Psychology professor believes reading and motor coordination may be related

Are motor coordination and reading related? Recent research by UConn psychology professor Claudia Carello shows that the two skills may indeed be linked.

Psychology professor Claudia Carello is studying the links between reading and motor coordination.

Carello and her research team reveal that when asked to carry out a manual task, competent readers perform it faster and make fewer mistakes than poor readers. Their recent study was the first examination of the connection between reading and coordination in people without significant reading or coordination impairments.

This is an exciting development, Carello explains, since most previous research examined the connection between reading and motor coordination only for people with dyslexia or children with coordination difficulties.

Carello notes that children who have motor coordination difficulties often have trouble controlling their tongues and lips, which are the parts of the body that produce speech. If a child's pronunciation of a word is poor, then it's harder for him or her to make a connection between the written form of a word and its sound. The impairment of that ability could have an impact on reading.

"To the extent that speech production and skilled movement share coordination of a variety of muscles, then less-fluid manual coordination may be indicative of less-fluid speech production which, consequently, is less supportive of fluent reading," explains Carello.

Carello and her colleagues, including a UConn graduate student in psych-ology, conducted two experiments to examine their theory that the connection exists in competent readers.

In the first experiment, 50 undergraduates whose SAT verbal scores ranged from 500 to 710 were given two tests of reading ability. In the first test, participants were asked to read aloud two lists of words--one of long, regular words that are easily identified and pronounced and the other of irregular words that are more difficult to decipher. The second test measured reading comprehension, using literal and interpretive questions about eight passages.

To test motor coordination skills, these same participants were asked to tap keys on a computer keyboard. In one trial, they were asked to tap a single key as fast as possible for five seconds with fingers on both their dominant and non-dominant hands. In the second task, participants had to tap four keys in sequence as fast as possible for ten seconds, again with each hand. In the final task, the students were asked to alternate between tapping one key with the left index finger and one with the right as fast as possible for five seconds.

"The relationship between reading and movement was as expected: The fewer errors participants made on the reading task, the faster and more consistent they were at the sequential tapping task," the researchers explain.

In the second experiment involving reading comprehension, 11 good readers and 11 poor readers were recruited from a pool of 500 undergraduates. The participants were asked to perform the same motor coordination tasks as in the first experiment. Carello and her colleagues found that poor readers tap more slowly than good readers in the sequential tapping task.

According to the researchers, their results show there is a reliable relation between reading and movement. "Clearly, manual dexterity does not cause phonological awareness nor vice versa," says Carello. "Rather, some skill set is assumed to underlie both."

Carello notes that the research has implications for all people, not just those who experience reading or coordination problems. "If the link truly exists, early on we might want to spend more time on articulation practice, not just to help children speak better but also to help them read better," Carello says.

Although improving reading won't improve coordination, educators should consider spending more time working on older children's reading skills. "Reading is a highly learned skill that can be improved with practice," Carello says. "Anything we can do to help people read better would be beneficial." --

-- Allison Thompson