Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary.
MTA-BME Momentum Language Acquisition Research Group, Eötvös Loránd Research Network (ELKH), Budapest, Hungary.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2021 May 11;64(5):1621-1635. doi: 10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00145. Epub 2021 Apr 12.
Purpose Impairments in statistical learning abilities of individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) have been demonstrated in word segmentation and in visual artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, but so far, little attention has been devoted to the AGL abilities of this population in the acoustic verbal domain. This study aimed to test whether adolescents with dyslexia have difficulties in extracting abstract patterns from auditory sequences of nonsense syllables based on a finite state grammar relative to typically developing (TD) peers. We also tested whether incremental presentation of stimuli of different lengths (starting small) has a facilitating effect on learning complex structures in dyslexia (and in TD) as opposed to presenting strings in random order. Method Thirty-one adolescents with DD and 31 age-matched control participants completed an AGL task. Participants passively listened to acoustic sequences of nonsense syllables generated by an artificial grammar in the training phase. In the test phase, they were presented with pairs of novel grammatical and nongrammatical sequences and were required to decide which member of a sequence pair was more similar to the material heard during training. Results Performance levels and the proportion of learners were smaller in participants with DD than in the control group. While the starting small effect was nominally present both in performance levels and in the number of learners in participants with DD, but not in the group with TD, the presentation of strings in incremental order did not statistically improve learning performance in either group. Conclusion Our results suggest that (a) statistical learning of abstract sequences in the acoustic domain is less efficient in people with dyslexia than in TD controls and (b) while incremental presentation of stimuli of different length did not improve learning in our study, the observed pattern of results suggests that the effects of different training designs should be explored further in developmental disorders.
在单词分割和视觉人工语法学习（AGL）任务中，已经证明了发育性阅读障碍（DD）个体在统计学习能力方面存在障碍，但迄今为止，人们对该人群在声学言语领域的 AGL 能力关注甚少。本研究旨在测试阅读障碍青少年是否难以根据有限状态语法从无意义音节的听觉序列中提取抽象模式，而与典型发育（TD）同龄人相比。我们还测试了在递增呈现不同长度的刺激（从小开始）是否对学习阅读障碍（和 TD）中的复杂结构具有促进作用，而不是随机呈现字符串。方法：31 名阅读障碍青少年和 31 名年龄匹配的对照组参与者完成了 AGL 任务。参与者在训练阶段被动聆听人工语法生成的无意义音节的声学序列。在测试阶段，他们会收到一对新的语法和非语法序列，并要求他们判断序列对中的哪一个成员与训练期间听到的材料更相似。结果：与对照组相比，阅读障碍参与者的表现水平和学习者比例较小。虽然在阅读障碍参与者的表现水平和学习者数量方面都存在名义上的起始小效应，但在 TD 组中则没有，而按递增顺序呈现字符串并不能在任何一组中显著提高学习表现。结论：我们的结果表明，（a）在声学领域中，对抽象序列的统计学习在阅读障碍者中不如 TD 对照组有效，（b）虽然不同长度的刺激的递增呈现并没有改善我们研究中的学习，但观察到的结果模式表明，应该进一步探索不同训练设计的效果在发育障碍中。
