Verbal task demands are key in explaining the relationship between paired-associate learning and reading ability

Paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks measure the ability to form a novel association between a stimulus and a response. Performance on such tasks is strongly associated with reading ability, and there is increasing evidence that verbal task demands may be critical in explaining this relationship. The current study investigated the relationships between different forms of PAL and reading ability. A total of 97 children aged 8–10 years completed a battery of reading assessments and six different PAL tasks (phoneme–phoneme, visual–phoneme, nonverbal–nonverbal, visual–nonverbal, nonword–nonword, and visual–nonword) involving both familiar phonemes and unfamiliar nonwords. A latent variable path model showed that PAL ability is captured by two correlated latent variables: auditory–articulatory and visual–articulatory. The auditory–articulatory latent variable was the stronger predictor of reading ability, providing support for a verbal account of the PAL–reading relationship

Verbal task demands are key in explaining the relationship between paired-associate learning and reading ability

Paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks measure the ability to form a novel association between a stimulus and a response. Performance on such tasks is strongly associated with reading ability, and there is increasing evidence that verbal task demands may be critical in explaining this relationship. The current study investigated the relationships between different forms of PAL and reading ability. A total of 97 children aged 8–10 years completed a battery of reading assessments and six different PAL tasks (phoneme–phoneme, visual–phoneme, nonverbal–nonverbal, visual–nonverbal, nonword–nonword, and visual–nonword) involving both familiar phonemes and unfamiliar nonwords. A latent variable path model showed that PAL ability is captured by two correlated latent variables: auditory–articulatory and visual–articulatory. The auditory–articulatory latent variable was the stronger predictor of reading ability, providing support for a verbal account of the PAL–reading relationship

Procedural and declarative learning in dyslexia

The procedural deficit hypothesis claims that impaired procedural learning is at least partly responsible for the deficits in learning to read seen in children with developmental dyslexia. This study used a reading ability‐matched design to examine group differences in both procedural and declarative learning. Both children with dyslexia and typically developing children demonstrated procedural learning on a serial reaction time task, although learning in the typically developing group increased at a greater rate towards the end of the task compared with children with dyslexia. However, these results do not provide strong evidence for the procedural deficit hypothesis, because poorer procedural learning in the group with dyslexia may reflect impairments in motor learning, rather than sequence specific procedural learning. In addition, neither group showed a relationship between procedural learning and reading ability

Twenty-four or Four-and-twenty : Language Modulates Cross-Modal Matching for Multi-Digit Numbers in Children and Adults

Does number–word structure have a long-lasting impact on transcoding? Contrary to English, German number words comprise decade–unit inversion (e.g., vierundzwanzig is literally translated as four-and-twenty). To investigate the mental representation of numbers, we tested the effect of visual and linguistic–morphological characteristics on the development of verbal–visual transcoding. In a longitudinal cross-linguistic design, response times (RTs) in a number-matching experiment were analyzed in Grade 2 (119 German-speaking and 179 English-speaking children) and in Grade 3 (131 German-speaking and 160 English-speaking children). To test for long-term effects, the same experiment was given to 38 German-speaking and 42 English-speaking adults. Participants needed to decide whether a spoken number matched a subsequent visual Arabic number. Systematic variation of digits in the nonmatching distractors allowed comparison of three different transcoding accounts (lexicalization, visual, and linguistic–morphological). German speakers were generally slower in rejecting inverted number distractors than English speakers. Across age groups, German speakers were more distracted by Arabic numbers that included the correct unit digit, whereas English speakers showed stronger distraction when the correct decade digit was included. These RT patterns reflect differences in number–word morphology. The individual cost of rejecting an inverted distractor (inversion effect) predicted arithmetic skills in German-speaking second-graders only. The moderate relationship between the efficiency to identify a matching number and arithmetic performance could be observed cross-linguistically in all age groups but was not significant in German-speaking adults. Thus, findings provide consistent evidence of a persistent impact of number–word structure on number processing, whereas the relationship with arithmetic performance was particularly pronounced in young children

Automatic Activation of Sounds by Letters Occurs Early in Development but is not Impaired in Children With Dyslexia

The automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis proposes that the decoding difficulties seen in dyslexia arise from a specific deficit in establishing automatic letter-sound associations. We report the findings of 2 studies in which we used a priming task to assess automatic letter-sound integration. In Study 1, children between 5 and 7 years of age were faster to respond to a speech-sound when primed by a congruent letter, indicating that automatic activation of sounds by letters emerges relatively early in reading development. However, there was no evidence of a relationship between variations in the speed of activating sounds by letters and reading skill in this large unselected sample. In Study 2, children with dyslexia demonstrated automatic activation of sounds by letters, though they performed slowly overall. Our findings do not support the theory that a deficit in automatic letter-sound integration is an important cause of reading difficulties but do provide further evidence for the importance of phonological skills for learning to read

A Longitudinal Study of Early Reading Development: Letter-Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Awareness and RAN, but Not Letter-Sound Integration, Predict Variations in Reading Development

It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored the theory that a failure to establish automatic associations between letters and speech sounds is a proximal causal risk factor for difficulties in learning to read. Our findings show that automatic letter-sound associations are established early, but do not predict variations in reading development. In contrast, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and alphanumeric RAN were all strong independent predictors of reading development. In addition, both phoneme awareness and RAN displayed a reciprocal relationship with reading, such that the growth of reading predicted improvements in these skills