BCBL Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain.
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Dyslexia. 2020 Feb;26(1):3-17. doi: 10.1002/dys.1649. Epub 2020 Jan 28.
Children of reading age diagnosed with dyslexia show deficits in reading and spelling skills, but early markers of later dyslexia are already present in infancy in auditory processing and phonological domains. Deficits in lexical development are not typically associated with dyslexia. Nevertheless, it is possible that early auditory/phonological deficits would have detrimental effects on the encoding and storage of novel lexical items. Word-learning difficulties have been demonstrated in school-aged dyslexic children using paired associate learning tasks, but earlier manifestations in infants who are at family risk for dyslexia have not been investigated. This study assessed novel word learning in 19-month-old infants at risk for dyslexia (by virtue of having one dyslexic parent) and infants not at risk for any developmental disorder. Infants completed a word-learning task that required them to map two novel words to their corresponding novel referents. Not at-risk infants showed increased looking time to the novel referents at test compared with at-risk infants. These findings demonstrate, for the first time, that at-risk infants show differences in novel word-learning (fast-mapping) tasks compared with not at-risk infants. Our findings have implications for the development and consolidation of early lexical and phonological skills in infants at family risk of later dyslexia.
患有阅读障碍的学龄儿童在阅读和拼写技能方面存在缺陷，但在婴幼儿时期，听觉处理和语音领域的后期阅读障碍的早期标志物已经存在。词汇发展的缺陷通常与阅读障碍无关。然而，早期的听觉/语音缺陷可能会对新词汇项目的编码和存储产生不利影响。通过配对联想学习任务，已经在学龄阅读障碍儿童中证明了单词学习困难，但在有阅读障碍家族史的婴幼儿中，尚未研究其早期表现。本研究评估了 19 个月大的有阅读障碍风险的婴儿（由于有一位阅读障碍的父母）和没有发育障碍风险的婴儿的新单词学习能力。婴儿完成了一项单词学习任务，要求他们将两个新词与相应的新词对应起来。无风险婴儿在测试中比有风险婴儿更多地注视新词的指代物。这些发现首次表明，有风险的婴儿在新单词学习（快速映射）任务中与无风险婴儿存在差异。我们的研究结果对有阅读障碍家族史的婴幼儿早期词汇和语音技能的发展和巩固具有启示意义。
