Visual-Tactile and Tactile-Tactile Paired-Associate Learning by Normal and Poor Readers

Abstract

The hypothesis that poor readers suffer from an inter-sensory perceptual deficit was tested by having 16 poor and 16 normal readers learn an inter- and intra-sensory paired-associate task. Thus, visual symbols were paired with tactile stimuli and another set of tactile stimuli were paired with tactile stimuli. Although all poor readers met an explicit criterion for poor reading, there was no difference between poor and normal readers in either of the paired-associate tasks. The results suggest that a general perceptual deficit does not exist for poor readers; however, a specific integration problem in auditory-visual pairing may exist.