Developmental Differences in Exogenous and Endogenous Attentional Orienting in Chinese Children With Dyslexia

Purpose Empirical support for the sluggish attentional shifting theory of developmental dyslexia (DD) remains debated. Inconsistent findings have been attributed to divergent paradigms for assessing attentional orienting, variability in participant ages, and cross-linguistic differences in script-processing demands. Therefore, the present study systematically investigated exogenous and endogenous attentional orienting in Chinese children with dyslexia across high and low grades of primary schools.Methods A total of Eighty-eight Mandarin-speaking children (46% female, Mage = 9.38) participated, including 44 children with DD and 44 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. Participants were divided into two grade-based groups: a low-grade group (Grades 2–3, n = 46, DD/TD = 23/23, 48% female, Mage = 8.73) and a high-grade group (Grades 4–5, n = 42, DD/TD = 21/21, 43% female, Mage = 10.09). All children completed reading-related assessments and exogenous/endogenous spatial cueing tasks.Results In the low-grade group, children with dyslexia showed longer reaction times and a smaller right-hemifield cueing effect in the exogenous attention task compared with their TD peers, indicating deficits in both attentional orienting and right-hemifield inhibition, which linked to poor sentence reading and orthographic awareness. These exogenous orienting deficits were attenuated in the high-grade group. Moreover, endogenous attentional orienting was generally intact in the current cohort of children with dyslexia and was associated with sentence-reading performance specifically in the high grades.Conclusion These results indicate that the exogenous attentional orienting deficit may be an early marker for DD identification while preserved endogenous attention orienting may compensate in children with dyslexia from high grades. The findings support the sluggish attentional shift theory from a developmental aspect and emphasize the importance of considering language-specific and age-related factors in characterizing dyslexia.