Ding Yi, Liu Ru-De, Hong Wei, Yu Qiong, Wang Jia, Liu Ying, Zhen Rui
5923Fordham University, New York, NY, USA.
Institute of Developmental Psychology, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education, Faculty of Psychology, 47836Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P. R. China.
Psychol Rep. 2021 Apr;124(2):720-751. doi: 10.1177/0033294120916865. Epub 2020 Apr 15.
The aim of this paper was to examine the role of phonological working memory in specific mental arithmetic difficulties and general arithmetic learning difficulties (ALD; difficulties presenting in both mental arithmetic and written arithmetic). In Study 1, we categorized 53 sixth graders into a control group, a group with specific mental arithmetic difficulties, and a group with general ALD. The findings indicated the group with specific mental arithmetic difficulties performed significantly worse on the task involving phonological working memory than did the control group. However, a significant difference was not found between the group with general ALD and the control group. In Study 2 involving 54 sixth graders, we decreased the load of phonological working memory by changing the format of the problems from horizontal (more reliance on phonological codes) to vertical (more reliance on visual resources). We found that the group with specific mental arithmetic difficulties performed comparably to the control group. In other words, when the working memory load is reduced, they no longer lag significantly behind on mental arithmetic. However, the group with general ALD still performed significantly worse than the control group when the problems were presented vertically, indicating that reduced phonological working memory load did not alleviate their arithmetic difficulties. The findings in both studies suggested that poor phonological working memory might contribute to the underlying mechanism for specific mental arithmetic difficulties but not as much for general ALD.
本文旨在研究语音工作记忆在特定心算困难和一般算术学习困难（算术学习障碍；在心算和笔算中均出现的困难）中的作用。在研究1中，我们将53名六年级学生分为一个对照组、一个有特定心算困难的组和一个有一般算术学习障碍的组。研究结果表明，有特定心算困难的组在涉及语音工作记忆的任务上的表现明显比对照组差。然而，有一般算术学习障碍的组和对照组之间没有发现显著差异。在涉及54名六年级学生的研究2中，我们通过将题目格式从横向（更多依赖语音编码）改为纵向（更多依赖视觉资源）来降低语音工作记忆的负荷。我们发现，有特定心算困难的组的表现与对照组相当。换句话说，当工作记忆负荷降低时，他们在心算方面不再明显落后。然而，当题目以纵向形式呈现时，有一般算术学习障碍的组的表现仍然明显比对照组差，这表明语音工作记忆负荷的降低并没有缓解他们的算术困难。两项研究的结果都表明，较差的语音工作记忆可能是特定心算困难潜在机制的一个因素，但对一般算术学习障碍的影响不大。
