Department of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBRC), University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
McConnell Brain Imaging Center, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2B4, Canada.
Neuropsychologia. 2023 Sep 9;188:108652. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108652. Epub 2023 Jul 30.
The current study examined whether adults with Developmental Dyslexia are impaired in learning linguistic regularities in a novel language, and whether this may be explained by a domain general deficit in the effect of sleep on consolidation. We compared online learning and offline consolidation of morphological regularities in individuals with Developmental Dyslexia (N = 40) and typical readers (N = 38). Participants learned to apply plural inflections to novel words based on morpho-phonological rules embedded in the input and learned to execute a finger motor sequence task. To test the effects of time and sleep on consolidation, participants were assigned into one of two sleep-schedule groups, trained in the evening or in the morning and tested 12 and 24 h later. Unlike typical readers, Dyslexic readers did not extract the morpho-phonological regularities during training and as a group they did not show offline gains in inflecting trained items 24 h after training, suggesting that the deficit in extraction of regularities during training may be related to the deficit in consolidation. The offline gains in dyslexic readers, were correlated with their prior phonological abilities, and were less affected by sleep than those of typical readers. Although no deficit was found in the consolidation of the motor task, dyslexic readers were again less successful in generating an abstract representation of the motor sequence, reflected in a difficulty to generalize the motor sequence knowledge acquired using one hand to the untrained hand. The results suggest that individuals with Developmental Dyslexia have a domain general deficit in extracting statistical regularities from an input. Within the language domain this deficit is reflected in reduced benefits of consolidation, particularly during sleep, perhaps due to reduced prior phonological abilities, which may impede the individual's ability to extract the linguistic regularities during and after training and thus constrain the consolidation process.
当前的研究考察了发育性阅读障碍成人是否在学习新语言的语言规则方面存在障碍，以及这种障碍是否可以用睡眠对巩固的普遍影响来解释。我们比较了发育性阅读障碍者（N=40）和典型读者（N=38）在个体在线学习和离线巩固形态规则方面的差异。参与者根据输入中嵌入的形态-语音规则学习将复数屈折应用于新词，并学习执行手指运动序列任务。为了测试时间和睡眠对巩固的影响，参与者被分为两组睡眠时间表，分别在晚上或早上接受训练，并在 12 和 24 小时后进行测试。与典型读者不同，阅读障碍者在训练过程中没有提取形态语音规则，作为一个群体，他们在训练后 24 小时没有表现出对训练项目的离线收益，这表明在训练过程中提取规则的缺陷可能与巩固过程中的缺陷有关。阅读障碍者的离线收益与他们先前的语音能力相关，并且受睡眠的影响小于典型读者。尽管在巩固运动任务方面没有发现缺陷，但阅读障碍者在生成运动序列的抽象表示方面再次表现不佳，这反映在他们难以将使用一只手获得的运动序列知识推广到未训练的手上。研究结果表明，发育性阅读障碍者在从输入中提取统计规则方面存在普遍的缺陷。在语言领域，这种缺陷反映在巩固的收益减少，特别是在睡眠期间，这可能是由于先前的语音能力降低，这可能会阻碍个体在训练期间和之后提取语言规则的能力，从而限制巩固过程。
