Visual Spatial Attention Skills and Holistic Processing in High School StudentsWith and Without Dyslexia

Visual-spatial attention has been shown to influence literacy development, yet studies investigating its influence on readingin non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese are scarce, despite recent studies demonstrating orthographic and visuo-spatialskills to be key deficits in people with dyslexia in Chinese. Here, we investigate visual-spatial processing skills in Chi-nese adolescents by measuring their 1) exogenous and endogenous attentional orienting, and 2) holistic processinga phe-nomenon typically demonstrated in face perceptionin Chinese character recognition. Compared with typically developingstudents, Chinese high-school students with dyslexia showed deficits in both endogenous and exogenous visual-spatialattention. Dyslexics also perceived characters more holistically than the controls, suggesting that they selectively attendedto individual components within Chinese characters less readily. These results demonstrated irregularities in visual-spatialprocessing skills in students in dyslexia. This study provides implications for reading intervention programs in order tofacilitate selective attention to character components to enhance literacy.