Abstract: Many studies have shown that developmental dyslexia in alphabetic languages is related to (visual and auditory) perceptual processes Reading impairment originates from deficits in representation and processing both at the linguistic level and at the more basic perceptual level To investigate the relations between Chinese school children′s visual perception and their abilities in reading Chinese characters, the present study used tasks that measure the coherent motion detection threshold, the number of Chinese characters known, reading fluency, phonological awareness, and other tasks including picture naming, and orthographic similarity judgement The correlation analyses found that the dynamic motion detection threshold correlated with error rate in picture naming, the reaction time and error rate in orthographic similarity judgement, static motion detection threshold correlated only with error rate in picture naming When the amount of characters known to children was controlled, correlations between the dynamic motion detection threshold and other variables were stable, but the correlation between the static motion detection threshold and error rate in picture naming disappeared Regression analyses found that the dynamic motion detection threshold accounted for 7%, 25% and 56% for reading fluency, orthographic similarity judgement and error rate in picture naming respectively, after the number of characters known to children and phonological awareness were controlled Phonological awareness accounted for 9% and 10% of character known to children and reading fluency respectively The static motion detection threshold could not account for any variables significantly Further analyses of the performance of poor readers found large individual differences in visual perceptual skills and phonological awareness It was concluded that the development of reading skills is affected by the development of visual perceptual skills and the effects can be localized to specific processes in reading Chinese characters

Key words: dynamic visual processing, character reading, reading fluency, phonological awareness