THE EFFECT OF EDUCATION THROUGH "PLAY"

Teachers Views on The Effect of Education Through "Play" For Children With Dyslexia

Teachers Views on The Effect of Education Through "Play" For Children With Dyslexia

Introduction

Developmental dyslexia is a specific failure to acquire reading and spelling skills despite adequate intelligence and education, affecting around 5-10% of children and adults. The predominant etiological view postulates that dyslexia results from a phonological deficit (Snowling, 2000). However, extensive research during the last decade also demonstrated a specific sensory processing deficit in individuals with dyslexia and it has been suggested that this deficit might be causal to both the observed phonological and literacy problems (Farmer and Klein, 1995 and Stein, 2001). To investigate the assumed causality of this sensorial deficit hypothesis we assessed auditory and visual processing in two contrasting groups of 5-year-old preschool children, a genetically high risk and a genetically low risk group. In a previous paper (Boets, Wouters, van Wieringen, & Ghesquière, in press) we reported the absence of a significant group difference for any of three administered auditory measures, in the presence of a significant difference for phonological awareness and letter knowledge. However, spectral auditory tasks (particularly 2 Hz frequency modulation detection) turned out to be highly significantly related to phonological awareness. In this paper, we will focus upon sensory processing in the visual modality, assessed in the same group of preschool children. In particular, we consider the question whether a deficit in coherent play processing may already be observable in preschool children at risk of dyslexia and we investigate the relationship between play processing and developing literacy skills.

Within the visual modality, dyslexia research has mainly focused upon sensory processing in the magnocellular visual pathway. Early studies using stimuli that assess the peripheral visual system (e.g., contrast sensitivity and flicker sensitivity paradigms) demonstrated that dyslexics tend to show a deficit in processing stimuli with low spatial and high temporal resolution (for a review, see Lovegrove, 1996; but see Skottun, 2000 for a critical revision). More recently, interesting results have also been obtained with stimuli that imply higher level magnocellular functioning such as coherent play detection tasks (CM). These tasks, relying predominantly upon processing in area V5/MT of the cortex, have proven to differentiate relatively reliable between groups of dyslexic and normal reading subjects (Cornelissen et al., 1995, Everatt et al., 1999, Hansen et al., 2001, Raymond and Sorensen, 1998, Ridder et al., 2001, Talcott, Hansen, et al., 2000, Talcott et al., 2003, Van Ingelghem et al., 2004, Wilmer et al., 2004 and Witton et al., 1998). Moreover, functional imaging studies have confirmed that activation of area V5/MT in response to coherent play stimuli was not as robust in dyslexics compared to controls (Eden et al., 1996). Demb, Boynton, and Heeger (1997) have even demonstrated a reliable relation between the magnitude of the hemodynamic BOLD-response in extrastriate area MT and overall reading skills in dyslexic subjects. In psychophysical studies too, sensitivity to play stimuli has been related to (nonword) reading ability (Talcott et ...