Spatial attention and learning to read: Evidence from a 3-years longitudinal study

Developmental dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder that affects about 10% of the children. Although impaired auditory and speech sound processing is widely assumed to characterize dyslexic individuals, emerging evidence suggests that dyslexia could arise from a more basic cross-modal letter-to-speech sound integration deficit. Nevertheless, letters must be precisely selected from irrelevant and cluttering letters by rapid shifting of visual attention before the correct letter-to-speech sound integration is applied. Thus, is prereading visual parietal-attention functioning able to explain future reading emergence and development? The present 3-years longitudinal study shows that prereading attentional shifting ability—assessed by serial search performance and spatial cueing facilitation—captures not only future basis of reading skills (ie, rapid letter naming and pseudoword length effect) but also words and text reading abilities in grades 1 and 2 after controlling for speech-sound processing as well as nonalphabetic crossmodal mapping. Our results provide evidence that visual spatial attention efficiency in preschoolers specifically predicts future reading acquisition, suggesting new approaches for early identification and a more efficient prevention of developmental dyslexia.