Statistical learning abilities of children with dyslexia across three experimental paradigms.

Merel Van Witteloostuijn,Paul Boersma,Frank Wijnen,Judith Rispens,Yafit Gabay

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0220041

Merel Van Witteloostuijn, Paul Boersma + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220041

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Aug 5, 2019
Citations: 26	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University

Abstract

Statistical learning (SL) difficulties have been suggested to contribute to the linguistic and non-linguistic problems observed in children with dyslexia. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that children with dyslexia experience problems with SL, but the extent of the problems is unclear. We aimed to examine the performance of children with and without dyslexia across three distinct paradigms using both on- and offline measures, thereby tapping into different aspects of SL. 100 children with and without dyslexia (aged 8–11, 50 per group) completed three SL tasks: serial reaction time (SRT), visual statistical learning (VSL), and auditory nonadjacent dependency learning (A-NADL). Learning was measured through online reaction times during exposure in all tasks, and through offline questions in the VSL and A-NADL tasks. We find significant learning effects in all three tasks, from which we conclude that, collapsing over groups, children are sensitive to the statistical structures presented in the SRT, VSL and A-NADL tasks. No significant interactions of learning effect with group were found in any of the tasks, so we cannot conclude whether or not children with dyslexia perform differently on the SL tasks than their TD peers. These results are discussed in light of the proposed SL deficit in dyslexia.

Highlights

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities and is characterized by specific difficulties in learning to read and write despite normal intelligence, schooling and socio-economic opportunities and in absence of other impairments
In the visual statistical learning (VSL), we used four measures to assess learning and confidence interval (CI) were corrected for quadruple testing (CIs thereby correspond to a false detection rate of 0.05 / 4 = 0.0125 for each effect, i.e. we have 98.75% CIs)
Since task order did not interact with our measures of learning and did not result in three-way interactions with our measures of learning and group, results from the three testing orders were collapsed in subsequent sections that describe the results of the serial reaction time (SRT), VSL and auditory nonadjacent dependency learning (A-NADL) tasks

Summary

Introduction

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities and is characterized by specific difficulties in learning to read and write despite normal intelligence, schooling and socio-economic opportunities and in absence of other impairments (e.g. sensory or neurological impairments [1]) These difficulties in the acquisition of literacy skills are typically associated with problems in related abilities including phonological awareness, lexical retrieval, and verbal short-term memory Deficits in individuals with dyslexia may include other domains of language (e.g. inflectional morphology and syntax; [6,7]) and non-linguistic cognitive skills such as visual and auditory processing [8,9], attention [10] and motor functioning [11,12]

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