University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Utrecht University, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2019 Aug 5;14(8):e0220041. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220041. eCollection 2019.
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.
统计学习 (SL) 困难被认为是导致阅读障碍儿童语言和非语言问题的原因之一。事实上，已有研究表明阅读障碍儿童在 SL 方面存在问题，但问题的严重程度尚不清楚。我们旨在通过使用在线和离线测量，在三个不同的范式中检查有和没有阅读障碍的儿童的表现，从而挖掘 SL 的不同方面。100 名有和没有阅读障碍的儿童（年龄在 8-11 岁之间，每组 50 名）完成了三个 SL 任务：序列反应时间 (SRT)、视觉统计学习 (VSL) 和听觉非相邻依赖学习 (A-NADL)。在所有任务中，通过在线反应时间来测量学习效果，而在 VSL 和 A-NADL 任务中则通过离线问题来测量。我们发现所有三个任务都存在显著的学习效果，从中我们得出结论，即从组间来看，儿童对 SRT、VSL 和 A-NADL 任务中呈现的统计结构敏感。在任何任务中，学习效果与组之间均未发现显著的交互作用，因此我们无法得出阅读障碍儿童在 SL 任务上的表现是否与他们的 TD 同龄人不同的结论。这些结果将根据阅读障碍中的 SL 缺陷进行讨论。
