Singh Sonia, Conway Christopher M
Callier Center for Communication Disorders, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, United States.
Brain, Learning, and Language Lab, Center for Childhood Deafness, Language, and Learning, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, United States.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2021 Oct 22;15:734179. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.734179. eCollection 2021.
One important aspect of human cognition involves the learning of structured information encountered in our environment, a phenomenon known as statistical learning. A growing body of research suggests that learning to read print is partially guided by learning the statistical contingencies existing between the letters within a word, and also between the letters and sounds to which the letters refer. Research also suggests that impairments to statistical learning ability may at least partially explain the difficulties experienced by individuals diagnosed with dyslexia. However, the findings regarding impaired learning are not consistent, perhaps partly due to the varied use of methodologies across studies - such as differences in the learning paradigms, stimuli used, and the way that learning is assessed - as well as differences in participant samples such as age and extent of the learning disorder. In this review, we attempt to examine the purported link between statistical learning and dyslexia by assessing a set of the most recent and relevant studies in both adults and children. Based on this review, we conclude that although there is some evidence for a statistical learning impairment in adults with dyslexia, the evidence for an impairment in children is much weaker. We discuss several suggestive trends that emerge from our examination of the research, such as issues related to task heterogeneity, possible age effects, the role of publication bias, and other suggestions for future research such as the use of neural measures and a need to better understand how statistical learning changes across typical development. We conclude that no current theoretical framework of dyslexia fully captures the extant research findings on statistical learning.
人类认知的一个重要方面涉及对我们在环境中遇到的结构化信息的学习，这一现象被称为统计学习。越来越多的研究表明，学习阅读印刷文字部分是由学习单词内字母之间以及字母与其所代表的声音之间存在的统计关联所引导的。研究还表明，统计学习能力受损可能至少部分解释了被诊断为诵读困难症的个体所经历的困难。然而，关于学习受损的研究结果并不一致，这可能部分是由于各研究中方法的使用各不相同——例如学习范式、所用刺激以及学习评估方式的差异——以及参与者样本的差异，如年龄和学习障碍的程度。在这篇综述中，我们试图通过评估一组针对成人和儿童的最新且相关的研究，来检验统计学习与诵读困难症之间所谓的联系。基于这篇综述，我们得出结论，虽然有一些证据表明患有诵读困难症的成年人存在统计学习障碍，但儿童存在这种障碍的证据要弱得多。我们讨论了在对研究的考察中出现的几个有启发性的趋势，比如与任务异质性、可能的年龄效应、发表偏倚的作用相关的问题，以及对未来研究的其他建议，比如使用神经测量方法以及需要更好地理解统计学习在典型发育过程中的变化情况。我们得出结论，目前没有任何诵读困难症的理论框架能完全涵盖关于统计学习的现有研究结果。
