A Study On The Relationship Between Attention Shift And Children's Reading Ability

Reading of children developed quickly in primary school.Also it is an important experience to learn knowledge by reading.If children perform difficultly in reading,it will affect their learning and living.Reaserchers focus on the cause of reading difficult and proposed various theories on reading difficult.There are two kind of theories,domain-specific theory and domain-nospecific theory.Domain-specific theory emphasize on the cause of reading skills deficit,the representative theory is phonetic theory.Domain-nospecific theory believe deficit on cognitive function caused reading difficulty.The representative theory is attention theory.Attention theory attracted more attention in recent years,especially sluggish attention shifting.In order to know how the attention shifting affect child's reading,especially children with reading difficult.The present study focus on the relationship of attention shift and children's reading by four years trace research and a series of experimental researches.The research divide in three part.First part,the present study focus on the relationship of reading and attention shift in normal children by a four-years longitudinal study.Results show a closed relationship of reading and attention shifting in high grade.In cross lagged model,attention shifting in grade one significantly predict the reading accuracy in grade three.But attention shifting only significantly predict the reading fluency in the same grade three.In second part,the present study focus on the relationship of reading and attention shift in normal children by a four-years longitudinal study.Results show a significant difference of reading skills and attention shifting between children with reading difficulty and normal children.In order to understand the effect of attention-switching ability on children' a reading accuracy and fluency,145 children were divided into high,low and middle groups according to the reading accuracy and fluency test scores.The results showed that there were significant differences in reading accuracy among the three groups,while there were only significant differences in reading fluency between the high and low groups.Multivariate regression analysis showed that the attention-switching ability of grade three and grade four had a significant effect on distinguishing the high-score group from the low-score group.Even after controlling for rapid naming,phonological awareness,orthography,fourth-grade attention-switching ability still played a significant role in differentiating between high-score and low-score groups.However,in terms of reading fluency,attention-switching ability of grade 1-4 can not distinguish the high,middle and low groups of reading fluencysignificantly.Studies have shown that attention switching delay exists in children with reading difficulties,and it has a greater impact on reading accuracy.In the third part,a series of experiments were conducted to examine the time characteristics of attention switching in children with reading difficulty.In experiment 1,a series of visual stimuli were used to present the visual stimuli.The results showed that there was no defect in the processing of single stimuli in childrenwith reading difficulty.Experiment 2 showed that attention switching affected childrenwith reading difficulty at about 500 milliseconds,but was influenced by rapid naming.In Experiment 3,after increasing the similarity between the disruptive stimulus and the target stimulus,attention switching delays still exceeded 500 ms which had an effect on childrenwith reading difficulty.Even controlling other reading skills,the impact is still significant.In terms of influencing factors,the results show that visual search ability affect the attention-switching ability of children with reading difficulty.Through this study,it is shown that there is a close relationship between attention switching and children's reading ability,and that children with reading difficulty have a phenomenon ofsluggished attention switching.