Comparison of deficits in cognitive and motor skills among children with dyslexia.

There is a growing body of evidence that children with dyslexia have problems not just in reading but in a range of skills including several unrelated to reading. In an attempt to compare the severity and incidence of deficits across these varied domains, children with dyslexia (mean ages 8, 12, and 16 years), and control groups of normally achieving children matched for IQ and for age or reading age, were tested on a range of primitive (basic) skills. The children with dyslexia performed significantly worse than the same-age controls on most tasks, and significantly worse even than the reading-age controls on phoneme segmentation, picture naming speed, word tachistoscopic word recognition, speeded bead threading and some balance tasks. The overall performance of the children with dyslexia is interpreted as showing less complete automatization than normal.