Department of Psychology, Institute for Cognitive Science, and Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Neuropsychologia. 2012 Jul;50(8):1895-905. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.04.014. Epub 2012 Apr 26.
The basic deficits underlying the severe and persistent reading difficulties in dyslexia are still highly debated. One of the major topics of debate is whether these deficits are language specific, or affect both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. Recently, Ahissar and colleagues proposed the "anchoring-deficit hypothesis" (Ahissar, Lubin, Putter-Katz, & Banai, 2006), which suggests that dyslexics have a general difficulty in automatic extraction of stimulus regularities from auditory inputs. This hypothesis explained a broad range of dyslexics' verbal and non-verbal difficulties. However, it was not directly tested in the context of reading and verbal memory, which poses the main stumbling blocks to dyslexics. Here we assessed the abilities of adult dyslexics to efficiently benefit from ("anchor to") regularities embedded in repeated tones, orally presented syllables, and written words. We also compared dyslexics' performance to that of individuals with attention disorder (ADHD), but no reading disability. We found an anchoring effect in all groups: all gained from stimulus repetition. However, in line with the anchoring-deficit hypothesis, controls and ADHD participants showed a significantly larger anchoring effect in all tasks. This study is the first that directly shows that the same domain-general deficit, poor anchoring, characterizes dyslexics' performance in perceptual, working memory and reading tasks.
在阅读障碍中，导致严重和持久阅读困难的基本缺陷仍存在高度争议。其中一个主要的争议话题是这些缺陷是否具有语言特异性，或者是否同时影响言语和非言语刺激。最近，Ahissar 及其同事提出了“锚定缺陷假说”（Ahissar、Lubin、Putter-Katz 和 Banai，2006），该假说认为阅读障碍者在自动从听觉输入中提取刺激规律方面存在普遍困难。该假说解释了阅读障碍者在言语和非言语方面的广泛困难。然而，该假说并未直接在阅读和言语记忆的背景下进行测试，而这正是阅读障碍者面临的主要障碍。在这里，我们评估了成年阅读障碍者从重复的音调、口头呈现的音节和书面单词中有效地受益于（“锚定”）规律的能力。我们还将阅读障碍者的表现与注意力障碍（ADHD）但没有阅读障碍的个体进行了比较。我们发现所有组都存在锚定效应：所有组都从刺激重复中获益。然而，与锚定缺陷假说一致的是，对照组和 ADHD 参与者在所有任务中都表现出显著更大的锚定效应。这项研究首次直接表明，相同的、一般性的缺陷——较差的锚定，特征化了阅读障碍者在感知、工作记忆和阅读任务中的表现。
