Visual Deficits in Dyslexia: Examination of stress patterns and the impact of emotions on students’ reading performance

The present study investigates the presence of visual deficits in students with developmental dyslexia as well as their emotions in relation to their reading performance. Dyslexia occurs in approximately 4% of the population (Simmons & Singleton, 2000) and concerns difficulties in reading and spelling for both L1 and L2 learning. One of the most common difficulties of dyslexic individuals has been noticed in stress errors (Paizi, Zoccolotti & Burani, 2011). However, the Greek and English language present differences regarding the visual information that entails stress pattern (such as the diacritic mark in Greek language). Additionally, emotions significantly affect students’ performance whether they are positive or negative (Pekrun et al., 2017). In this mixed-method research, 110 Greek students with dyslexia participated in a training program with pre- and post-phase. The training was assessed through visual and auditory stimuli to observe differences between these two sensory abilities. Moreover, questionnaire, interview and observational data were collected to examine the emotional impact. Results indicated an improvement in the stress pattern assignment of the Greek language after visual training while no improvement was observed in the English language since the stress pattern is not marked. The evidence supports the findings that visual impairments do play a role in the reading performance for both L1 and L2 learning. In addition, both positive and negative emotions were found to play a particular role in students’ performance but the extent of which positive emotions would lead to a positive outcome and negative emotions to a bad outcome was questioned. Nevertheless, anxiety was found to play a crucial role in students’ overall performance.