Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A series of experiments will be reported comparing the performance of groups of 11 year old and IS year old children with dyslexia with groups of normal children matched for chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA) respectively. Experiments testing gross motor skill demonstrated that both groups of children with dyslexia showed significant deficits in balance when required to undertake a further task at the same time, whereas the control groups were not affected. It was concluded that the control children balanced automatically whereas the children with dyslexia did not. Further experiments indicated that working memory performance was not diswdered, in that deficits in memory span were paralleled by deficits in speed of articulation. Tests of information processing speed led to an interesting dissociation. Simple reaction performance was indistinguishable from that of the C A controls. By contrast, on the simplest possible choice reaction, both groups of children with dyslexia were slowed to the level of their R A controls. It was concluded that the locus of the speed deficit lay within the decision-making process. Further experiments demonstrating deficits in sensory thresholds and abnormal evoked potentials will also be reported. W e conclude that an auiomatisation deficit is consistent with most of the known problems of children with dyslexia.