Episodic traces and statistical regularities: Paired associate learning in typical and dyslexic readers

Manon Jones, J.R. Kuipers, Sinead Nugent, Angelina Miley, Gary Oppenheim

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    Abstract

    Learning visual-phonological associations is a key skill
    underlying successful reading acquisition. However, we are yet to
    understand the cognitive mechanisms that enable efficient learning in
    good readers, and those which are aberrant in individuals with
    developmental dyslexia. Here, we use a repeated cued-recall task to
    examine how typical and reading-impaired adults acquire novel
    associations between visual and phonological stimuli, incorporating a
    looking-at-nothing paradigm to probe implicit memory for target
    locations. Cued recall accuracy revealed that typical readers' recall of
    novel phonological associates was better than dyslexic readers' recall,
    and it also improved more with repetition. Eye fixation-contingent error
    analyses suggest that typical readers' greater improvement from
    repetition reflects their more robust encoding and/or retrieval of each
    instance in which a given pair was presented: whereas dyslexic readers
    tended to recall a phonological target better when fixating its most
    recent location, typical readers showed this pattern more strongly when
    the target location was consistent across multiple trials. Thus, typical
    readers' greater success in reading acquisition may derive from their
    better use of statistical contingencies to identify consistent stimulus
    features across multiple exposures. We discuss these findings in relation
    to the role of implicit memory in forming new visual-phonological
    associations as a foundational skill in reading, and areas of weakness in
    developmental dyslexia.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)214-225
    JournalCognition
    Volume177
    Early online date27 Apr 2018
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Aug 2018

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