Accurately Assessing Visual Deficits in Children With Developmental Dyslexia —Reply

In Reply We thank Elder and Gole for their thoughtful comments on our article. Citing Ayton et al, they contend that the Developmental Eye Movement (DEM) test is not a valid indicator of saccadic eye movements. The Ayton et al study, however, had its own limitations: (1) it included only typical readers (restricting variability and hence correlations); (2) it did not consider normative age-associated changes in eye movements; and (3) it used saccadic measures of gain, latency, and velocity, rather than typical measures associated with reading, such as fixations and regressions. A 2018 study by Moiroud et al in children with dyslexia used the DEM to document clear differences in fixation duration in comparison with age-matched and reading-age –matched controls. Furthermore, our DEM findings did not occur in isolation; they correlated moderately with Visagraph eye tracking measures obtained during reading at the participants’ reading level. Thus, we believe it would be premature to dismiss the DEM test as a measure of oculomotor funct ions associated with reading.
Source: JAMA Ophthalmology - Category: Opthalmology Source Type: research