Impact of a cognitive training on reading of 6-year-old children

Abstract

Numerous studies explore the effect of cognitive stimulation programmes on reading skills in children and adolescents, with mixed results. Although several studies support that the relationships established between executive functions and reading skills are more robust at early ages, when the process of formal reading acquisition is being consolidated, there are few studies that evaluate the impact of this type of interventions at the beginning of primary school. For this reason, the present pilot study investigates the possible effects of executive functions training on letter identification and decoding, as well as word and pseudoword reading. A cognitive training was carried out using the CogniFit platform in 12 typically developing 6-year-old children, comparing their performance with a control group of 28 children of the same age and similar socioeconomic status. This protocol took place over 8 weeks, with a mean of 19 minutes of training per week. The results obtained indicate that the experimental group showed a higher reading speed in letter recognition than the control group. However, no effect was found in the rest of the reading skills. These promising results indicate that additional research is needed to clarify the lack of convergence reported in the current scientific literature.