Relationships Between Visual and Auditory Perceptual Skills and Comprehension in Students with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

The outcome of a correlational study that examined the relationships between visual and auditory perceptual skills and comprehension is reported. Scores of 25 learning disabled students (aged 9 to 13) were compared on five tests: a visual-perceptual test (Coloured Progressive Matrices); an auditory-perceptual test (Auditory Motor Placement); a listening and reading comprehension test (Durrell Listening-Reading Series); and a word recognition test (Word Recognition subtest, Diagnostic Reading Scales). The correlation coefficients indicated highly significant relationships between visual-perceptual skills and listening comprehension, and between visual-perceptual skills and reading comprehension only when the effect of word recognition skills was controlled statistically. Auditory-perceptual skills, however, were more closely related to reading comprehension than to listening comprehension. Although word recognition skills explained much of the variance in reading comprehension among the learning disabled students in this study, visual perceptual skills also seemed to contribute to this variance.

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