Anchoring the deficit of the anchor deficit: dyslexia or attention?

Poor anchoring limits dyslexics' perceptual, memory, and reading skills.

The basic deficits underlying the severe and persistent reading difficulties in dyslexia are still highly debated. One of the major topics of debate is whether these deficits are language specific, or affect both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. Recently, Ahissar and colleagues proposed the "anchoring-deficit hypothesis" (Ahissar, Lubin, Putter-Katz, & Banai, 2006), which suggests that dyslexics ...

Better to lose the anchor than the whole ship.

In a recent TICS article, Ahissar [1] proposed an interesting new theory for understanding dyslexia, the ‘perceptual anchor theory’. The idea is straightforward. Most psychophysical tasks used to investigate perceptual deficits in dyslexia repeat stimuli, such as tones in frequency discrimination or objects in rapid automatized naming (RAN). Theoretically, this massed repetition allows unimpair...

The relationship between cerebral hemisphere volume and receptive language functioning in dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Because poor comprehension has been associated with small cerebral volume and there is a high comorbidity between developmental dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and specific language impairment, the goal of this study was to determine whether cerebral volume is reduced in dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in general, as some suggest, or whether the ...

The occurrence, identification and treatment of convergence failure in children with dyslexia, dyspraxia, attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactive disorder (..

Dyslexia and the anchoring-deficit hypothesis.

The 'core deficit' of dyslexia has been characterized by different researchers in terms of either phonological impairments or of difficulties in processing basic visual and auditory stimuli. Recent findings suggest that a single type of impairment in the dynamics of perception, which affects the efficiency of short-term memory, might underlie the broad range of difficulties of dyslexics. Experi...