Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Neurotypical children have been shown to display a leftward visuospatial attention bias while children with dyslexia(i.e., children with a reading disorder characterized by slow and/or inaccurate word recognition) have been shown todisplay a relatively rightward visuospatial attention bias. Researchers have speculated that leftward bias in young childrenmay be driven by their beginning reading education in languages read from left to right. Here, we investigated whetherspatial bias may be related to the acquisition of reading skills among a sample of children in grades 1 to 3. We assessedthe relationship between spatial bias (measured using the landmark task) and performance on (1) a rapid automatizednaming test (a predictor of reading fluency) and (2) a word-identification test. We found that leftward bias predicts rapidautomatized naming but not word identification. This finding has implications for understanding the potential role ofspatial bias in reading and dyslexia.