scholarly journals Reading and Non-word Repetition Skills in Bilingual Developmental Dyslexia: The Case of a Greek - Italian Bilingual Dyslexic Adult

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Ioanna Talli ◽  
Polyxeni Emmanouil

Studies of bilinguals with developmental dyslexia learning to read in two alphabetic orthographies have shown that they demonstrate similar reading and phonological short-term memory (STM) deficits in both their languages. The present study aimed at exploring whether dyslexia in adults affects similarly decoding skills in two transparent languages, Greek and Italian, whether there are similar deficits in phonological STM and whether the dominance of one of the two languages affects the manifestation of the deficits. We compared the performance of a young Greek-Italian bilingual dyslexic adult (exposed to Italian from birth, L1: Greek) to that of a young monolingual Greek dyslexic adult, a young Greek-Italian typically developing (TD) bilingual adult (exposed to Italian from birth, L1: Greek) and a young Greek monolingual TD adult. We assessed them in word and non-word reading and non-word repetition. Results showed that bilingual dyslexic adult performed significantly poorer than the bilingual TD adult on all tasks in both languages, suggesting that dyslexia affects similarly decoding and phonological STM across languages. On reading, bilingual outperformed monolingual dyslexic, while monolingual outperformed bilingual TD adult. On phonological STM, both bilinguals outperformed monolinguals. A positive effect of bilingualism was found for reading skills only for dyslexics, while it was found for phonological STM for both dyslexic and TD adults. Finally, the dominance of L1 affected bilinguals' performance in reading but not in non-word repetition, where they showed better performance in Italian, perhaps due to the phonotactic complexity of the Greek orthography compared to Italian.

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew K. Burns ◽  
Katherine Davidson ◽  
Anne F. Zaslofsky ◽  
David C. Parker ◽  
Kathrin E. Maki

The amount of information that students successfully learn and later recall from each intervention session is limited and is called the acquisition rate (AR). Research has consistently supported the effects of modifying intervention set sizes with AR data, but research with AR is in its infancy. The current study compared the relationship between AR while learning words with working memory, short-term memory, and reading skills. Participants were 52 fourth- and fifth-grade students with and without learning disabilities (LDs). Working memory ( r = .34), short-term memory ( r = .41), and word reading skills ( r = .57) all moderately correlated with AR, but word reading skills accounted for 32% of the variance and the other two scores added little unique variance. The corrected correlation coefficients were higher for the word reading with AR than with any other variable and were essentially equal for both groups ( r = .73 for average readers and r = .75 for students with an LD in reading). Thus, the data not only support the validity of making decisions with AR data but also suggest that AR is more consistent with a skill-by-treatment interaction framework than an aptitude-by-treatment interaction approach. Potential applications, directions for future research, and limitations are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (12) ◽  
pp. 4162-4178
Author(s):  
Emily Jackson ◽  
Suze Leitão ◽  
Mary Claessen ◽  
Mark Boyes

Purpose Previous research into the working, declarative, and procedural memory systems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has yielded inconsistent results. The purpose of this research was to profile these memory systems in children with DLD and their typically developing peers. Method One hundred four 5- to 8-year-old children participated in the study. Fifty had DLD, and 54 were typically developing. Aspects of the working memory system (verbal short-term memory, verbal working memory, and visual–spatial short-term memory) were assessed using a nonword repetition test and subtests from the Working Memory Test Battery for Children. Verbal and visual–spatial declarative memory were measured using the Children's Memory Scale, and an audiovisual serial reaction time task was used to evaluate procedural memory. Results The children with DLD demonstrated significant impairments in verbal short-term and working memory, visual–spatial short-term memory, verbal declarative memory, and procedural memory. However, verbal declarative memory and procedural memory were no longer impaired after controlling for working memory and nonverbal IQ. Declarative memory for visual–spatial information was unimpaired. Conclusions These findings indicate that children with DLD have deficits in the working memory system. While verbal declarative memory and procedural memory also appear to be impaired, these deficits could largely be accounted for by working memory skills. The results have implications for our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying language impairment in the DLD population; however, further investigation of the relationships between the memory systems is required using tasks that measure learning over long-term intervals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13250180


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 640-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Marino ◽  
A. Citterio ◽  
R. Giorda ◽  
A. Facoetti ◽  
G. Menozzi ◽  
...  

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1334-1346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Brock ◽  
Christopher Jarrold

Down syndrome is associated with severe deficits in language and verbal short-term memory, but the causal relationship between these deficits is unclear. The current study therefore investigated the influence of language abilities on verbal short-term memory performance in Down syndrome. Twenty-one individuals with Down syndrome and 29 younger typically developing children were tested on memory for words and nonwords using 2 immediate recognition tasks: an order memory task that was a relatively pure measure of verbal short-term memory and an item memory task that was more sensitive to language ability. Despite having superior vocabulary knowledge to the typically developing children, individuals with Down syndrome were impaired on both order and item tasks. This impairment was particularly marked on the item task, where individuals with Down syndrome showed an atypically large lexicality effect. These results are interpreted in terms of an underlying verbal short-term memory deficit in Down syndrome that is compounded by poor phonological discrimination abilities.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Miolo ◽  
Robin S. Chapman ◽  
Heidi A. Sindberg

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language—Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with Down syndrome (DS), age 12 to 21 years, and 19 typically developing (TD) children, age 3 to 5 years, matched on syntax comprehension, as measured by TACL-3 Subtests II and III. Of the 5 dependent measures of comprehension, auditory-verbal short-term memory accounted for significant amounts of variance in 4; group membership, 1 (semantic role assignment); and visual short-term memory, 0. In the group with DS, hearing status predicted variation in Grammatical Morphemes (TACL-3 Subtest II). Using the SCT, the authors also investigated the effects of varying sentence voice and supporting visual context on sentence comprehension. SCT performance was significantly poorer in terms of (a) referent selection and semantic role assignment, for passive (vs. active) sentences in both groups, and (b) semantic role assignment in all sentences for the group with DS (vs. the TD group). Vocabulary strengths in the group with DS were found with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Third Edition (L. M. Dunn & L. M. Dunn, 1997) but not the TACL-3 Vocabulary subtest.


1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Macaruso ◽  
John L. Locke ◽  
Suzanne T. Smith ◽  
Susan Powers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Kimel ◽  
Itay Lieder ◽  
Merav Ahissar

AbstractDyslexia, defined as a specific impairment in decoding the written script, is the most widespread learning difficulty. However, individuals with dyslexia (IDDs) also consistently manifest reduced short-term memory (STM) capacity, typically measured by Digit Span or non-word repetition tasks. In this paper we report two experiments which test the effect of item frequency and the effect of a repeated sequence on the performance in STM tasks in good readers and in IDDs. IDDs’ performance benefited less from item frequency, revealing poor use of long-term single item statistics. This pattern suggests that the amply reported shorter verbal spans in dyslexia may in fact reflect their impaired sensitivity to items’ long-term frequency. For repeated sequence learning, we found no significant deficit among IDDs, even when a sensitive paradigm and a robust measure were used.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Costa ◽  
Maria Teresa Guasti ◽  
Stefania Sharley

Major concerns still surround literacy education in a foreign language during primary school. In this study, we aim to establish (1) whether bilinguals perform worse in Italian literacy tests than monolinguals; (2) whether literacy skills transfer from Italian to English. We tested 97 Italian–English bilingual first, third and fifth graders (attending two bilingual primary schools in Italy, with a simultaneous 50:50 immersion programme) and a control group of 40 monolingual Italian pupils in grades 1 and 3. All participants were tested in Italian, measuring the following skills: vocabulary, phonological awareness, reading proficiency and verbal short-term memory. Bilingual participants – who had been exposed to Italian since birth and to English within the first three years of their lives – were also tested on the same measures in English. The results showed that bilingual first graders outperformed their monolingual peers in verbal short-term memory, thus revealing a possible cognitive advantage in the early stage of literacy acquisition. Monolingual and bilingual firstand third graders did not differ in reading speed. The two groups made an almost similar number of errors, but the small difference turned out to be statistically significant. Bilingual subjects’ reading attainment was found to be within monolingual normal limits in both languages on all measures except for English reading comprehension, which, together with English vocabulary, was found to be below the English norm. Aside from reading comprehension, on all other measures bilingual children’s performance in Italian correlated with their performance in English, suggesting the presence of cross-linguistic transfer of language and reading skills. 


CoDAS ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 422-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia Rodrigues ◽  
Debora Maria Befi-Lopes

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to design a short-term memory test, to describe quantitative performance in typically language developing children and to verify the relationship between the non-words repetition and oral phonological measure. METHODS: The participants included 136 typically language developing children aged from 3 years to 6 years and 11 months old in this study, who were evaluated. The test consisted of 40 non-words of one, two, three, and four syllables. The subjects' repetitions were transcribed and the number of right answers was calculated for each age range. RESULTS: The effect of age was observed in the test, as well as the effect of length, only for disyllabic non-words. The performance in the non-word repetition task showed correlation with the oral phonology measure. CONCLUSION: The test designed in this research was able to verify the short-term memory in typically language developing children and the results showed correlation between this memory and phonological performance.


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