Statistical learning abilities of children with dyslexia across three experimental paradigms

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.

The contribution of individual differences in statistical learning to reading and spelling performance in children with and without dyslexia

“…All participants were native speakers of Dutch and none had been diagnosed with (additional) developmental disorders as reported by parents (in the case of participants with dyslexia) and teachers (in the case of control participants). Note that the sample reported here is identical to the sample reported by van Witteloostuijn et al (2019), since, as previously stated, the current study is a re‐analysis of the same sample. Also, the control group partly overlaps with studies investigating SL and its relationship with language in children with DLD (Lammertink et al, 2020; Lammertink et al, 2020).…”

“…A study examining the link between learning on the SRT task and a range of language skills in English‐speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) similarly found no correlation between SRT performance and reading words or pseudo‐words in either group (Clark & Lum, 2017). Null findings also exist regarding SL performance in dyslexia: a number of studies did not find evidence for a difference in performance between participants with dyslexia and non‐impaired controls (adults: e.g., Kelly, Griffiths, & Frith, 2002; Pothos & Kirk, 2004; children: e.g., Nigro, Jiménez‐Fernández, Simpson, & Defior, 2016; Staels & Van den Broeck, 2017), even when using a range of different SL measures within the same pool of participants (adults: Rüsseler, Gerth, & Münte, 2006; children: van Witteloostuijn et al, 2019). This mix of high and low p ‐values (i.e., some studies reporting significant group effects and other studies finding null results), though expected for effects with average detectability, has resulted in literature reviews and meta‐analyses in the area of SL in dyslexia to determine the overall effect size (Lum, Ullman, & Conti‐Ramsden, 2013; Schmalz, Altoè, & Mulatti, 2017; van Witteloostuijn, Boersma, Wijnen, & Rispens, 2017).…”

Visual statistical learning in children with and without DLD and its relation to literacy in children with DLD

“…As for the second prediction, there is also evidence that children with DLD perform worse on statistical learning tasks with non-linguistic stimuli in the visuomotor domain than typically developing children (Lum, Conti-Ramsden, Morgan, & Ullman, 2014). Such visuomotor non-linguistic statistical learning deficit has also been observed in children with dyslexia (Lum, Ullman, & Conti-Ramsden, 2013), but see recent studies reporting no evidence for or against such deficit in dyslexia: Henderson & Warmington (2017), Schmalz, Altoè, & Mulatti (2017), van der Kleij et al (2018), van Witteloostuijn, Boersma, Wijnen, & Rispens (2019a. Children with dyslexia also perform more poorly in their detection of non-linguistic regularities (geometrical shapes or unfamiliar symbols) in the visual domain, hence they show a visual statistical learning (VSL) deficit (Pavlidou & Williams, 2014;Sigurdardottir et al, 2017).…”

Statistical Learning and Language Impairments: Toward More Precise Theoretical Accounts

“…They therefore hypothesized that DD populations should be impaired in SL tasks such as the auditory embedded-pattern task. Van Witteloostuijn, Boersma, Wijnen, and Rispens (2019) stated, “it has been suggested that dyslexia is associated with a domain-general learning deficit rather than a deficit that is specific to the processing of phonological material. This domain-general learning mechanism is often referred to as statistical learning [emphasis in original]” (para.…”