TY - JOUR

T1 - Episodic traces and statistical regularities

T2 - Paired associate learning in typical and dyslexic readers

AU - Jones, Manon

AU - Kuipers, J.R.

AU - Nugent, Sinead

AU - Miley, Angelina

AU - Oppenheim, Gary

PY - 2018/8

Y1 - 2018/8

N2 - Learning visual-phonological associations is a key skillunderlying successful reading acquisition. However, we are yet tounderstand the cognitive mechanisms that enable efficient learning ingood readers, and those which are aberrant in individuals withdevelopmental dyslexia. Here, we use a repeated cued-recall task toexamine how typical and reading-impaired adults acquire novelassociations between visual and phonological stimuli, incorporating alooking-at-nothing paradigm to probe implicit memory for targetlocations. Cued recall accuracy revealed that typical readers' recall ofnovel phonological associates was better than dyslexic readers' recall,and it also improved more with repetition. Eye fixation-contingent erroranalyses suggest that typical readers' greater improvement fromrepetition reflects their more robust encoding and/or retrieval of eachinstance in which a given pair was presented: whereas dyslexic readerstended to recall a phonological target better when fixating its mostrecent location, typical readers showed this pattern more strongly whenthe target location was consistent across multiple trials. Thus, typicalreaders' greater success in reading acquisition may derive from theirbetter use of statistical contingencies to identify consistent stimulusfeatures across multiple exposures. We discuss these findings in relationto the role of implicit memory in forming new visual-phonologicalassociations as a foundational skill in reading, and areas of weakness indevelopmental dyslexia.

AB - Learning visual-phonological associations is a key skillunderlying successful reading acquisition. However, we are yet tounderstand the cognitive mechanisms that enable efficient learning ingood readers, and those which are aberrant in individuals withdevelopmental dyslexia. Here, we use a repeated cued-recall task toexamine how typical and reading-impaired adults acquire novelassociations between visual and phonological stimuli, incorporating alooking-at-nothing paradigm to probe implicit memory for targetlocations. Cued recall accuracy revealed that typical readers' recall ofnovel phonological associates was better than dyslexic readers' recall,and it also improved more with repetition. Eye fixation-contingent erroranalyses suggest that typical readers' greater improvement fromrepetition reflects their more robust encoding and/or retrieval of eachinstance in which a given pair was presented: whereas dyslexic readerstended to recall a phonological target better when fixating its mostrecent location, typical readers showed this pattern more strongly whenthe target location was consistent across multiple trials. Thus, typicalreaders' greater success in reading acquisition may derive from theirbetter use of statistical contingencies to identify consistent stimulusfeatures across multiple exposures. We discuss these findings in relationto the role of implicit memory in forming new visual-phonologicalassociations as a foundational skill in reading, and areas of weakness indevelopmental dyslexia.

U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.010

DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.010

M3 - Article

VL - 177

SP - 214

EP - 225

JO - Cognition

JF - Cognition

SN - 0010-0277

ER -