The visual attention (VA) span deficit hypothesis was found successfully to account for variability in developmental dyslexia (Bosse, Tainturier & Valdois, 2007). We conducted a cross-sectional study on 417 typically developing children from first, third and fifth grades examining the role of VA span on the development of reading skills. A battery including reading, phoneme awareness and VA span tasks was administered. Results show that VA span predicts variations in learning to read independent of the influence of phoneme awareness. Moreover, whereas the specific influence of VA span on pseudoword reading declines from first to third grade, VA span has a significant and sustained influence across grades for the irregular words. In addition to phoneme awareness, the VA span contributes to reading performance from the beginning of literacy instruction, suggesting that it might have a long-term influence on specific orthographic knowledge acquisition.