Helping dyslexic children attend to letters within visual word forms

Learning to read visual words aloud requires a novel integration of two distinct neurocognitive systems: a visual system that allows one to recognize a visual word from a crowd of letter features and a phonological language system that allows one to recognize and produce spoken words from a crowd of phonetic features (1). Integrating these two systems through the alphabetic principle bestows skilled readers with the ability to appreciate how each letter feature within a crowded visual word form specifically influences each corresponding nuance in its spoken form (e.g., trails vs. traits). Children with developmental dyslexia, a condition that affects as many as 10% of school children (2), face profound challenges in fluently integrating their visual and phonological systems in the service of reading (3). As a result, reading is slow and error prone, which can have severe cascading influences on a child’s life. Thus, a central focus in cognitive investigations of dyslexia has been to gain insight into how individual differences in the development of phonological and/or visual processing systems influence the reading acquisition process. Leveraging such insights to improve reading acquisition has remained a central exemplar for the potential of basic cognitive and developmental sciences to bestow translational benefits to education and society.