Generalization of Auditory Sensory and Cognitive Learning in Typically Developing Children.

Cristina F B Murphy,Eliane Schochat,David R Moore,Frederic Dick

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0135422

Cristina F B Murphy, Eliane Schochat + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135422

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Abstract

Despite the well-established involvement of both sensory (“bottom-up”) and cognitive (“top-down”) processes in literacy, the extent to which auditory or cognitive (memory or attention) learning transfers to phonological and reading skills remains unclear. Most research has demonstrated learning of the trained task or even learning transfer to a closely related task. However, few studies have reported “far-transfer” to a different domain, such as the improvement of phonological and reading skills following auditory or cognitive training. This study assessed the effectiveness of auditory, memory or attention training on far-transfer measures involving phonological and reading skills in typically developing children. Mid-transfer was also assessed through untrained auditory, attention and memory tasks. Sixty 5- to 8-year-old children with normal hearing were quasi-randomly assigned to one of five training groups: attention group (AG), memory group (MG), auditory sensory group (SG), placebo group (PG; drawing, painting), and a control, untrained group (CG). Compliance, mid-transfer and far-transfer measures were evaluated before and after training. All trained groups received 12 x 45-min training sessions over 12 weeks. The CG did not receive any intervention. All trained groups, especially older children, exhibited significant learning of the trained task. On pre- to post-training measures (test-retest), most groups exhibited improvements on most tasks. There was significant mid-transfer for a visual digit span task, with highest span in the MG, relative to other groups. These results show that both sensory and cognitive (memory or attention) training can lead to learning in the trained task and to mid-transfer learning on a task (visual digit span) within the same domain as the trained tasks. However, learning did not transfer to measures of language (reading and phonological awareness), as the PG and CG improved as much as the other trained groups. Further research is required to investigate the effects of various stimuli and lengths of training on the generalization of sensory and cognitive learning to literacy skills.

Highlights

There is considerable evidence that literacy skills involve both auditory sensory (“bottom-up”) and cognitive (“top-down’) aspects, as demonstrated by the relationship between reading and auditory temporal processing [1,2,3,4,5] and reading and phonological working memory [6,7,8,9], respectively
Individuals improved with training, and mean performance for each of the 3 trained groups significantly improved with training
For the sensory group (SG) this was clearly due to ceiling performance among those completing more than 14 blocks of training

Summary

Introduction

There is considerable evidence that literacy skills involve both auditory sensory (“bottom-up”) and cognitive (“top-down’) aspects, as demonstrated by the relationship between reading and auditory temporal processing [1,2,3,4,5] and reading and phonological working memory [6,7,8,9], respectively. Some studies have demonstrated generalization of learning following non-linguistic auditory training to measures of language, including reading, speech perception and phonological awareness [11,13,22]. The results demonstrated that, after 2 years, children who were more engaged in the music program developed stronger brain encoding of speech and achieved higher scores in reading tasks Both Halliday et al [18] and Murphy et al [19] reported on-task learning, but no generalization to higher-level measures of language skills. In the study of Murphy et al [19], both a typically developing group and a speech-sound disorder group of children were trained on a non-linguistic auditory temporal task in 12 sessions delivered over 12 weeks. Murphy et al [19], as for a number of studies, reported improved performance on language tasks among all studied groups (including untrained groups), suggesting the operation of a test-retest effect [12, 28], or very rapid perceptual learning [29] rather than generalization of learning per se

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