Abstract
One of the hallmarks of dyslexia is the failure to automatise written patterns despite repeated exposure to print. Although many explanations have been proposed to explain this problem, researchers have recently begun to explore the possibility that an underlying implicit learning deficit may play a role in dyslexia. This hypothesis has been investigated through non-linguistic tasks exploring implicit learning in a general domain. In this study, we examined the abilities of children with dyslexia to implicitly acquire positional regularities embedded in both non-linguistic and linguistic stimuli. In experiment 1, 42 children (21 with dyslexia and 21 typically developing) were exposed to rule-governed shape sequences; whereas in experiment 2, a new group of 42 children were exposed to rule-governed letter strings. Implicit learning was assessed in both experiments via a forced-choice task. Experiments 1 and 2 showed a similar pattern of results. ANOVA analyses revealed no significant differences between the dyslexic and the typically developing group, indicating that children with dyslexia are not impaired in the acquisition of simple positional regularities, regardless of the nature of the stimuli. However, within group t-tests suggested that children from the dyslexic group could not transfer the underlying positional rules to novel instances as efficiently as typically developing children.
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Notes
Shapes were sequentially added as a previous pilot study with a sample of TD third graders showed that participants could only learn the visual regularities when each shape was added to the display one-at-a-time (instead of presenting all four shapes at once).
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Acknowledgments
This research has been partially supported by PITN-215961-ELDEL project of the FP7 Marie Curie programme and HUM-820 research group of the Junta de Andalucía.
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Nigro, L., Jiménez-Fernández, G., Simpson, I.C. et al. Implicit learning of non-linguistic and linguistic regularities in children with dyslexia. Ann. of Dyslexia 66, 202–218 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-015-0116-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-015-0116-9