Visual-attentional and phonological deficits explored in French dyslexic students: eye movements recorded during a phonological lexical decision task

Abstract

Whether dyslexia is a phonological or a visual attention problem remains a widely debated issue. This study aimed to compare the eye movements of 32 French university students with and without dyslexia while performing a phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. Stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while others involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number and the duration of single and double fixations and the number and amplitude of the first saccade made on the stimuli. Compared to controls, dyslexics made fewer single than double fixations during reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical), while the number and the amplitude of the first saccade was similar in the two groups of participants. Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be observed in dyslexia and support the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit.