Reading Ability and Associative Learning for Children With a Visuomotor Deficit

Reading is a complex process which at the very least involves the perception of visual stimuli and the association of these stimuli with their counterparts in an existing oral language system. Although focusing primarily on the associational aspect of this process, this study was also designed with the intent of further clarifying the interrelationships among perceptual factors and associational factors and the attainment of reading skills. Recent studies of the relationship between reading ability and associative ability have regarded the latter as a general characteristic which can be measured by various paired associate learning tasks (Walters & Doan, 1-962; Walters & Kosowski, 1963; Otto, 1961), and significant relationships have been obtained between these two variables in these investigations. However, in approaching the reading process from a diagnostic point of view, Gates (1935) developed a number of tests consisting of a variety of paired associate tasks. He speculated that various types of retarded readers would perform differentially on these tests. One principal category of tasks consisted of those employing geometric forms as stimuli and was termed non-linguistic. The other major type of task was identified as wordlike in nature and used Japanese characters as stimuli. Stauffer (1948) applied these tests in a study of retarded readers and from his results concluded that retarded readers in general had an inability Volume 5 Number 3 May 1968