Acta Psychologica Sinica


Vol. 34 No. 4 , Pages 437 - 442 , 2002

Developmental Dyslexia and Perceptual Processing (Article written in chinese)

MENG Xiangzhi, ZHOU Xiaolin, ZENG Biao, & SAI Xiaoguang

Abstract

Many behavioral and neurophysiological studies in recent years found that developmental dyslexia is related to deficits in basic perceptual processing. The magnocellurlar theory, proposed mostly by researchers working in the visual processing field, postulates that dyslexia is the result of a deficit in the magnocellular part of the visual system. This magnocellular system responds to rapid changes in visual stimulation and a deficit here would lead the brain to confuse neural activities attributed to different fixations between saccades during text reading. A similar deficit also exists in the auditory domain, where dyslexics show difficulties in processing rapid, sequential, and transit sounds. It is believed that a general impairment in temporal processing underlies dyslexics poor performance in reading. Theories emphasizing the role of basic perceptual processing in reading impairment is in contrast with theories that focus on the deficits in the linguistic domain, reflecting the significant advancement in cognitive neuroscience and the decline of the modular approaches.

Keywords: developmental dyslexia; perceptual processing; magnocellular deficit; temporal processing deficit

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