Visual Discrimination in Good and Poor Readers

Abstract

Two studies are described in which match-to-sample tasks were presented to elementary school children. These tasks were of approximately equal difficulty with respect to visual discriminatory ability but differed in terms of their approximation to written and spoken English. It was found that poor readers made comparatively more errors than good readers when the items to be matched closely approximated English; however, when the items were nonsense shapes, which did not therefore have verbal labels that could be readily associated with them, good readers did not make fewer errors than poor readers. Our results do not support the hypothesis that visual discrimination abilities are a causative factor in reading retardation: When items to be visually matched or discriminated are letters or words, differences that are found between good and poor readers are almost certainly caused by differences in cognitive/linguistic strategies rather than by differences in visual discrimination abilities.