Tachistoscopic study of reading related operations in average readers and those experiencing difficulty

Abstract

Thirty elementary school children were classified into equal groups of poor and average readers. In a series of four experiments, subjects were requested to provide vocal responses to tachistoscopically presented stimuli representing an array of reading related tasks. Poor readers maintained a performance throughout two experiments suggesting a left hemisphere deficit, and the persistence of a serial approach to verbal processing characteristic of right hemisphere stimulus entry in normals (Bub and Lewine, 1988). It was hypothesized that normal readers were induced to perform in a manner conforming to Kershner's (1983) model of learning disabilities, and the performance of poor readers in this study. The use of morphographic analysis (Dixon and Engelmann, 1979) and the exploration of prolonged stimulus exposure to individual hemispheres were proposed as novel methods of reading remediation. A tentative experiment on metacontrol revealed an inconsistency in structural and semantic preferences to a target word in the left visual field of poor readers.