The role of sensorimotor impairments in dyslexia: a multiple case study of dyslexic children

TLDR

The study examines whether sensorimotor impairments play a role in dyslexia. Twenty‑three dyslexic children were compared to 22 matched controls on literacy, phonological, visual, auditory, and motor tasks. Dyslexic children were significantly impaired on phonological tasks but not on sensorimotor tasks, and phonological skill alone accounted for literacy performance, with little evidence that auditory, motor, or other visual impairments contributed causally.

Abstract

Abstract This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty‐three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non‐verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on phonological, but not sensorimotor, tasks. Analysis of individual data suggests that the most common impairments were on phonological and visual stress tasks and the vast majority of dyslexics had one of these two impairments. Furthermore, phonological skill was able to account for variation in literacy skill, to the exclusion of all sensorimotor factors, while neither auditory nor motor skill predicted any variance in phonological skill. Visual stress seems to account for a small proportion of dyslexics, independently of the commonly reported phonological deficit. However, there is little evidence for a causal role of auditory, motor or other visual impairments.