Modeling the Length Effect: Specifying the Relation With Visual and Phonological Correlates of Reading

The Effects of Visual Attention Span and Phonological Decoding in Reading Comprehension in Dyslexia: A Path Analysis

“…More studies are needed to examine the hypothetical claims. Our finding supported the VA deficit theory hypothesis (Bosse et al, ) and the length effect theory (van den Boer et al, ) that one needs a wide VA span to quickly connect multiple phonemic units in one fixation in order to decode the whole word. If one fails to grasp multiple graphemes quickly, it will be difficult for the reader to combine the graphemes into units that can be parsed as phonemes and then into a whole word.…”

“…Various studies have found VA span to explain unique variance in single‐word reading performance controlling for phonological awareness, phonological decoding skills and working memory (Bosse et al, ; Bosse & Valdois, ; Lallier, Donnadieu, & Valdois, ; Lallier et al, ; Lallier, Thierry, & Tainturier, ). This hypothesis can also explain the observation that emerging and dyslexic readers have difficulty in reading long words or pseudo‐words that require a wider VA span, known as the length effect (Rastle & Coltheart, ; Van den Boer, de Jong, & Haentjens‐van Meeteren, ; Zoccolotti et al, ). A recent study has shown that short lines improve reading for a particular group of readers with dyslexia who have short VA span (Schneps, Thomson, Chen, Sonnert, & Pomplun, ).…”

Visual attention deficits in developmental dyslexia cannot be ascribed solely to poor reading experience

“…Furthermore, if this argument is correct, VA span performance should strongly correlate with rapid automatized naming performance, which specifically measures visual-to-phonology mapping. In addition, both VA span performance and rapid automatized naming performance should similarly correlate with reading performance; however, these two predictions are not supported by the available data 11 . Finally, the absence of a deficit for a difficult-symbol VA span task in individuals with dyslexia 12 could result from poor nearfloor performance of children both with and without dyslexia.…”

What bilateral damage of the superior parietal lobes tells us about visual attention disorders in developmental dyslexia

“…Such a dichotomy is consistent with the hypothesis put forward by regarding the independence of the VA span theory (Bosse & Valdois, 2007) and the sluggish attentional shifting (SAS, ) theory of developmental dyslexia, two theoretical accounts that further dissociate with respect to the contribution of visual attention difficulties to phonological deficits. On one hand, a large body of research shows that VA span and phoneme awareness deficits typically dissociate in developmental dyslexia (Bosse et al, 2007 ;Germano et al, 2014 ;Lallier et al, 2010c ;Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014 ;See Saksida et al, 2016 for contradictory results and Reilhac et al, submitted, for a response) and that VA span and phoneme awareness are independent unique predictors of reading performance in typical readers (Bosse & Valdois, 2009 ;Lobier et al, 2013 ;Valdois et al, submitted ;van den Boer et al, 2013). On the other hand, sluggish temporal attentional shifting typically cooccurs with phonological deficits in individuals with developmental dyslexia (Lallier et al, 2009(Lallier et al, , 2010a(Lallier et al, , 2010b(Lallier et al, , 2010c and exogenous spatial attention deficits were reported in only a subgroup of dyslexic children with very poor pseudo-word reading and poor phonological skills (Facoetti et al, 2010;Ruffino et al, 2014;see however, Banfi, Kemény, Gangl, Schulte-Körne, Moll & Manderl, 2017).…”