Impaired Ability in Visual-Spatial Attention in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia.

This article investigates whether Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) exhibit overt visual-spatial attention deficits, a phenomenon well-documented in dyslexia involving alphabetic languages. Using three visual search tasks with simple, non-linguistic stimuli—color search, orientation search, and conjunction search—the study found that children with dyslexia performed comparably to controls in color search but showed slower responses in orientation search and poorer accuracy and longer reaction times in conjunction search. These results suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia have deficits in rapid visual processing of orientation and in top-down visual-spatial attention shifting. The findings imply that visual-spatial attention deficits in Chinese dyslexia may affect orthographic processing rather than phonological decoding, reflecting the unique demands of the Chinese logographic writing system.