Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Department of Special Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Dyslexia. 2018 Nov;24(4):391-400. doi: 10.1002/dys.1596. Epub 2018 Oct 2.
The analysis of spatial relations among components of a character is important in identifying visual word forms. We investigated such spatial configuration processing for Chinese characters in dyslexic children (aged 9-12 years) and two groups of typically developing children, matched according to chronological age or reading level. In this study, we used real characters and noncharacters to manipulate the spatial configuration between character components while preserving their local features. Both characters were displayed either in an upright or inverted position. Participants were asked to quickly determine whether the two presented stimuli were identical. A significant interaction between character type and character orientation showed children's matching performance was better in upright real characters than in the inverted version, but such effect was absent in noncharacters. This indicated that regardless of reading skills, children developed the ability to use local configuration information to visually identify words. Dyslexic children performed poorly in both real-character and noncharacter conditions. Furthermore, compared with control groups, dyslexic children performed worse in real-character conditions, which were close to the noncharacter performance of other groups. This reflected an impairment of global visual word-form processing (i.e., spatial configuration between components) in dyslexia.
分析字符成分之间的空间关系对于识别视觉单词形式很重要。我们研究了阅读障碍儿童（9-12 岁）和两组按年龄或阅读水平匹配的正常发育儿童的这种空间构型处理。在这项研究中，我们使用真实字符和非字符来操纵字符成分之间的空间构型，同时保留其局部特征。两个字符都以直立或倒置的位置显示。要求参与者快速确定呈现的两个刺激是否相同。字符类型和字符方向之间的显著交互表明，儿童在直立真实字符中的匹配表现优于倒置版本，但在非字符中没有这种效果。这表明，无论阅读技能如何，儿童都发展了使用局部配置信息来视觉识别单词的能力。阅读障碍儿童在真实字符和非字符条件下的表现都很差。此外，与对照组相比，阅读障碍儿童在真实字符条件下的表现更差，接近其他组的非字符表现。这反映了阅读障碍中全局视觉单词形式处理（即成分之间的空间构型）受损。
