Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2013 May;115(1):137-49. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.11.012. Epub 2013 Feb 10.
Recent research suggests that visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) may tap a crossmodal associative learning mechanism that plays a distinct role in reading development. However, evidence from children with dyslexia indicates that deficits in visual-verbal PAL are strongly linked to the verbal demands of the task. The primary aim of this study was to disassociate the role of modality and verbal demand in driving the PAL-reading relationship. To do so, we compared performance across four PAL mapping conditions: visual-verbal, verbal-verbal, visual-visual and verbal-visual. We reasoned that if crossmodal mapping demand accounts for the PAL-reading relationship, both visual-verbal PAL and verbal-visual PAL should exhibit significant relationships with reading ability. The results were incompatible with the crossmodal hypothesis. Only tasks requiring verbal output (visual-verbal PAL and verbal-verbal PAL) significantly correlated with reading ability. In addition, visual-verbal PAL and verbal-verbal PAL were well represented by a latent "verbal output PAL" factor. Structural equation modeling showed that this factor fully accounted for the PAL-reading relationship; visual-verbal PAL did not add anything to the prediction of reading above and beyond this latent factor. The results are interpreted according to an alternative verbal account of the PAL-reading relationship.
最近的研究表明，视觉-言语配对联想学习（PAL）可能利用了一种跨模态联想学习机制，这种机制在阅读发展中起着独特的作用。然而，来自阅读障碍儿童的证据表明，视觉-言语 PAL 的缺陷与任务的言语要求密切相关。本研究的主要目的是将模态和言语需求在驱动 PAL-阅读关系中的作用分离开来。为此，我们比较了四个 PAL 映射条件下的表现：视觉-言语、言语-言语、视觉-视觉和言语-视觉。我们推断，如果跨模态映射需求解释了 PAL-阅读关系，那么视觉-言语 PAL 和言语-视觉 PAL 都应该与阅读能力有显著的关系。结果与跨模态假设不一致。只有需要言语输出的任务（视觉-言语 PAL 和言语-言语 PAL）与阅读能力显著相关。此外，视觉-言语 PAL 和言语-言语 PAL 由一个潜在的“言语输出 PAL”因子很好地表示。结构方程模型表明，这个因子完全解释了 PAL-阅读关系；在这个潜在因子之外，视觉-言语 PAL 并没有为阅读预测增加任何内容。该结果根据 PAL-阅读关系的替代言语解释进行解释。
