Verbal Short‐Term Memory Deficits in Chinese Children with Dyslexia may not be a Problem with the Activation of Phonological Representations

Abstract

This study explored the underlying mechanism of the verbal short-term memory deficit in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. Twenty-four children with dyslexia and 28 age-matched normal readers participated in the study. They were required to memorize a visually presented series of six Chinese characters and identify them from a list also including code-specific distracters and non-code-specific distracters. Error rates were recorded and were higher for code-specific distracters in all three conditions, revealing phonological, visual, and semantic similarity effects respectively. Group comparisons showed a stronger phonological similarity effect in dyslexic group, suggesting intact activation of phonological representations of target characters. Children with dyslexia also exhibited a greater semantic similarity effect, revealing stronger activation of semantic representations, while visual similarity effects were equivalent to controls. These results suggest that the verbal short-term memory deficit in Chinese dyslexics might not stem from insufficient activation of phonological information. Based the semantic activation of target characters in dyslexics is greater than in controls, it is possible that the memory deficit of dyslexia is related with deficient inhibition of target semantic representations in short-term memory.

Dissociation between exact and approximate addition in developmental dyslexia

“…Boets et al (2013) also postulated that the phonetic representation in individuals with dyslexia was intact, the phonological processing deficit in dyslexia lay in the inefficient accessing process which was underpinned by the white fiber connections between Broca's region and Werniche's region. Even further, Zhao, Yang, Song, and Bi (2015) recently reported that children with dyslexia could activate phonological representations sufficiently in a verbal short-term memory task. If in this case that phonological representation is intact and is activated sufficiently, the impairment in exact addition resulting from verbal/phonological deficit probably resides in the processing and utilization of those intact phonetic representations.…”

Genetic polymorphism of nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate is associated with developmental dyslexia in Chinese school-aged populations

“…In a recent study, Chinese dyslexics showed reduced short-term verbal memory during recall of Chinese characters than age-matched normal readers. 31 Given reported implication of CREBBP in memory impairment as well as developmental and intellectual abnormalities, understanding functional effects of rs8049367 on CREBBP in future studies might explain its contribution to DD.…”

Anomalous Cerebellar Anatomy in Chinese Children with Dyslexia

“…It is obvious that, raw scores of the test are measured based on the standard difficulty coefficient. And many previous studies with Chinese dyslexia used the raw scores of this vocabulary test to select dyslexia children ( Shu et al, 2006 ; Meng et al, 2007 ; Wang et al, 2010 ; Yang and Hong-Yan, 2011 ; Liu et al, 2012 , 2013 ; Yang et al, 2013 ; Qian and Bi, 2014 ; Zhao et al, 2014 , 2015 ). Besides, in this current study, the inclusionary criterion for dyslexics was their written score at least 1.5 standard deviation ( SD ) below the average score of all participants, not a fixed score.…”