Note The visual attention span deficit in dyslexia is visual and not verbal Muriel Lobier a, *, Rachel Zoubrinetzky a,b and Sylviane Valdois a,c a Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (UMR 5105 CNRS), Universite ´ Pierre Mende `s France, Grenoble, France b Centre de Diagnostic des troubles du langage et des apprentissages, CHU de Grenoble, France c Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France article info Article history: Received 2 February 2011 Reviewed 20 June 2011 Revised 11 July 2011 Accepted 8 September 2011 Action editor Roberto Cubelli Published online xxx Keywords: Reading Developmental dyslexia Visual attention VA span abstract The visual attention (VA) span deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that letter string deficits are a consequence of impaired visual processing. Alternatively, some have interpreted this deficit as resulting from a visual-to-phonology code mapping impairment. This study aims to disambiguate between the two interpretations by investigating performance in a non-verbal character string visual categorization task with verbal and non-verbal stimuli. Results show that VA span ability predicts performance for the non-verbal visual processing task in normal reading children. Furthermore, VA span impaired dyslexic children are also impaired for the categorization task independently of stimuli type. This supports the hypothesis that the underlying impairment responsible for the VA span deficit is visual, not verbal. ª 2011 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Developmental dyslexia is characterized by a severe reading acquisition impairment in children of normal intelligence, free of any neurological or psychiatric condition. It is widely admitted that dyslexia is a consequence of a phonological deficit (Vellutino et al., 2004; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). Nevertheless, as a significant proportion of dyslexic children exhibit no phonological impairment (Bosse et al., 2007; White et al., 2006), such a deficit cannot account for the full spec- trum of the disorder. Concurrently, visual processing perfor- mance has been shown to contribute to reading performance in typical readers (Kevan and Pammer, 2008; Kwon et al., 2007; Pammer et al., 2005). Moreover, visuo-spatial attention (Facoetti et al., 2008, 2006) and low level visual processing (Boden and Giaschi, 2007) have been found to be impaired in dyslexic readers. Multifactorial accounts of dyslexia (Menghini et al., 2010) have opened new perspectives such as the exis- tence of a visual rather than phonological system impairment (Vidyasagar and Pammer, 2010). Several studies have explored multi-element visual process- ing in dyslexic children using whole and partial report tasks (Bosse et al., 2007; Valdois et al., 2003). Impaired performance on these tasks was interpreted as evidence for a deficit in the number of individual visual elements that can be processed simultaneously, namely a visual attention (VA) span disorder. * Corresponding author. Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (UMR 5105 CNRS), Universite ´ Pierre Mende ` s-France, BP 47, 38040 Grenoble Cedex 9, France. E-mail address: Muriel.Lobier@upmf-grenoble.fr (M. Lobier). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex cortex xxx (2011) 1 e6 Please cite this article in press as: Lobier M, et al., The visual attention span deficit in dyslexia is visual and not verbal, Cortex (2011), doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2011.09.003 0010-9452/$ e see front matter ª 2011 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2011.09.003