lower scores in the global syntactic processing scale than normal readers of a younger age. When controlling for the effect of working memory, the deficit in syntactic processing is shown in gender and number agreement tasks, and not in grammatical structure or function word tasks. Discussion: Findings suggest that the deficit in syntactic processing is determined by difficulties in phonological processing which characterize children with RD. Children with RD have more difficulty in processing gender and number agreement tasks since they are more phonologically demanding. On the other hand, these difficulties are not manifest as a deficit when the tasks provide contextual information, such as in the case of grammatical structure and function word tasks. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

A study assessed whether the effects of computer-assisted practice on visual word recognition differed for 73 Spanish children with reading disabilities with or without aptitude-achievement discrepancy. Computer-assisted intervention improved word recognition. However, children with dyslexia had more difficulties than poor readers during computer-based word reading that required extensive phonological computation. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)