Symposium: Comparing the roles of phonological and visual processing skills in reading: developmental and cross-language differences

This symposium consists of four research papers and one discussion paper summarising the research findings. In doing so, the paper also identifies possible impacts to society in general, and suggests future research.

The first paper (Cunningham) discusses classic phonological accounts of reading in English, examining how the role of phonological skills changes with development in English-speaking typically-developing children.

The second paper (Wydell) then goes on to explore the relative roles of phonological and visual cognitive skills in reading English with typically- and atypically-developing children. The focus of the visual cognitive skills was on their visual attention span (VAS) measured by the tasks developed by Valdois and her colleagues.

The third paper (Uno) similarly examines the relative roles of phonological and visual cognitive skills in reading but with Japanese-speaking children with and without dyslexia. The tasks used to measure their visual recognition skills were the Rey-Osterreith Complex Figure Test (ROCFT) and the line-drawing non-object recognition test developed by Uno and his colleagues.

The fourth paper (Sambai) examines specifically the performance of Japanese-speaking adults with developmental dyslexia using a naming aloud and a lexical decision task with Japanese shallow orthography, Kana stimuli. The stimuli included Kana words and Kana pseudohomophones (i.e., phonologically a word but orthographically a nonword). The paper attempts to account for their impaired performance in these tasks when compared to controls. The paper suggests that the problem lies in their impaired orthographic lexicon, i.e., the size of the lexicon is limited, and their access to the lexicon is slow.

The final paper (Shapiro) summarises the main developmental changes and cross-language differences in the role of phonological versus visual cognitive skills in reading, and will highlight key considerations for further discussion and research.