The Journal of General Psychology (Accepted for publication) 1 OBJECT NAMING IN DYSLEXIC CHILDREN: MORE THAN A PHONOLOGICAL DEFICIT

In this study we investigated how some visual factors related to early stages of visual object naming modulate naming performance in dyslexia. The performance of dyslexic children was compared with two control groups, normal readers matched for age and normal readers matched for reading level, while performing a discrete naming task in which color and dimensionality of the visually presented objects were manipulated. The results showed that two-dimensional naming performance improved for color representations in control readers but not in dyslexics. In contrast to control readers, dyslexics were also insensitive to the stimulus’ dimensionality. These findings are unlikely to be explained by a phonological processing problem related to phonological access or retrieval, but suggest that dyslexics have a lower capacity for coding and decoding visual surface features of two-dimensional representations and/or problems with the integration of visual information stored in long-term memory.