Lazzaro Giulia, Varuzza Cristiana, Costanzo Floriana, Fucà Elisa, Di Vara Silvia, De Matteis Maria Elena, Vicari Stefano, Menghini Deny
Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry Unit, Department of Neuroscience, Bambino Gesù Children's Hospital, IRCCS, 00165 Rome, Italy.
Department of Human Science, LUMSA University, 00193 Rome, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2021 Jan 1;11(1):40. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11010040.
Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is considered a multifactorial deficit. Among the neurocognitive impairments identified in DD, it has been found that memory plays a particularly important role in reading and learning. The present study aims to investigate whether short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) deficits could be related to poor reading experience or could be causal factors in DD. To verify that memory deficits in DD did not simply reflect differences in reading experience, 16 children with DD were not only compared to 16 chronological age-matched children (CA) but also to 16 reading level-matched children (RL) in verbal, visual-object, and visual-spatial STM and LTM tasks. Children with DD performed as well as RL, but worse than CA in all STM tasks. Considering LTM, the three groups did not differ in Visual-Object and Visual-Spatial Learning tasks. In the Verbal LTM task, DD recalled significantly fewer words than CA but not RL, while CA and RL showed a similar performance. The present results suggest that when reading experience was equated, children with DD and typical readers did not differ in STM and LTM, especially in the verbal modality, weakening claims that memory has a causal effect in reading impairments.
发育性阅读障碍（DD）被认为是一种多因素缺陷。在DD中发现的神经认知障碍中，人们发现记忆在阅读和学习中起着特别重要的作用。本研究旨在调查短期记忆（STM）和长期记忆（LTM）缺陷是否与不良阅读体验有关，或者是否是DD的因果因素。为了验证DD中的记忆缺陷不仅仅反映阅读体验的差异，在言语、视觉物体和视觉空间的STM和LTM任务中，不仅将16名患有DD的儿童与16名年龄匹配的儿童（CA）进行了比较，还与16名阅读水平匹配的儿童（RL）进行了比较。患有DD的儿童在所有STM任务中的表现与RL相当，但比CA差。考虑到LTM，三组在视觉物体和视觉空间学习任务中没有差异。在言语LTM任务中，DD回忆的单词明显少于CA，但不比RL少，而CA和RL表现相似。目前的结果表明，当阅读体验相当时，患有DD的儿童和典型读者在STM和LTM方面没有差异，尤其是在言语模态方面，这削弱了记忆对阅读障碍有因果影响的说法。
