Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Anomalies have been found in a range of skills for children with dyslexia. The study presented here investigated performance on the full range of primitive skills for with dyslexia and normal children at ages 8, 11 and 16 years. Unexpectedly severe deficits were revealed in a range of skills, including motor skill, phonological skill, and processing speed. Overall, the performance of the 16 year old children with dyslexia was no better than that of the 8 year old normal children, with some skills being significantly worse, and some better. The results are inierpteted in terms of a developmental progression in which children with dyslexia suffer from general deficits in primitive skill learning, but are able to consciously compensate in many skills. We believe that a connectionist learning framewcxk may provide a parsimonious account of the range of deficits, providing a potential link between these difficulties in skilled performance and the underlying neuroanatomical abnormalities