Devil in the details? Developmental dyslexia and visual long-term memory for details.
Cognitive theories on causes of developmental dyslexia can be divided into language-specific and general accounts. While the former assume that words are special in that associated processing problems are rooted in language-related cognition (e.g., phonology) deficits, the latter propose that dyslexia is rather rooted in a general impairment of cognitive (e.g., visual and/or auditory) processing streams. In the present study, we examined to what extent dyslexia (typically characterized by poor orthographic representations) may be associated with a general deficit in visual long-term memory (LTM) for details. We compared object- and detail-related visual LTM performance (and phonological skills) between dyslexic primary school children and IQ-, age-, and gender-matched controls. The results revealed that while the overall amount of LTM errors was comparable between groups, dyslexic children exhibited a greater portion of detail-related errors. The results suggest that not only phonological, but also general visual resolution deficits in LTM may play an important role in developmental dyslexia.
['Huestegge|Lynn|L|', 'Rohrßen|Julia|J|', 'van Ermingen-Marbach|Muna|M|', 'Pape-Neumann|Julia|J|', 'Heim|Stefan|S|']
orthographic representations visual resolution deficit language and word processing memory errors phonology and reading picture processing