Working Memory in Dyslexic Children — How General is the Deficit?

Abstract

The important role of working memory functions for reading and writing will be discussed together with the proven impairments of working memory performance in dyslexic individuals for visual and auditory presentation of stimuli with different paradigms and types of material. In the following paper, three studies will be introduced. The conceptual differentiation of these studies is based on the Baddeley and Hitch model (1974), with its specific modalities for incoming and maintaining information as well as on Cowan’s model (1995), with regard to automatic versus controlled executive functions during the generation of response and action. Thus, the central issue of the following studies is to investigate the importance and extent of assumed working memory impairments in dyslexic children with the focusing on the generality versus the specificity of these impairments. All three studies are conducted with samples of third grade dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. With the obtained results, we notice a dependency of working memory performance in dyslexic children on the training and language system (experiment 1), the specific type of modality (experiment 2) and on a specific kind of material (experiment 3). Therefore, the results of the three experiments cannot support the assumption of a general modality-, material-, and language-independent deficit in dyslexic individuals.