What is the role of visual skills in learning to read?

Although the issue of visual skills in relation to word reading has not been central to recent explorations of reading development, all visual word reading involves visual skill. Children constantly face tasks of differentiating visually similar letters or words. For example, distinguishing “b” from “d,” “a” from “e,” or “book” from “boot” all require visual differentiation. Children's orthographic knowledge and letter knowledge are causal factors in subsequent reading development in English (e.g., Badian, 1994; Lonigan et al., 2000). At a pure visual skill level, some researchers (e.g., Franceschini et al., 2012) suggest that core visual processing skills such as visual spatial attention in preschoolers could be a causal factor in subsequent reading acquisition. In addition, some alphabetic readers with dyslexia may have visual processing deficits (e.g., Valdois et al., 2004; Van der Leij et al., 2013). Following this hypothesis, Franceschini et al. (2013) showed that action video games that strengthened children's visual attention also improved their reading speed in Italian without sacrificing reading accuracy, similar to previous interventional research training facilitating visuospatial attention skills in Italian children with dyslexia (Facoetti et al., 2003). However, orthographic depth mediates the role of visual attention in reading (Bavelier et al., 2013; Richlan, 2014). English is a more opaque orthography than Italian, and Chinese is even more opaque than English.