Spatial Attention Disorders in Developmental Dyslexia: Towards the Prevention of Reading Acquisition Deficits

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a Ileurobiological disorder (see Habib, 2000; Demonet & Reilhac, 2012 in the present book for reviews ) characterized by difficulties in reading acquisition despite adequate intelligence, conventional education, and motivation (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). It is widely believed that impaired phonologi­ cal processing characterizes individuals with DD (see RanlUs, 2003; Vellutino et aI., 2004; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2005; Gabrieli, 2009 for reviews). Thus children and adults with DD display poor phonological awareness, slow lexical retrieval, and poor phonological short­ term memory. These phonological deficits interfere with one of the most critical skills for successful reading acquisition, that is, phonological decoding (e.g. Ziegler et aI., 2003; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Phonological decoding is based on letter-to-sound conver­ sion, allowing children to make the connection between novel letter strings and words that are already stored in their phonological (spoken word) lexicon (Share, 1995). Efficient phonological decoding requires accurate auditory representations at the phoneme level (e.g. Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Perry et aI., 2007) . Since Italian letter-to-sound orthogra­ phy is particularly regular, phonological decoding is crucial for learning to read. Nevertheless, it is also essential for learning to read in more irregular letter-to-sound orthographies, such as English (Share, 1995) .