Grammatical performance in children with dyslexia: the contributions of individual differences in phonological memory and statistical learning

Witteloostuijn, Merel van; Boersma, Paul; Wijnen, Frank; Rispens, Judith

doi:10.1017/s0142716421000102

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 116 publications

(172 reference statements)

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“…An inspection of Table 1 reveals that of the 26 separate tasks involving children with dyslexia (across 14 studies), only six showed impairment in statistical learning (He and Tong, 2017;Schiff et al, 2017a;Singh et al, 2018;Tong et al, 2019;Vandermosten et al, 2019;Hedenius et al, 2020), whereas the other 20 reported intact learning van den Broeck, 2015, 2017;Schiff et al, 2017a;Inácio et al, 2018; van der Kleij et al, 2018;van Witteloostuijn et al, 2019van Witteloostuijn et al, , 2021aVandermosten et al, 2019;West et al, 2019). Interestingly, a majority of the studies with children were administered to native speakers of Dutch van den Broeck, 2015, 2017;van der Kleij et al, 2018;Vandermosten et al, 2019;van Witteloostuijn et al, 2019van Witteloostuijn et al, , 2021a, of which all showed evidence of intact learning, except for performance on one of the tasks by Vandermosten et al (2019). Besides Dutch and English (Singh et al, 2018;West et al, 2019), tasks were also administered to native speakers in other languages, such as Cantonese (He and Tong, 2017;Tong et al, 2019), Hebrew (Schiff et al, 2017a), Portuguese (Inácio et al, 2018) and Swedish (Hedenius et al, 2020).…”

Section: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Continuing with this preliminary evaluation of studies listed in Table 1, certain task features tended to dominate over others. For example, there were more tasks pertaining to the visual and visual-motor domains versus the auditory-visual (Vandermosten et al, 2019) and auditory-motor (van Witteloostuijn et al, 2019(van Witteloostuijn et al, , 2021b. This modality issue is discussed further in Section "Discussion."…”

Section: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unraveling the Interconnections Between Statistical Learning and Dyslexia: A Review of Recent Empirical Studies

Singh

Conway

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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One important aspect of human cognition involves the learning of structured information encountered in our environment, a phenomenon known as statistical learning. A growing body of research suggests that learning to read print is partially guided by learning the statistical contingencies existing between the letters within a word, and also between the letters and sounds to which the letters refer. Research also suggests that impairments to statistical learning ability may at least partially explain the difficulties experienced by individuals diagnosed with dyslexia. However, the findings regarding impaired learning are not consistent, perhaps partly due to the varied use of methodologies across studies – such as differences in the learning paradigms, stimuli used, and the way that learning is assessed – as well as differences in participant samples such as age and extent of the learning disorder. In this review, we attempt to examine the purported link between statistical learning and dyslexia by assessing a set of the most recent and relevant studies in both adults and children. Based on this review, we conclude that although there is some evidence for a statistical learning impairment in adults with dyslexia, the evidence for an impairment in children is much weaker. We discuss several suggestive trends that emerge from our examination of the research, such as issues related to task heterogeneity, possible age effects, the role of publication bias, and other suggestions for future research such as the use of neural measures and a need to better understand how statistical learning changes across typical development. We conclude that no current theoretical framework of dyslexia fully captures the extant research findings on statistical learning.

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Section: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unraveling the Interconnections Between Statistical Learning and Dyslexia: A Review of Recent Empirical Studies

Singh

Conway

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…In the case of children with dyslexia, they performed significantly poorly in grammar because they tend not to focus on the morpho-syntactic features of the text [37]. A study by [38] reported that several studies [39,40] have shown that spoken language skills in young familial risks of dyslexia (FRdys) children produce shorter sentences of lower syntactic complexity and achieve lower vocabulary scores than low-risk children. In addition, when school-aged children with dyslexia or FRdys children are compared to their typically developing peers, they are found to achieve lower scores on standardized tests of grammar (e.g., the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oral Language Skills and Literacy Skills of Malay Children with Dyslexia

Razak¹,

Lin²,

Aziz³

2022

Learning Disabilities - Neurobiology, Assessment, Clinical Features and Treatments

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Dyslexia can involve among others, difficulties in spoken language. However, there is limited local data on oral language (narrative skills) and literacy skills in children with dyslexia. The relationship between language and literacy is well documented although they involve complicated and non-straightforward processes. There is also evidence suggesting a link between language difficulties with subsequent literacy difficulties. Thus, this study aims to identify and describe the language and literacy skills of Malay children with dyslexia, and to discuss the possible relationships between them. Subjects were six children with dyslexia in the Klang Valley, Malaysia aged 8:0 to 9:11 (mean age, 8:10) who were compared to an age-matched control group (n = 10). The battery of tests administrated was phonological awareness test, language task, narrative, and literacy tasks. Our findings showed that children with dyslexia had generally weaker language and literacy skills than the control group. There were significant differences (p < .05) in grammar understanding, sentence repetition, and reading and spelling at both word and paragraph levels. Pearson correlation between language and literacy was shown to be positive and strong, r = .887, p < .05. The qualitative discussion of the data is presented. Findings from this study would provide useful information to teachers and speech-language therapists in their teaching or planning of appropriate clinical evaluation and management of children with dyslexia.

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“…This has been proposed to help vocabulary learning [ 33 ]. Statistical learning ability has also been linked to phonological awareness [ 34 ], and it has been considered in relation to grammar skills [ 35 ].…”

Section: Is Statistical Learning Related To Reading?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental Dyslexia, Reading Acquisition, and Statistical Learning: A Sceptic’s Guide

2021

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Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive, or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism that allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli. The link between statistical learning and reading ability is indirect, with intermediate skills, such as knowledge of frequently co-occurring letters, likely being causally dependent on statistical learning skills and, in turn, causing individual variation in reading ability. We discuss theoretical issues regarding what a link between statistical learning and reading ability actually means and review the evidence for such a deficit. We then describe and simulate the “noisy chain hypothesis”, where each intermediary link between a proposed cause and the end-state of reading ability reduces the correlation coefficient between the low-level deficit and the end-state outcome of reading. We draw the following conclusions: (1) Empirically, there is evidence for a correlation between statistical learning ability and reading ability, but there is no evidence to suggest that this relationship is causal, (2) theoretically, focussing on a complete causal chain between a distal cause and developmental dyslexia, rather than the two endpoints of the distal cause and reading ability only, is necessary for understanding the underlying processes, (3) statistically, the indirect nature of the link between statistical learning and reading ability means that the magnitude of the correlation is diluted by other influencing variables, yielding most studies to date underpowered, and (4) practically, it is unclear what can be gained from invoking the concept of statistical learning in teaching children to read.

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Grammatical performance in children with dyslexia: the contributions of individual differences in phonological memory and statistical learning

Cited by 7 publications

References 116 publications

Unraveling the Interconnections Between Statistical Learning and Dyslexia: A Review of Recent Empirical Studies

Unraveling the Interconnections Between Statistical Learning and Dyslexia: A Review of Recent Empirical Studies

Oral Language Skills and Literacy Skills of Malay Children with Dyslexia

Developmental Dyslexia, Reading Acquisition, and Statistical Learning: A Sceptic’s Guide

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