Visual discrimination deficits of reading-disabled children: sex artifact?

Several theorists have suggested that deficits in visual discrimination play an etiological role in the development of reading deficits in children who are diagnosed as learning-disabled. Supporting this theory, a number of studies have shown that disabled readers make more errors on visual discrimination tasks than do good readers. The present study, however, suggests that those findings may have been due to a sex-difference artifact. Thirty-six 8- and 9-year-old good readers and reading-disabled children of both sexes responded to 40 matching items under untimed conditions. Males made more errors than females, but overall, reading-disabled children made no more errors than good readers. These findings, along with a reanalysis of previous studies, suggest that because reading disabilities are more common in males, evidence construed as supporting a visual discrimination hypothesis may have been an artifact of a sex difference in studies in which sex was not controlled.