Visual Statistical Learning Deficits in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: an Event Related Potential Study

A growing body of research suggests that individuals with developmental dyslexia perform below typical readers on non-linguistic cognitive tasks involving the learning and encoding of statistical-sequential patterns. However, the neural mechanisms underlying such a deficit have not been well examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the ERP correlates of sequence processing in a sample of children diagnosed with dyslexia using a probabilistic visual serial learning paradigm. The behavioral results revealed that whereas age-matched typically developing children (n=12) showed learning in the task as reflected by their response times, the children with dyslexia (n=8) likely showed difficulty in learning. In conjunction with these behavioral results, the ERPs of the typically developing children showed a P300-like response indicative of this paradigm (Jost et al., 2015); whereas, the children diagnosed with a reading disorder showed no such ERP effects. These findings are consistent with the idea that differences in statistical-sequential learning ability might underlie the reading deficits observed in developmental dyslexia.

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