FLICKR, ANGRYJULIEMONDAY
Shooting silly-looking rabbits with a plunger gun in a video game called Rayman Raving Rabbids can improve the reading ability of dyslexic children, according to a new study publishing in the March 18 issue of Current Biology—despite the fact that the game contained no reading or linguistic components. The counterintuitive finding supports the idea that dyslexia is not only a disorder of linguistic centers of the brain, but may also involve areas that govern attention and motor skills.
“The claim that they help dyslexic kids read is very novel and quite counter to recent research on dyslexia—which is held to be a phonological disorder that makes kids have a hard time hearing the transitions between sounds in speech,” James Gee, a psycholinguist at Arizona State ...
